Just shy of eight years after the release of Planet Coaster, developer Frontier Developments is looking to build upon the ultimate amusement park-building experience with a sequel. Frontier recently invited me to spend about an hour and a half hands-on diving into some park building in Planet Coaster 2, and I'm very excited about the direction in which the theme park sim appears to be heading.

Pack your bathing suit

The first part of the preview dropped me into a Scenario that I was told is about midway through the reworked Career mode in Planet Coaster 2. My inherited park was split into two separate partitions, and it's my job to essentially build a water park in one of them. I knew that water parks were the big draw of the sequel, but I was afraid it would just be the addition of some simple water-themed rides. I'm happy to report, that's not the case.

While there are in fact some new water-based flat rides, the main new feature here is being able to build your own beaches and pools. There are a few pre-made pools you can build, but you can also free-form build your own, shaping the size and the depth of the water. Aside from looks, this also impacts how you can further interact with the pools you build.

Several new rides also interact directly with the pools you build. You have the option of keeping your pool as its own attraction in itself, be it a simple swimming pool, a wave pool, or even building out a lazy river for your guests to wade around the park, but you also have the option of integrating rides with the pool. New attraction options include water slides and flumes, with the opportunity to build your own custom creations, dumping your visitors into your pools at the end of the ride.

Instead of taking the easy route and just throwing in some simple new rides, Frontier has added in-depth and fleshed-out systems that allow you to get creative and build some impressive water parks. The great thing is, it's up to you if you want to make the water park section of your amusement park its own thing, or you can integrate it alongside your standard coaster park.

Putting the THEME in Theme Park

Even though I only have about 50 hours in the original Planet Coaster—very casual numbers to the park-building aficionados—I immediately realized there are a handful of major quality-of-life improvements in the sequel. A very divisive task in the park-building world, the placement of queues and paths, has been fleshed out and optimized, making the process of wrapping your queues around the limited space in your park much easier than I remember in the original.

New themes have been added when building parks, giving players plenty of options for designing thematic sections of their park including the Resort, Aquatic, Viking, and Mythological themes. The custom pools you build can also integrate the new themes and props, allowing you to create uniquely themed sections of your park, just like you'd see at Disney World.

For the real park-building pros who like to add all the nitty gritty details, a new event sequence tool allows players to perfectly time and execute mesmerizing effects to further bring rides and the park itself to life. Some of the creations from the original Planet Coaster we absolutely insane, and I can't wait to see what players who take the time to master all the new systems in Planet Coaster 2 will be able to come up with.

A little more management

My only issue with the newer simulation titles including Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and Jurassic World Evolution is that the management options feel a bit thin. I didn't get to see all the new aspects of Planet Coaster in that regard, but what I did see was certain improvements to the management features available.

I spoke with Planet Coaster 2 Senior Executive Producer Adam Woods and Game Director Richard Newbold about this exact thing, and they assured me that improving the actual management aspect of your park was a big focus when developing the sequel. First and foremost, an entire narrative aspect has been implemented alongside the Career Mode, with fully voiced characters.

As you progress through the Career Mode you'll be presented with challenges on how to tackle each scenario, earning starts for completing various challenges. As you accrue more stars, you can access more scenarios.

But even on a base level, more management options are present in Planet Coaster 2. There are more staff to hire, more management-related buildings to build, and services to maintain. Players will have to build power generators and setup a power grid to keep their park running. Any attractions or pools will need to be properly maintained, and cleaned, as well as provided with a source of water via water pumps.

Planet Coaster 2 is set to launch on November 6, 2024 on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S at a price point of $49.99. A Deluxe Edition is also available for $64.99 which comes with the Vintage Funfair Ride Pack. This pack features a collection of 10 vintage attractions including a nostalgic Grand Carousel and some traditional wooden coasters.

The post Planet Coaster 2 enters the splash zone with the addition of water parks appeared first on Destructoid.

Ahead of the Early Access release for the new World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion, I had the opportunity to chat with two of the developers on the WoW development team: Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton, and Assistant Lead Quest Designer Mateusz Albrewczynski. As the first chapter in the new Worldsoul Saga trilogy, I feel like the story, and by association quest design headed into The War Within expansion are more important than ever. After all, the Worldsoul Saga will be told over the course of three expansions and is the first time Blizzard has told a Warcraft story in this way.

DESTRUCTOID: With The War Within being the first part of the Worldsoul Saga trilogy, what's the scope and scale going into this expansion from a story perspective compared to some of the crazy things we've gotten into the past few expansions?

MATEUSZ: Oh I love the premise that we've done a lot of crazy things! That's 20 years of doing these things, and we like to think that those 20 years kind of led to this moment. When we first started talking about what's next, we figured that now is the time to tell a story that is so epic and so big that it cannot simply be contained in our usual one expansion, which is why this time around we're doing a whole saga about it. And this is not just a culmination of 20 years of WoW storytelling, but this will also set the stage for what is coming after. We have no intentions of slowing down, and we have lots of ideas.

MARIA: I would add that yes we absolutely get into it right away. There is no slow roll with this one, the action starts early, and big things happen and keep happening. It's been really exciting to pace out an entire trilogy and make sure each individual release is interesting and meaningful while still pushing our overall story. Hang on, it's a wild ride!

DESTRUCTOID: Character development and individual character stories are one of my favorite aspects of Warcraft and of WoW. Any specific characters we should look forward to delving into either in The War Within itself or over the course of the trilogy?

MATEUSZ: A lot of our characters have been through a lot of intense events recently. For some of them, the world was literally ending, and so they are starting to really feel it. They are starting to feel it, that once again they are finding themself in this situation. I'm absolutely excited to see how players will react to Xal'atath's story. This is not your usual Warcraft villain. She's way more complex, and we need way more time with her to explore her motifs as they are not all exactly known to us when we begin The War Within. So seeing this multi-dimensional villain is really interesting and I can't wait to see player reactions to it.

