I missed out on the Cambrian explosion of FPS’s in the 90s because I was a Nintendo kid and DOS command lines were scary and complicated. So it’s been kind of cool that the resurgence of retro-styled “boomer shooters*” these days coincided with wanting to experience the classics first hand finally. Of course, like the rest of the ‘retro-styled’ stuff springing up in the indie space, most of it coasts along on Vibes more than slavishly replicating the way things actually were. That’s not always a bad thing. It’s impressive as hell what DOOM and the Build Engine could pull off before true 3D, but now that any hack can download a relatively reliable true 3D engine that doesn’t say, keep you from moving past an enemy on a floor ‘below’ or working in modern quality of life stuff like iron sights/zooming, physics, dynamic lighting, etc. This is also how I feel about the trend of art accounts that churn out pics of “What If X Show Was Made in the NINETIES” and they clearly just mean “The 90’s Sailor Moon.”
Mullet Mad Jack (Madjack? MadJack?) is, if you gave me the benefit of the doubt I was going somewhere with this and not just padding my word count, both of these things and it is a glorious, cathartic explosion of neon and violence. This self-branded OVA-FPS is about a Moderator who has to rescue the Influencer Princess from a gang of Robillionaires, which are uh, robot billionaires. Sponsored by PEACE Corp, you live stream your rescue effort to salivating fans who offer you likes and comments which in turn power your rampage and survival because you will DIE if you don’t get enough of that sweet dopamine. You storm through 10 floors at a time, face down a Robillionaire boss, and earn a checkpoint and a permanent shop upgrade. Did I mention this is a roguelike, too? No? Well, it is. You pick up all sorts of weapons and upgrades including spawning more exploding barrels in a stage, increasing your max life, and making Jack (who was called the strong, silent type in the intro) unable to shut up. I tended to lean toward the shotgun and katanas because I am a horrible shot and prefer to focus on my movement. Way too many of my runs ended because I was frantically trying to shoot the chains off of a door with the pistol or SMG while juking around, but this is clearly a me problem and RNG be willing I can compensate with the right tools.
Between the slick as hell visuals, driving synth soundtrack, variety of ways to KILL BILLIONAIRES, and some decent tongue in cheek voice bites, Mullet Mad Jack does a great job of infusing dopamine into your brain if you, like me, need brief, intense fixes of cartoonish violence to Deal with Life. The story mode actually has some pretty neat moments in it playing with its own nature as a game even though on its face the whole thing comes off as a joke. It’s no MGS2 but I like it enough not to spoil anything and encourage you to give it a shot even if you’re not a super FPS junkie. It has accessible difficulty modes including one that gets rid of the timer if that sounds too stressful for you. I, a fellow time limit disliker, played on Normal and didn’t find the time limit too suffocating.
Only a few things bother me about MadJack, really. They’re leaning into the retro vibe pretty hard but the ramp-sliding portions with the neon palm trees feel like a bit much for the club/office building thing going on with the level designs. You can also pick up numerous implements for high-scoring execution moves but they’re all basically the same execution with a different weapon sprite embedded in the enemy’s face. It’s also a little disappointing that in the story mode your operator lady’s lines heading into boss levels are the same every time. I can get making them recyclable in Endless (did I mention there’s an Endless mode?) but given the effort elsewhere in the main story, I sort of expected more variety. From her, in general really, since she shows up between every stage as the upgrade shop. Sometimes she doesn’t say *anything* and just smirks in the corner of the screen. I wasn’t super into the billboard-running segments either, they tended to appear in really similar rooms and all you really do each time is ride the right billboard, hop, fight one guy, ride the left billboard, hop, fight three guys and then there’s a door back to normal rooms. But really, this is all minor. This is a great stress reliever kind of game I can play a few rounds of and feel satisfied or zone out and lose an hour or two depending on the mood.