MARIA: I don't want to spoil anything, but we've got so many characters that we're going to see, characters that players love, and some new ones as well, like Faerin Lothar, who is quite important to our story. I really don't want to spoil it, but there are a lot of favorite characters that you will see and stories you will hear. Part of the theme for The War Within is family, so we're spending some time with Moira, Dagran, Brann, and of course Magni, so we're getting more of their story. But there are other stories we'll be looking at is well, such as Alleria. Her relationships and family also have a lot of meaning here. Once again, I don't want to spoil here, but lots of cool faces are coming back!

DESTRUCTOID: How does the new Delve system tie into the worldbuilding in The War Within? Any quests or stories tied directly to Delves, or is it a completely side-optional thing?

MARIA: We wanted everyone to have the opportunity to try out Delves, so we did use this new feature in our main campaign. As you play through the main story, leveling up, you will enter a Delve and have specific goals in that Delve to complete to have the opportunity to see what they are like and learn about them. We can put objectives in Delves that feed into quests. Later, once you've reached max level, the later part of the story takes you through another Delve. The ability to change the difficulty of the Delve and have more of a challenge and greater rewards is something we want players to understand, so we did a lower level one and then a max level one. But we also know they may not be everyone's cup of tea. I think they're very fun, but it's a matter of personal playstyle, so we didn't want to force people to do Delves. We also haven't seen how much people actually enjoy them; we haven't gotten much feedback on them yet, so we didn't want to put a lot of questing into them. We want to avoid the early impressions we had with Torghast where people felt they were forced to play Torghast when it may not have been something they personally enjoyed. So we're waiting to see what kind of reception they have before we invest heavily into putting quests in them. It is a tool in our toolbox, and I'd very much like to use them more for questing, but I want to be respectful of player time and feedback around the feature, so we'll reassess once we have more player feedback.

MATEUSZ: What's great about Delves is they reinforce the worldbuilding and storytelling that's happening in their zones. For example, on the Isle of Dorn, we have a region that has a lot of Nerubian presence. So when you go into the Delve, you have to help rescue miners that are under attack by the Nerubians. So it's definitely a tool that helps us tell the stories we have throughout the zones.

DESTRUCTOID: Time for a fun one. Which of the new dungeons are each of yours favorite from a lore perspective?

MATEUSZ: I'm going to go with I think the very first dungeon we encounter which is The Rookery. It's right in the Isle of Dorn, right in Dornogal, the new capital city. This is the home of Stormriders, the elite force of the Earthen, the guardians of the Isle. It's a very important place for them, as it's where they tend for their Rooks and get them. And then something happens inside The Rookery, and it's our task to make sure it's safe. I love this story because it shows the connection between Stormriders and their mounts. It's an excellent experience that resonates with me very well.

MARIA: I was going to say The Rookery too, because I also have enormous interest in that one, but I think the Cinderbrew Meadery also resonates with me. In the course of our questing, we learn about an extremely volatile substance...they drink it, but they also explode things with it. It's an entertaining idea in itself. But the Meadery has been overrun, and so it's quite interesting what happens when someone else has control of the mead, and how we have to deal with that. In some ways the humor aspect of it appeals to me especially; I'm a fan of those tongue-in-cheek moments. So for me, that's a fun one because it does a lot of good characterization and worldbuilding for the Earthen, and I quite like it. We've got another one, The Dawnbreaker, which is an airship that's trapped in Nerubian webs. That one is pretty amazing too because the whole circumstance is pretty epic, but a lot more serious.

DESTRUCTOID: Another fun one to end on. Any specific side quests I need to make sure I hit and don't miss?

MATEUSZ: What's great about local stories is they expand on the overall narrative of the zone over the expansion. I would definitely recommend diving into all the Earthen local stories in the Isle of Dorn. This is an interesting culture that has lots of little secrets waiting for you. Their relationships, how they perceive the world, and their very reason for being alive are very interesting. All of that is sprinkled across the zone waiting for you to discover it it. Some are high adventure, others we try to squeeze some tears out of you, and others are pure joy to watch and observe as they unravel.

MARIA: If you're looking for lore tidbits, I think you'll find something in every zone that is a local story that expands on lore. If you're looking for "Don't miss because it's funny or cool," I'm going to suggest you play a quest in Azj-Kahet, which is a Nerubian who is absolutely terrified of bipedal creatures like yourself. You don't have enough limbs, it's really creepy, and they are just freaking out. It's such a wonderful and amusing take on arachnophobia but for a spider creature. The NPC is really struggling to see you as anything other than just something to be squashed because you're so creepy to them. I like when we flip things on their head like that. It's particularly amusing because we were aware of the impact spider-like creatures and Nerubians have on a portion of our community. Worldwide it's not an uncommon phobia. So we went ahead and created an option to turn them all into crabs, visually at least for you, so it's fun to have a quest and narrative designer that partnered up to create this comical situation: the Nerburian that can't cope with its fears. There are many local stories worth checking out; they are the ones that aren't marked with the shield campaign marker. It's highly recommended to dive into those quests if you want to really understand the places and cultures in The War Within.

World of Warcraft: The War Within launches globally on August 26, 2024. Players who purchase the Epic Edition can gain Early Access later today on August 22, 2024 at 6pm EST.

The post Interview: World of Warcraft: The War Within developers talk lore and quest design appeared first on Destructoid.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Firaxis Games studio in Sparks, Maryland, where I got to learn more about the studio behind the monumental turn-based strategy franchise as well as get a few hours of hands-on time with the upcoming Sid Meier's Civilization VII. It was great to see such a passionate team of developers pridefully showcase the next installment in the beloved franchise. As a Maryland native myself, I've always felt like Maryland game studios simply do things differently, and in a good way. And my roughly three hours of hands-on playtime with Civilization 7 only furthered that sentiment.

History Comes in Layers

Creative Director of the Civilization franchise, Ed Beach, has been at Firaxis Games for over a decade. He kicked off our hands-on preview by telling us about the vision for Civilization 7. Instead of just making "another Civilization" game, the team instead chose a new element of focus: History Comes in Layers. Beach described this vision as akin to what we see in historical locations throughout the world. As new empires laid claim to various settlements and cities throughout the world, they would often simply build over what used to be there, still leaving behind remnants and glimpses of the past while replacing it with new ideas and technologies.

To create that same element of building on the past—history in layers—Civilization 7 features an all-new three-stage Age system: The Age of Antiquity, the Age of Exploration, and The Modern Age. A full campaign in Civilization 7 will expand across these three ages, allowing the player to change their Civilization at the start of each new wave. Oh, and for the first time ever, players will be able to choose their Leader separately from their Civilization at the start of the game. That's right, you can lead an Egyptian empire as Benjamin Franklin.

The four classic Legacy paths will remain throughout each Age. That is Science, Economics, Culture, and Military, which are the victory conditions traditionally available in Civilization. The choices and actions you make in each Age will decide which civilization you can change to as you transition into each Age. So while you may start off as a culture or science-focused civilization, if you find yourself engaging in a lot of wars due to pesky neighbors you may end up unlocking a more war-driven civilization when you reach the next Age.

It almost feels as if each Age will be sort of its own contained game inside a bigger overarching one. That being said, in my limited hands-on time I only got to experience the Antiquity Age, so I never got to see what civilizations I unlocked based on my actions.

Sprawling cities

The History in Layers mantra of Civilization 7 really shines through the progression of your cities as you advance through the game and build up your city. Builders are no longer a unit in Civilization, nor are the pre-defined districts you could build in Civilization 6. Instead, you will have Rural areas that feature the improvements you make to the nearby city, while Urban districts allow you to build up to two buildings per hex.

Of course, the visuals of the city will change as you plop down these new entities, molding your city into its ultimate vision as you continue to add and build upon it as it spreads outwards. Because my hands-on time only explored the Antiquity age, I didn't get to see what sort of changes would happen when moving towards a completely different civilization, but I can only imagine it will further enforce History in Layers.

Another big change that I actually found really promising is that you can choose to keep a Town as a Town, rather than progressing it into an actual City. Doing so allows you to give the town a specific specialization, granting it buffs while focusing on a specific task. For example, a Mining Town will get production bonuses while a Farming Town will get bonuses for food production and growth.

You can then use these towns, and the Luxury Resources surrounding them, to funnel back into your city and boost it even further. It's a unique gameplay loop on expanding which is a big part of Civilization, and I'm excited to see what players who are much better than me end up doing once they've gotten a hold of the new system.

Combat is all about Commanders

Another big change is how Military Leaders, and more importantly experience from combat, work in Civilization 7. In previous entries in the franchise, each unit gained experience after combat. You could then train or purchase various generals that would provide buffs when near certain units, but they would not gain experience.

In Civilization 7, basic combat units no longer get experience. Instead, Commanders gain experience based on the combat performed by units around them. Through experience, they will level up and gain access to buffs that are also then applied to the units around them.

Furthermore, you can link or stack units into a Commander, move them across the battlefield as one single entity, and then deploy the units as necessary on the frontline. It's actually a massive change to how combat will work in Civilization, and as someone who is a more casual enjoyer of the series, I found the change to be a good one both from a quality-of-life perspective and also in terms of gameplay.

I typically often go more into Culture, Science, or Economics when I play Civilization, simply because I've never been a huge fan of the combat. But in the campaign I played, despite choosing an economic culture-favored civilization, I found myself really getting into the combat and for sure would have transitioned towards a military-favored civilization had I reached the next age.

A Promising Step Forward

With a game like Civilization, three hours is certainly not enough time to get a full grasp of the game. In fact, for a casual Civ player like myself, I might have only been halfway or so into the first of the three Ages. But the systems and elements I did get to experience—the new combat experience and Commanders, mixing Civilizations with Leaders, specializing Towns, or turning them into cities—all felt like solid meaningful changes to the Civilization franchise.

In the end, this is still Civilization. The same historical immersion and strategic depth we've come to expect from the turn-based strategy game across its many many hexagons are still very much front and center. But instead of just pushing out a prettier Civ game, Firaxis Games seems to be walking the perfect balance of adding new, impactful features and systems while being careful not to disrupt the Civilization formula that many have come to love over the decades. This was certainly a hands-on experience that left me pining for more, and I can't wait to try some crazy Civilization and Leader combinations to rewrite history in some fun ways.

Sid Meier's Civilization VII is set to release on February 11, 2025 on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.

Note: I also had the opportunity to interview a couple of developers from the Civilization 7 team at Firaxis which will be going live tomorrow. I asked some development questions, as well as some fun ones like their favorite leader/civ combos, so keep an eye out for that!

The post Hands-on Preview: Sid Meier’s Civilization VII appeared first on Destructoid.

Over the last year or so, I’ve inexplicably joined the ranks of people collecting big, bulky vinyl soundtracks. Albums are enjoying their second coming in a mostly digital era, and initially, I picked up a few with the sole intent of hanging them on a barren bedroom wall. Yet somehow, somewhere along the way, I wound up with a record player listening to the Silent Hill 4 soundtrack. It gives me a sort of haunted, pinky-out ambience.

Anyway, I’ve got no technical reason for it. My vinyl expertise doesn't extend beyond 'that sounds good' or 'that sounds bad' — and I don’t own any albums that could fund my retirement or make them worth all the fuss. Really, I just like how holding the unwieldy discs feels, and I'm especially into the ones that look a bit like vintage splatter art. I like looking at the sleeves, blowing away the dust, and using a medium society had long aged out of by the time I was born.

A lot of people making games seem to share that sentiment, too. I recently spoke with Sabotage Studio president and Sea of Stars creative director Thierry Boulanger, who seems inspired by what drives us to revisit those little rituals with older media. In the interview, Boulanger offered Destructoid a peek into the studio’s process. It's a look into making something both new and retro, maintaining integrity between mediums, and how you decide where Yasunori Mitsuda slots into all of this. 