System Erasure’s Zeroranger was a game that came out of nowhere and clotheslined my attention so hard I forgot what CrossCode was after years of eagerly following its development and even getting to try the demo in person. So when they announced their second game, I was incredibly stoked for it even if block puzzles aren’t exactly my favorite thing. I just had a feeling that if those guys took a swing at sokoban, they would make The Sokoban for Me.
[Disclaimer: the last one I remember really getting into was either Lolo or Amazing Tater.]
I’m happy to say that yes, Void Stranger is good! It takes a very basic set of mechanics (suck up and set down tiles, shove object) and introduces new enemies and obstacles at a pretty satisfying rate, and every so often it doles out story in surprising amounts for what it is. I feel like maybe that’s not the most positive phrasing I could give it, but I do mean it as a good thing. See, while Zeroranger had a story, it was a shmup first and weaved its story segments into two or three main dumps with a lot of visual hinting. It also did some clever little fourth wall breaks, doing a good job of teasing the player’s mind into wandering. What did this mean? What if I don’t pick up weapons? Can I get out of doing this stupid Undertale battle for fucks sake? Void Stranger does the same but has more time to unpack things and flesh its characters and story. It encourages you to take naps, or think a minute when you feel stuck. Other times, it uh, doesn’t!
It’s a difficult game to talk about without heavily spoiling things, since the cool parts are either going to give away puzzle solutions or just say what happens story wise. I’ve only gotten one of the endings so far, and it was hardly a good one so I went right back into a second run. Even just laying out “You are the caretaker of a princess presumably trying to find her” takes a little mystique out of the opening sequence of “serious woman jumps in perfectly square hole.” One of the great things is just hearing what’s gone different for other friends I’ve had playing through it, there seem to be a lot of secrets and alternate paths to see. For instance, there’s an early game obstacle someone said they got past using a sword, but they wondered how anyone could get past it if they didn’t get the sword because it’s easily missable, so I told them what I did seeing as how I didn’t get the sword!
My only real complaint is kind of a nitpick and mostly a problem when streaming, when in the Void state and stopping for a rest, the game actually closes itself when you fall asleep and needs to be relaunched. That kind of thing always hits me as ‘cute’ but not really helping my immersion or anything, especially if the game isn’t pulling some kind of fourth wall creepypasta fuckery to go with it- hold on a sec
ok yeah nothing seems especially off and if the spreadsheet data means anything I am far too peanut butter brained to interpret it. (splash.png is just the title graphic)
My only other gripe is that you can’t just change facing without taking a step, but the puzzles are designed around it, so it kind of falls into the same territory as getting mad at chess because bishops can only move diagonally. Way back when I played Knights in the Nightmare, something either dawned on me or broke inside my head and I realized it’s kind of dumb to get mad at a game for not having the same rules as another game, and when you start playing on their terms, it can be pretty fun! Or you still hate it, but you hate it for what it is. That said, yeah, it is kind of aggravating when you’re *so close* to a solution but you can’t just turn left without stepping into the bottomless void.
Apologies for keeping this one kind of vague, but Void Stranger really is something you have to try out if you have the chance. It’s only $11.99 USD normally and if Zeroranger is any indicator, you’ll probably have lots of opportunities to catch it on sale. System Erasure is 2 for 2 in my book and I’ll be eagerly awaiting to see what they do next. But what comes after shmups and puzzle games…?
Hiiiii, absentee internet guy here! I actually started a bona fide article back in December then didn’t finish it because it was pretentious as fuck and now isn’t even topical! So I just thought it was a good time to check in and report on some games I’ve enjoyed recently, dump some sketches, then come back in another three to four months. You’re fine with that, right? I like that about our relationship.