It’s all about touch

“From the get-go, it was a must,” said Boulanger, in reference to the decision to give Sea of Stars the retail and vinyl soundtrack treatment. The studio released its first game, The Messenger, in the same nostalgic vein back in 2018. They were already familiar with the path to getting something tangible made, and with Sea of Stars, Boulanger says it was always part of the plan. 

“We want there to be intent in everything that we do. We don’t wanna just move plastic. It’s not so much about the units. It’s that we make something people want to touch, they want to own, they want to be able to keep. They want it to exist in their lives, more than the abstract, digital part of everything.” 

The holding, the touching, that’s all part of the retro experience for plenty of enthusiasts. It’s, mostly, a good-intentioned longing for different times or something comforting and familiar. For me, it usually boils down to some combination of childhood favorites and just wanting something a little simpler to manage. However, working within the limitations of yesteryear doesn't merit praise by default, despite what my nostalgia insists, and by no means is the process truly easier.

Sea of Stars gets that, I explained as much in my review, but eschewing what’s needlessly obtuse doesn’t detract from recreating classic RPG designs with modern sensibilities. The limitations, however, still exist when you move between mediums  — like making the jump from a limitless digital library to the more restrained, plastic discs.

Sabotage’s Iam8bit vinyl collaboration is a 2xLP collection, so it doesn’t contain the entire, hefty 200-song tracklist from Sea of Stars. Instead, it has to work as a sampling representative of the OST’s best pieces, capturing the work of composer Eric Brown and his legendary collaborator, Yasunori Mitsuda of Chrono Trigger and Xeno-series fame, in a curated format. It’s a gauntlet of bangers already made within a limited framework, and for the vinyl, they’d have to be culled again. 

“In capturing retro, we do like to work with the limitations because we sort of aim for the type of experience or the type of things that emerge from really harsh boundaries,” said Boulanger. 

“So, any track has to be a two minute loop maximum. You need to have a hook in there in like three sections, you know? You can't do this drawn-out intro into a symphonic thing that just goes on. So it's, it's less of a score and more of a classic soundtrack there. But since we don't have the memory limitations of a cartridge, then we can do as many tracks as we want.”

For Sea of Stars, that meant any important cutscene could have “bespoke audio,” leading to its whopping 200 tracks. It’s not the usual setup for many of the games that inspired the RPG, so that meant the vinyl would get picky. 

“The first thing we did was [say] ‘okay, we’re doing 2xLP, right? So, we’re gonna save one side for Mitsuda, because this collaboration is straight-up legendary.” Boulanger laughs describing the process, but that harsh curation left to the rest of the soundtrack was important to get Mitsuda’s 12 tracks on the physical album. 

From there, Boulanger and Brown worked to sample a selection of its more iconic themes into something that could flow outside the larger, digital collection. They needed the basics, like the town and battle themes, but Brown was left to much of the curation process to ensure the round-up was not only representative but balanced. 

“Eric also put care into the idea of the listening experience, trying to pace everything properly. Of course, you want all the heavy bangers, but you also want to sometimes take a bit of a break. So we feel it flows really nicely, but it was really something [of a process] because when you're doing digital, you're kind of boundless, right? You can just do however much you want to do.

And this kind of brings it back to now, ‘but what if you distill your idea?’ It forces you, it puts you in this mindset of like, ‘what's the nugget? What's the, the crystallized form of it that's concise?’ It was a super fun journey to do that, even though it was a bit hard.”

Moving with purpose

I describe my own recent affinity for vinyl with a bit of annoyance. If anything, I’m mostly embarrassed to be so sentimental about just stuff. I’ve already got an untameable retro collection of cartridges, discs, and guides eating away at a finite amount of closet and shelf space. But there’s comfort in holding something, purposefully removing the cartridge, or smashing a physical reset button. It compels me into keeping a sea of N64 games. 

If anything, Boulanger’s enthusiasm for that sensation offers a far kinder look at the type of person hoarding a stash of CDs to unlock creatures in a decades-old PlayStation game. 

“There is this understanding, there is a commitment to being in the moment. If you're just playing some playlist on Spotify or whatever in your Bluetooth speaker, it's like, yeah, you just go back 10 seconds to keep getting the dopamine hit of your favorite spike in the melody, or you hit next the second you're not like 100% vibing with the current track or whatever. 

Whereas when you have a vinyl, it's kind of like, in a way,  it's a presence. It's not just a thing that you consume. And just all the steps that you have to do to even get it to play, I feel like, your entire body understands that you are committing time to listening to music more mindfully.”

It’s a process he sees as almost meditative, or at least shares roots with the grounding, purposeful steps involved in physical media. While there’s no shortage of stories from the director rooted in childhood nostalgia that leads to the creation of games like Sea of Stars, he seems just as compelled by the little processes. “For me, a vinyl is that, I’m going to actually sit down and listen to music. Not on the side, but that's my activity this afternoon, I want to listen to music fully.”

I grew up using CDs, but I’m incredibly nostalgic for the physicality of the whole playing-a-record process. It’s certainly far more cumbersome to pull out the Silent Hill 4 vinyl and listen to 'Room of Angel' on a device drastically bigger than my phone, but I just brood better that way. I’m more emotional.

Ultimately, there's always a more critical read of my desire to buy another SNES game at a pawn shop or order more pieces of plastic to stack on a shelf, and I get it. I don't necessarily need every piece of digital media I own as a tangible, physical item, but there's value in that very purposeful, involved way an old concert or vinyl setup makes me interact with it. It's certainly a commitment, as Boulanger described, and in the attention economy where focus is a constant struggle, I appreciate the occasional game or album that demands I slow down.

Sea of Stars launches its retail edition worldwide today and is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X. The exclusive edition with a retro game manual, digital game soundtrack, poster, and other collectibles launches in Q2, 2024. The 2xLP vinyl soundtrack is available for pre-order now and is scheduled for release in Q3 2024. A digital download code with the full soundtrack is included with the vinyl.

The post Sea of Stars creative director talks crafting physical game releases and our craving for the tangible appeared first on Destructoid.