Alchemy Stars: Aurora Burst (Mobile)- First off, yeah, a lot of these are going to be mobile games. I’ve played entirely too many of them lately, and keep trying new ones just to see what looks promising and which turns into a dull slog of daily quests and template generated moeblobs and/or gijinka. Alchemy Stars is really cool, though, since it has a unique battle system involving drawing a line through like-colored tiles to move your squad around and attack enemies. It’s goofy as hell watching a conga line of characters run in awkward panels to either do a hit and run or just burn up tiles on the far end of the map, but I love the ‘gameyness’ in the same way I love STING RPG’s. It’s simplistic, yet has some nuance in how you build your teams and trigger your active skills. I broke my rule about joining games for collaborations since a Dragon Maid crossover was going on at the time, but I like the game itself enough to keep picking away at it a while every day.
I give it a 3 out of 2.
Guardian Tales (Mobile)- Okay I broke the rule again with this one due to peer pressure: there was a Slayers collab going on and other members of the fan discord I’m on were really enjoying it, so I bit. Guardian Tales is a surprisingly fun sort of Zelda-like title that gets bogged down a bit for me with Gacha Things. Overall, I’d say it’s worth a play but I prefer the bite sized stages, puzzles and exploration parts of it to the resource grinding, active and passive PVP, and vestigial but compulsory co op elements that every mobile game (or ‘mobage’ if you’re like that) and kind of wish it was just a stand alone thing that was just that. It’s got an interesting sense of humor and likes to casually slide dark notes in your way, which really made that Slayers crossover make sense.
I’d call it a 2 out of 2. Fun, nothing glaringly bad but I wouldn’t say I’m hooked.
World Flipper (surprise, it’s also Mobile)- I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for video games that take a physical game and do things with it that you couldn’t do on a real pinball table/race track/line at the urgent care. World Flipper is a pinball RPG where you build teams of adventurers then fling them violently at enemies and obstacles to score points and charge up for Power Flips and active skills. I love the presentation (tiny sprites for the actual game, colorful clean character art for dialogue and menus) and it’s pretty easy to get a fix in short bursts since each stage is usually just a two-screen ‘table’ that can be beaten in a couple minutes. The flip (heh) side of the whole thing is it’s a very light, fluffy kind of experience so don’t go in expecting LORE! or anything especially deep. It’s just a really good game to toss on when you’re in ‘head empty, actual RPG take too long’ mode. Given that’s been the philosophy of most of my attempted game projects myself, I can’t help but love it. Also worth pointing out the game just automatically ticks off daily quests and achievements as you hit them, so you’re never consulting a checklist and being compelled to do all of the menial bullshit on it on a daily basis, so it is a surprisingly guilt/FOMO free experience for what it is.
2 out of 2.
Final Gear (Mobile)- I like mechs. This shouldn’t be remotely surprising for long time readers, new readers, people I’ve sat next to on a bus, or those who quietly just stop responding on Discord after several paragraphs explaining the different VF-1 Valkyrie variants and who used them in Classic Macross. Final Gear is a mecha RPG that plays a bit like a side scrolling beat em up with guns added, until you can turn on Auto battle and much like Azur Lane, there’s rarely a reason to go back. Of course, these mechs are piloted by cute, merchandisable anime girls. They seem to have pretty frequent collab events, which could be a selling point if you’re into mecha because if there’s anything we mecha fans love is seeing a mecha we know in something else. The guest character art seems to be all done by their own staff though, which isn’t outright *bad* so much as kind of uncanny in some cases. A smiling, moe-fied Major Motoko Kusanagi is one of the more cursed examples. (Original characters look fine though.)
Final Gear is a tough recommend for me. I like mecha, the construction system is cool (if you get the full parts set and pilot for a Custom unit, you can transform it into a cooler looking, more powerful version) but resources for upgrading can get really grindy and as far as I can tell, whaling is about mandatory for some machines (you get points from making gacha pulls on a banner which can be used to buy parts of a character’s Custom from the banner, but going through the Eva collab f2p only ended up giving me enough parts for Eva-02’s backpack and arms.) It’s worth playing if you just can’t get enough robots in your life, but it has a lot of annoyances that might dampen your enthusiasm including crashes, typos, and a high maintenance base that seems to consume a baffling amount of system resources when you visit.