The NES library has north of 700 games on it. That’s a lot, but in terms of successful consoles, it’s kind of in the mid-range. It still makes it difficult to choose any number of the best games. That’s probably why no one has been brave enough to make a Top X NES games list. I’m not saying I’m the bravest person in the world, but I am saying I have no shame.

One thing to note is that while I’ve played a staggeringly wide range of the NES library, I haven’t played everything. For example, I haven’t played Bases Loaded 3, and I’m open to the possibility that it’s the apogee of the NES library. This also isn’t about which games were most popular or influential. That’s another topic. These ones are the best for a myriad of other reasons.

I’m also not including Famicom exclusives, though I’d love to. If I was, just know that Metal Max would be stomping all over these games. That and Kunio-Kun. But, alas, here are the top 18 NTSC NES games.

18. Super Mario Bros. (1985)

I mentioned that this is not a list of the most influential games on the console because, if it was, Super Mario Bros. would top it each time. The NES is essentially a console built on the back of Super Mario Bros., and it's impossible to overstate its impact on console games.

Also, it's still an extremely fun game. While its vintage ensures that the gameplay remains rather basic with little variety in enemies and obstacles, it makes up for it with sheer creativity in its level design. From World 1 to World 8, it stretches its mechanics in new and interesting ways. Improvements in the technology within NES cartridges would enable its predecessors to push new boundaries, the original holds its own through sheer craftsmanship.

17. Maniac Mansion (1990)

NES ports of home computer games were often rather lackluster due to differences in capabilities. However, it feels like no compromise has been made with the NES port of Lucasarts' seminal point-and-click adventure, Maniac Mansion.

What makes Maniac Mansion such a unique and exciting game among point-and-click titles is the more freeform nature of solving its puzzles. You select three characters and your path to the finish line changes depending on the combination you put together. The time it takes to get from start to finish in this game is extremely short, but it's unlikely you'll reach it on your first attempt. Maniac Mansion is a game that you'll play over and over, and surprisingly for a point-and-click adventure, it remains fun each time.

16. Mega Man 6 (1993)

You're probably expecting to see at least one or two Mega Man games on this list. If multiple mega men are listed, you are probably expecting two specific titles to be here. I'm not going to spoil it, but Mega Man 6 is my choice for the second-best in the series. To be fair, all six titles are pretty much just one game repeated, but each brings its own wrinkles that either add to or detract from the series.

What Mega Man 6 adds it the ability to couple the blue bomber with his dog in a number of transformations that remain unique to the series. What it detracts is essentially any challenge. It has some great levels with branching pathways enabled by the Rush transformations. However, it also has no teeth. It's up to you whether or not diminished challenge bothers you, but for me, it's not all that much.

15. Duck Tales (1989)

While we have some big-named licensed games these days, most games based on movies or cartoons during the 8-bit years weren’t very good. Some of them were extraordinarily terrible. Capcom, on the other hand, had a good track record for making some terrific games based on Disney licenses. One of their early endeavors was Duck Tales.

There were a lot of directions you could go with a game based on Duck Tales, since it wasn’t purely an action show. Capcom chose to do hop-and-bop with a twist. You play as Scrooge McDuck who can somehow use his cane as a pogo stick, allowing him to eliminate enemies. The platforming was fine, but the real treasure was, er, searching for treasure. Not only were you rewarded with gems for messing with the environments, but there were also secret treasures located in each stage.

14. Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988)

Originally released in 1987 on the Famicom Disk System as Yume Kōjō: Dokidoki Panic, Nintendo tweaked and rebranded it as a Mario game for North America because the real Super Mario Bros. 2 is kind of butt. It’s difficult, but in a really unfair and cruel way.

The Super Mario Bros. 2 that we got is a whimsical game about throwing dudes into other dudes. It doesn’t have much in common with the original game, but if you didn’t know about the Japanese release, you probably wouldn’t guess. It’s a challenging platformer with a jaunty soundtrack. It is, in my opinion, better than even the first game and miles better than the Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan received.

13. Kirby’s Adventure (1993)

I often say that I enjoy the idea of the Kirby, but don’t necessarily love the games. Kirby’s Adventure is an exception to that. It was a late release in 1993, and it kind of shows. Beyond having a lot of technical trickery, Kirby was given the ability to consume his enemies and adopt their powers. It’s not a terribly difficult game but it manages to be entertaining the whole way through.

12. Metroid (1986)

I totally get that some people don’t dig the original Metroid. The floaty controls, annoying enemies, and unforgiving life system can really be abrasive when you first approach the game and don’t get me started on the massive passwords you use to save your progress.

However, if you get acclimated to the enormous friction Metroid puts up front, there’s a lot to like underneath. It’s a challenging game with a great progression. It was also very influential, with the impact of its gated exploration formula being immediately felt on the console. It can be hard to get into today, but it’s still worthwhile.

11. Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse (1989)

Not far off from the original is Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse. Some would probably rank this one above the original, but I feel it has some areas where it’s not nearly as tightly designed. Difficulty is one such area, as changes were made in the North American version that aren’t in the Japanese version, Akumajou Densetsu. In particular, the damage the player takes is more of a linear increase and is less fair.

Nonetheless, Castlevania 3 contains a lot of the original’s terrific sense of style and control. It adds branching routes to the end, multiple characters to recruit and partner with, and a better variety of obstacles and challenges. All in all, it’s a great follow-up.

10. Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988)

This is going to be the top pick for a lot of people, and it’s here because I do love Super Mario Bros. 3; it just doesn’t get my thighs grinding. There’s a lot to love about it, though. For one thing, it plays like something that belongs to another console generation, effortlessly pulling off 4-way scrolling and fast movement. The level of variety on hand is insane, the level design is practically in a class of its own, and there’s a tonne of extras and secrets tucked away. Decades later, it still stands as one of the plumber’s best house calls. The fact that there’s such a night and day difference between Super Mario Bros. 3 and the first Super Mario Bros. while them both belonging to the same console is impressive.