If I gotta be real, this is a 1 out of 2 but has potential to improve if it survives. On the other hand, my Research on -booru sites has yielded mostly official art rips and barely any risque fan art so that may not bode well for its popularity.
Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack (Switch)- I bought the individual games at launch on my 3DS, plodded through them, then never touched them again, but I’ve been on a major Inti Creates fanboy kick lately and decided to go back to the beginning of the series to see how I like them now. And, as happens to me a lot, really, I enjoyed the replay a lot more. I’ve heard that some tweaks were made to the collection, like additional platforms in Zonda’s upside down flipped sequences and the script to GV1 was essentially de-4Kids’d, but I barely remember the first time around so I got to just appreciate it as is. Hunting for jewels for… Joule was less obnoxious than I remembered, but the bosses remain as tough as I thought. I think I’m just more welcoming of challenge than I was back than- at least not counting attempting the good end- fighting those bosses a second time without prevasion on sucks. I like GV2 more overall, due in no small part to just liking Copen’s play style a lot. Gunvolt’s tag and zap mechanic is neat, but physically ramming enemies to tag them, ricocheting off walls and air dashing is just plain fun. I jumped at his spinoff when it came out. Overall, it is two good games bundled together, so it’s easy to suggest.
I’d give the Striker Pack a 3/2 but the limitations of my forced point scale means I can’t give iX a slightly higher score, I guess.
Luminous Avenger iX (Switch)- Gunvolt’s edgy boi rival Copen gets a spinoff where it turns out he was right to want to kill all the Mutants Adepts, actually, because in the future they’ve taken over the joint and hunt the surviving humans through their ruined cities. This game is a joy, it’s all about mastering Copen’s movement and weaponry to rack up combos and score, and it’s been polished and streamlined a lot since the 3DS entries. Since I didn’t get too deep into it before, basically the GV series are Mega Man X-likes as they appear, but designed more around getting through stages quickly, untouched, and chaining up points. Survival itself is actually pretty easy since both characters have an ability called “Prevasion” that basically trades their electric gauge or bullets to take a hit before you start losing health, and either of those things can be reloaded by double tapping down at any time. So if you play deliberately, it’s usually pretty simple to get out of the way and quickly reload before going on the offensive again.
Also, considering Copen’s play is based around different kinds of dashes, combos, and the bosses in iX2 are more or less expies of Mighty Numbers, the entire thing kind of feels like a big flex on Mighty No. 9 and I love passive aggressiveness in the games industry.
Luminous Avenger iX gets a 3 out of 2 in my book, nudged slightly higher than the previous games as mentioned above, though honestly, play ’em all!
Gal*Gun 2 (Switch&Steam)- Yes, I own this game. Twice. If you have to pick, I would pick PC for mouse aim. I don’t know where to really begin breaking this down while still keeping things kind of snappy since this list is getting longer than I planned, but do you like rail shooters like House of the Dead or Lethal Enforcers? It’s like that, but horny. You play a nondescript loner boy who is given a Pheremone Shot and Pheremone Goggles that will help drive out and defeat the mini-devils serial prankster Korona is spreading to cause mischief. The side effect of this demon busting gear is it makes every female member of the school irresistibly, violently attracted to you, so you must take them down by ‘satisfying’ them with Pheremone Shots to their weak points. It is exactly the kind of game you think it is assuming you know they stop short of actual nudity because it’s a console game for Grodd’s sake. GG2 has a surprising amount of content in it though, in the form of numerous side missions, different types of stages including defense stages (which suck), hidden object searching (which kind of sucks), and the route-ending Doki Doki stages where you just get right in there and drive the devils out of your chosen gal pal’s body at point blank range while they writhe and my friend judges me and tries to think of an excuse to go home.