9. Dragon Warrior (1986)

You can feel free to substitute your personal favorite Dragon Warrior (or Dragon Quest) game, but the original still feels the best to me. I prefer its simplicity and open design. Final Fantasy and the three subsequent games in the Dragon Warrior series take the formula in interesting directions, but if this list tells you anything, it’s that I value focus and polish over scale.

I love the twists Dragon Warrior throws at you, and I’m happy it can be completed in, like, ten hours. Its cheerful design makes it a bit more inviting than CRPGs at the time, and its simplicity makes it a great fit for consoles. Really, I love the complete NES run of Dragon Warrior games, but if I had to pick just one, it’s the original.

8. Contra (1988)

In arcades, Contra was a merciless quarter-muncher. It was difficult to see even a fraction of it without giving up most of your allowance. In its home 8-bit form, it’s still extremely brutal, but at least it took all your money upfront. Contra on the NES is the seminal run-and-gun shooter, and it made a home for the series on console. It’s smooth, easily readable, varied, and nicely polished. Plus, its soundtrack is pretty kicking on top of it.

Contra would be followed up by Super C, which is fine but not quite as excellent as the first. This would lead to console-exclusive titles in the series, like Contra 3: The Alien Wars and Contra: Hard Corps. None of those are as good as Metal Slug, but we had to start somewhere.

7. Batman (1989)

Batman: The Video Game has very little to do with Batman the 1989 movie. It has more to do with Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania, but you play as purple Batman and spend most of your time in sewers fighting robots.

The thing about Batman is that it’s like Ninja Gaiden if it was better designed. There’s wall jumping and gadget throwing, but it never resorts to simply spamming enemies at you and completely changing the rules just to screw you over. It’s one of the most difficult games I’ve completed, but I feel like I earned it. Learning to time those jumps in the clock tower, mastering everything on the utility belt, and somehow toppling Joker made for a satisfying conquest.

6. Mega Man 2 (1988)

The first Mega Man title sold in North America about as well as a box of live wasps. Thankfully, Capcom reluctantly green-lit a sequel, and even more thankfully, they tried it again over here. With an easier difficulty and uglier box art. Look, Mega Man 2 is already one of the breezier of the original 8-bit titles, but if you’re playing on “Normal” difficulty, it’s stripped of all challenge. The inappropriately named “difficult” is the way the Gods of Thumbs intended, and I’m not just saying that as a flex. It’s actually equivalent to the Famicom version’s setup.

When you’re on the proper difficulty, Mega Man 2 has it all. Great soundtrack, solid level design, and memorable boss battles. A lot of people prefer Mega Man 3 to this title, but I think that’s bupkiss. Mega Man 3 is too long, and I find it has the visual flavor of wallpaper paste. Awesome opening song, though.

5. Punch-Out!! (1987)

I respect Punch-Out!! because I feel it’s a solid idea perfectly executed. Technically, it’s a port of a game that was released in arcades years earlier, but the mere fact that it was refocused to not just being a quarter-munching monster makes it a lot more enjoyable on console. As long as you’re on a setup without horrendous input lag, the visual cues and timing all make for a perfect challenge. Well, until you get into the top tier of boxers. I still can’t actually topple Mike Tyson, because when my attention span faces off against consistently getting my ass kicked, my attention span never makes it three rounds.

4. The Legend of Zelda (1986)

I often associate the original Legend of Zelda as the game that got me into gaming. I was extremely young at the time, but watching my father play through it gripped my mind. However, there are a lot of formative games from my youth that I rarely return to, and Legend of Zelda isn’t one of them. For whatever reason, I’ve developed a habit of returning to it almost annually for another playthrough.

Zelda had a massive impact on the direction of game development, but, as I’ve stated, this list isn’t about influence. Stripped of that, The Legend of Zelda is an open game that respects your abilities as an inquisitive human. Maybe a bit too much, but somehow I was able to figure out which bushes to burn, and that’s my mind isn’t letting that go.

3. River City Ransom (1989)

With the severe graphical memory limitations of the NES, beat-’em-ups were a tricky genre to pull off. However, we did get a few gems, including some of the most ubiquitous ports of the Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. Those are fine, but I think Technos’ weird experiment in the Kunio-Kun series stands as the best.

Upgrading your character through food and items, River City Ransom has as much to do with shopping as it does with fighting. When fists go up, it becomes a ridiculous brawl, taking full advantage of its expressive art style. It’s one of the few games I can name that allows you to use the second player as a weapon.

I would include more Nekketsu/Kunio-Kun games on this list if they weren’t Famicom exclusive. Check out the Double Dragon & Kunio-Kun: Retro Brawler Bundle if you’d like a taste of what we missed in the west.

2. Gun*Nac (1990)

The NES had some great shoot-’em-ups in its library, though many of them were ports of arcade titles, and many more didn’t even make the journey to our front-loaders. Gun*Nac is a major exception, and it’s easily the best on the console.

Featuring amazingly fast scrolling and near-flicker-free graphics, it’s a technical masterpiece. To add to that is an unending variety of enemies and a slew of weapons and bombs to clear the screen. Gun*Nac is unbelievably robust, especially considering its 8-bit trappings. If you haven’t tried it or even heard of it, you’re missing out.

1. Castlevania (1986)

There’s no question in my mind that Castlevania is the best game on the NES. From both an aesthetic and design standpoint, it’s flawless. Featuring tightly refined controls, perfect enemy placement and behavior, a stiff but fair challenge, and a surprising amount of variety, I still consider it to be the best in the series and on the system. Considering the Castlevania series already has enough banger titles to fill its own highly subjective top 18 list, I think that says it all.

Don’t think this is an off-the-cuff decision, either. When my NES library explorations finally reached Castlevania, I knew I had reached the peak. Now that I’ve dug even further, I’m even more certain of it. Castlevania is what 8-bit perfection looks like.

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Within any traditional Final Fantasy XIV party, there are three roles to fill: one Tank, one Healer, and two DPS in a light party or double that in 8-man groups. For a long time, I checked that last box as a strictly DPS-only player. It wasn't until years into my adventures that I'd stray from my comfort zone, thrust headfirst into tanking.