Really, it’s just a goofy as hell anime fanservice game that’s more fun than it has any right to be. I was laughing my ass off when it gets to extremes like the girl next door revealing her pet project of an Anti-God Laser or classmates chasing you in the air vents like Xenomorphs. If you miss light gun or shooting gallery type games, it’s a pretty fun one though it feels like a missed opportunity to let you use the detached joy-con to aim like a pistol instead of doing the awkward Splatoon whole-Switch tilt on console. Steam’s port has mouse aiming which makes things much easier (much, much easier- they probably dumbed things down a bit expecting console aiming response times.)
I give it a solid 2/2. I had a blast playing through it (Chiru best gal, classic gaming five-ever) but I’m not really itching to return to it any time soon.
I think that about does it for stuff I want to dish on right now, I’ve been in aggressive CONSUME MEDIA mode for the past month or so and felt like sharing. I haven’t gotten as much PRODUCE CONTENT done as a result unfortunately, but hope to turn that around once things stabilize a bit. Had a lot of vet trips for Nia over the past couple months and work is jerking my schedule around for the first time in a good while, so here’s hoping it’s stable hours even if they’re not the ones I prefer to work. Friday Raffles have also been getting back in swing over on RGL, so I can be caught there most Fridays when an event isn’t going on. But I’ve been thinking lately, I really need to just nail down a project and get it out there instead of talking endlessly about My Game that doesn’t actually exist as yet so I can’t show it off.
Until next time, adios.
DotturricanTried giving Eishi + sign eyes for a while, dunno if I like itMerry Eishmas!I love drawing Flanker but in the back of my head I keep thinking of her as Evil EishiZelame drawing for quietwriter in the Secret Santa exchangeTomcat, rawr.BlackbirdHornetFlanker, drinking a Yourtears-accinoThe stripe says “MEDIC” but the armband kind of makes it look like “NO DIC.” Which is technically right…I very specifically made the roses Zelgadis colors.MiG-chan wants to cuddle.
When I get into a game, I have a habit of talking the ear off anyone willing to listen about every minute thing I notice. You would think I would channel that into articles and reviews on my website more frequently or something. Well, ever since I started doing those comics, I kind of got in the habit of clamming up and trying to ‘save’ my thoughts for those, but at times a game comes along that gives me more to talk about than can gracefully fit into a comic panel layout. And as text dense as some of my worse strips can get (if I’m self aware of the problem and call attention to it, it’s totally forgiven right!?), that’s probably saying something. So that brings me to the Neptunia series, which I have sort of a history with already.
A few years ago, my friend Steve and I were trying to put together an experimental-style animated short/pilot of an Eishi n’ Dixie video series, getting as far as getting a script and dialogue recorded. The subject was a niche PS3 RPG, as I tend to wind up acquiring, and it was called Hyperdimension Neptunia. And it was dullllll. Going in, all I really knew was that it was supposed to be full of little in-jokes about the gaming industry, so I was kinda curious about where they’d go with that. Apparently, not very far- extended visual novel style dialogue sequences, soundly meh music, a battle system that kind of felt like Xenogears but less good… overall, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the game as much as the general idea. I didn’t really pay the sequels much mind beyond “how in the fuck did that get a sequel?”, until I got a half decent rig and started down the Steam Sales hole. Among the things I wound up with by the end of the 2015 summer sales were Neptunia Re;Birth 1 and 2; PC ports of the enhanced Vita port that were supposed to be vaguely “better.” And yeah, they kinda are. The battle engine had been refined through the sequels then applied to the ports to make them well, better, as well as attempt to fix some story problems, to limited success. I’ll save that part for later because complaining is fun and I don’t like to start with dessert.