I’ll never forget my first proper tanking experience in FFXIV. My FC (Free Company) mates at the time, whom I will honestly never forgive but always be grateful to, insisted I give the role a try. They promised to go easy on me and promised I’d be fine. Reluctantly, I agreed. I was among friends; it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Wrong. But before we get into that, let me explain something. I had tanked before, but never with actual people. I’d clawed my way through the levels using Duty Support and a seemingly never-ending list of side quests and, eventually, by avoiding people in Eureka, the Bozjan Southern Front, and Zadnor. My Tank Job, a Paladin at the time, sat comfortably at level 80, and I was happy never to never reprise the role until the call of peer pressure.

Then, the leader of our ready-made light party dropped us directly into Paglth’an. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite dungeons of all time now, but back then it was a horrifying hellscape that I was quite happy never to visit again. When I tell you that I tanked that dungeon while screaming both internally and externally, shaking like a leaf and almost hyperventilating, I am not exaggerating. It was, in equal measure, the most enlightening and terrifying experience I’ve ever had in FFXIV. I was horrified at the thought of leading the party in that way.

For a while, I refused to jump back onto Paladin. I never wanted what felt like so much responsibility again, at least not with other people who would need to suffer through my mistakes. But then I saw the blasted Amaro mount, the reward for reaching level 80 in each class. 

The Amaro is, to this day, my favorite mount. I call mine X-Wing and it ties me irrevocably to the one main story character who has touched me most deeply in my journey throughout Eorzea — Ardbert.

So, of course, I had to have it, and that meant I had no alternative but to pick up a sword, axe, and gunbladeto get there. This was the start of my deep dive into tanking, and through this, I’ve become a tank main. I overcame that miserable tanking anxiety, and it wasn’t easy, but it’s taught me so much. Mostly thanks to X-Wing, but helped along by the tank titles and rewards. They gave me something purposeful, something actionable I could work toward to feel a little proud of the baby steps there.

I threw myself in with full force, learning a laundry list of important MMO skills — like the importance of frank communication. I lost count of the number of times I immediately announced that I was new to an instance, asking for a little patience and grace. Sometimes people just dropped without saying a word, which I understood to mean they didn’t want to play with a rookie tank. I can’t say I didn’t take it personally at times, but I pulled up my pants and gave myself a pep talk while we waited for a replacement.

Most of the time, though, people were unbelievably understanding. They’d give tips, tell me I was doing a good job, and help me along the way. It’s this kind of behaviour that kept me going. It’s also this kind of behaviour that drove me to become a mentor, to help others with those same anxieties.

When I met my fiancé, I strove to help him try other roles one and only Job — Summoner. Not against his will, I should add. Summoner had just been completely overhauled with the Endwalker expansion, and he was complaining that he was bored. After my own experiences, I was already getting a knack for teaching, and now he's got a full roster of level 90 jobs, including Tanks, and mains Healer. Yes, we’re the dreaded healer-tank couple, but try not to judge us for it. 

That was two and a half years ago, and it’s hard to believe it’s been that long since Endwalker dropped. But now here I am, a Dark Knight main, and I can’t DPS without getting bored. Of course, I’m going to level everything after Dawntrail releases, but I will always go back to tanking. 

Tanking did more than teach me a new role, too. It gave me perspective on fights I didn't have before. I get why and when a Tank will move so early in some boss fights, so it doesn't catch me off guard. I see the importance of a wall-to-wall pull in certain dungeons and how much time the DPS have to light the mob up before, well, the mob lights the tank up.

That’s not to say that I’m a perfect Tank. I’m pretty far from perfect. I forget my tank stance more than I’d like to admit, I still manage to lose aggro on stragglers in a big pull, and I still get a little annoyed when I’m watching the other Tanks battle it out for aggro during an Alliance Raid, but I’ve learned not to take it too seriously. 

What’s the worst that can happen? We wipe? That’s not so bad. If someone else wants aggro in an Alliance Raid, I’m happy to give it to them and turn myself into a blue DPS. If I forget to turn on my Tank stance, I laugh it off and send a quick “well that could have gone better” in chat. Humor helps, and people seem to appreciate it. 

Believe me, I know how petrifying Tank anxiety, or anxiety over any role, can be. Even if it's not in the Job description, your party often looks to you as a de facto leader, and that comes with pressure. But if you’re unsure about it, or feel like you can’t do it, I’m here to tell you that you can. It may not come easily at first, but communicating your fears and inexperience is part of venturing out of your comfort zone on a new Job. Laugh it off; people are, usually, more understanding than you think. Give it a few runs, and I promise you'll not only be a better player for it, but maybe you'll pick up a new main Job, too.

The post Overcoming Tank anxiety in FFXIV made me a better player (and a Dark Knight main) appeared first on Destructoid.

No matter the genre you play, I guarantee that at some point, somewhere, you've encountered a fishing mini-game. There's no stopping them. They're anywhere with a body of water and time to kill, and, for the most part, I can't stand them.

I hate fishing mini-games. I’ve made no secret of it, and anyone who knows will tell you that if I can avoid any fantasy fishing, I absolutely will. This is a bit of a problem, considering the fact that I tend to favor ‘cosy’ games, which invariably have some form of fishing mechanic. Even while playing Final Fantasy XIV, I’ve had no choice but to level Fisher and take part in Ocean Fishing, but I’ve never done it without complaining the entire time. 

My biggest complaint is just the sheer monotony of the task. Pick a spot, press a button, and voila, the line is cast. Then it's time to wait. When you do get a bite, you press a button again and you’ve caught a fish. It’s hardly the most thrilling kind of gameplay, even when those clicks are timed. The timing becomes muscle memory and fishing just feels so… Bland. 

So herein lies the issue I’m currently facing — fishing in Stardew Valley seems to have caught my attention, despite the fact that I have spent years actively avoiding it to the point that my fiancé has had to visit my farm and complete the Fishing bundles for me, because I point blank refused to pick up a rod. 