Combat lets you move characters freely around within a set range circle during their turn and attacks are tied to a ‘hitbox’ area that you can fine-tune the angle of so you can catch multiple targets in your swing. Normal combat consists of combos made of slotted skills, split into Rush, Power, and Break types, which respectively build up combo hits (meh), focused strong attacks, and attacks that more quickly wear down the enemy’s Guard gauge, leading to a weakening Guard Break. These include spells in addition to physical attacks, so each turn you can choose the slotted commands that best suit the situation. Then, you have the EXE gauge, which stores power stocks and not only enables Limit Break style attacks, but adds EX Finishers to the combo chains of the party. It sort of makes you have to think whether that extra attack per turn is more useful than a flashy super move, since using an EXE depletes the gauge by one or more chunks and cuts your overall options back down. It might seem like kind of a shallow looking system, but between the free movement, targeting and the almost fighting-gamey inputs, it’s a surprisingly fun system, especially when you’ve got a boss on the ropes and finish them with an over the top special attack.
The Re;births include a new mechanic called the “Remake System,” which is kind of a crafting system that lets you not just unlock items for the shop, but ‘craft’ changes to the overall game. You can add dungeons, alter the items and enemies within them, ‘create’ bonus characters, and even affect overall game balance like permanently reducing the effectiveness of status ailments or allowing you to kill weak enemies on the map with a sword swing instead of going into battle. It’s a pretty cool setup, and I don’t even get especially annoyed gathering materials since it’s usually pretty clear what monsters drop what. (It’s a little harder to keep track of Harvested items on the maps themselves.) The other system that’s neat but not quite as important is the market share system, where doing Quests not only gives you money and items, but also pushes one faction’s market share up a percentage while lowering another. Getting different endings and unlocking all the non-DLC characters requires you to game the market to certain levels, and when shooting for the True Ending, you need to make sure that the enemy has 0% of the Shares and all four of the friendly lands are pretty evenly spread.
Which brings me to a category I like to call the Tangible Flaws. Re;Birth 1 seems to really love lulling you into a false sense of security then throwing an overpowered boss in your path, more or less mandating you re-evaluate your slotted skills and more often than not, grind for a good while until you can brute force it. It happened frequently enough early on that when actual “supposed-to-lose” fights happened, I was wasting Revives and SP Chargers trying to cling to dear life. It was irritating enough that once I progressed enough to go through the Fairy Fencer F collab fight and get some utterly broken gear from it, I squatted in the Arena until Neptune was Level 99 and took care of the last few chapters without breaking a sweat. Neptunia Re;birth 2 seems to have toned it down a bit, but in all honesty, I’ve been playing from the start with another free dlc collab weapon because I wasn’t in the mood to get brick walled every couple hours again, so it may just be me putting a band-aid over the problem before it happened. So, if you’re interested in the game, do be prepared for the occasional level grind.
The thing that I think hurts the game the most is the sheer volume of drawn out, visual novel-style portrait plus text cutscenes in it. It ties in with the more subjective problem of “How Much Fucking Kawaii Uguu Can You Stand?” Neptune and her pals are all relentlessly ‘quirky’ and chatty as hell. The actual storyline isn’t groundbreaking, but the novelty of Fantasy World Plus Video Game References is buried below giant bags of pink packing Styrofoam. Technically, you can skip about everything (even long attack animations), but if you’re fast forwarding through an RPG, it’s kind of failing in a major area. If the dialogue was edited down by a lot, you’d really end up with a pretty breezy, fun game. Hell, it would probably cut an hour off the run time if you just omitted the times a character who’s not really in on the conversation pops in to go “yes, I agree” to remind you they’re in the party. The characters aren’t without their charm, but you’re given it in way too large of a dose at a time.
In the end, I’m still having fun, so I guess that’s something. Streaming it with friends so we can groan and riff our way through the lame parts is fun, and there are some decent ideas and jokes scattered in there. It’s a fun game that I think does deserve a bit more attention, but needs to learn just a little bit of restraint in subjecting the audience to fifteen minute sequences of being stared at by doe eyed, pink haired paper dolls with Newgrounds-esque ‘breathing’ animations. Re;birth 2 has been mostly more enjoyable other than the annoying little twin girls and a certain giant pedophilic robot with a six foot tongue… so hopefully it keeps that up as I enter the last chapters. The enjoyable part. Not the tongue part. The tongue part can fuck off to hell.