When Stardew Valley 1.6 dropped, I started a new save file, as many players did. I chose the new farm, marveled at the benefits of the new Blue Grass, and went about my life in Pelican Town, all while never picking up a fishing rod. I did complete the bundles, though, thanks to my long-suffering fiancé. 

On the first day of Spring in the second year, I woke up to a visitor. Willy, everyone’s favorite scruffy Fisherman, showed up at my door asking why I seemed to be avoiding his favorite pastime. With no answers to give him, he instead handed me a Training Rod. I could almost hear the disappointment through his dialogue box.

Even then, despite this humiliation, I avoided the sport. My fishing level remained at rock bottom until halfway through Summer of year two, when I realised that in order to access the Mastery Cave and get my hands on the sweet rewards, I had no choice but to level my own Fishing skill and I couldn’t rely on someone else to do it for me. Alas, I would have to suck it up and go Fishing. 

Reluctantly, I tried. My first fishing experience took place during the Trout Derby, and I didn’t do well. I caught some fish, sure, but no trout, and the experience was horrible. The frustration was immeasurable, I got no rewards, and I stormed home after catching my fifth Bream. On the plus side, I did get one Fishing level out of it, so not all was lost. 

Then a few things happened:

• I unlocked Mr. Raccoon and realised I’d need a Smoker, the recipe for which contains three things that can only be gained through fishing
• I started unlocking higher quality fishing rods and more useful bobbers
• I attended Squid Fest

Squid Fest is what did it for me, because I finally learned how almost enjoyable fishing could be. Every time I hit a maximum cast, or scored a perfect catch. Fighting the Squid as they tried to escape my line and figuring out how to tell what fish I was catching just from it’s behaviour during the mini-game… It was satisfying. I achieved an Iridium score on both days, got my Squid Hat and felt a strong sense of accomplishment. 

To my horror, I found myself wanting to do more fishing and actually going out of my way to catch fish at a certain time of day. I want to reach level 10, even if it’s just for the Mastery, and I want to catch all of the fish the game has to offer. Even the legendary ones, which is something I never thought I’d say. I even have a dedicated space on my farm for Fishing related things.

I’m no longer shying away from fishing quests on the board outside Pierre’s or the Special Orders board outside Mayor Lewis’ house and the next time I start a new save file, I’ll be able to complete the Fishing bundles all by myself, which is certainly going to be a little different to my previous save files. 

Okay fine, I admit it. I enjoy fishing in Stardew Valley. It’s rewarding, it’s challenging and while it’s not exactly intuitive, it does keep you on your toes. It’s immensely frustrating when you lose a fish and infuriating when your tackle wears out or you run out of bait just when you need it most, but it’s fun. It’s just taken me a very long time, a lot of denial, and some public humiliation from Willy to get here.

The post You’ll never hear me admit it, but I enjoy fishing in Stardew Valley appeared first on Destructoid.

Something peculiar happened to me recently, when I was playing Unicorn Overlord. I was on the review coverage, and also on deck to hit a few guides along the way. And at one point, somewhere in the game's fourth major area, I got a notification screen I hadn't seen before: I couldn't take any more screenshots.

Considering the size of the SD card I have in my Switch, it seemed absurd I filled it up that fast. So I went into the settings and got a notification that I had exceeded the amount of screenshots I could capture. The amount, for those wondering, seems to be 10,000 screenshots.

Now, it seems like this 10k cap isn't for a single game, but for cumulative screenshots. Given that I still have a giant repository of other screens for other games I've covered on my Switch, like Tears of the Kingdom and Mario vs. Donkey Kong, it makes a little more sense. (At least to me and my brainworms, it does.)

What it did do was make me so much more conscious of how often I was hitting the screenshot button. It's a lot more than I realized. Sure, my guides-seeking brain was firing the snapshot-neuron every time I saw a rewards screen or detail I might not be able to easily resurface. But I was also just grabbing cool images; art that looked nice, dialogue I enjoyed, and battle scenes that struck me. Going back to my PlayStation 5, I saw the same was happening in games like FF7 Rebirth and Dragon's Dogma 2. I was instinctively hitting the snapshot button, all the time.

I can remember the time before screenshotting was widely accessible. In the late aughts, when I was grinding Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with my friends, it was a big deal when one got a gameplay recorder. He'd upload clips of one-shots and throwing knife kills onto a YouTube channel, just so we could relive silly moments from all those nights spent running Search and Destroy inhouses.

It's funny to think that not even five years later, both Sony and Xbox consoles would come with capture tech packed into the hardware, and Nintendo followed suit in 2017 with the Switch. Capture on PC got easier, too. Programs like OBS made it incredibly simple to link with Twitch and share gameplay. By college, I was recording Hearthstone Arena runs and League of Legends matches with relative ease.

Both of those situations seem like a far-cry from now, where streaming gameplay is possible within a console box, and the growing prevalence of gaming PCs means everyone can be a streamer. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: the biggest impact the PS4 and Xbox One generation had was the Share button. The ability to take a screenshot, without any additional hardware, meant all those moments don't just look better than cell phone snaps and off-screen video, but they're easy to take and share. (Well, they used to be easier to share on a certain site.)

I remember the time before built-in capture well, but the margin is thinner for concerts without phones. Growing up, I loved going to live shows. And for a long time, they were just giant pits of people. Then, as technology advanced, I started to see those hands in the air holding more than just lighters. Digital cameras, cell phones, iPhones, even Nintendo 3DS handhelds.

I'm not really lamenting the before-and-after of it all. I'm not the Old Man Yelling at a Cloud today. But at some point, advances in technology did fundamentally change the way we engage with media. It became easier to record live video and audio, and so people started wanting to capture those moments, to share them or preserve them, to send to crushes or boast a little online. The same thing happened to video games. And now I've got 10,000 screenshots on my Switch.

Over the weekend, I had to fix my install on Final Fantasy XIV and was terrified, for a brief moment, that I had lost all my screenshots. Hundreds of snaps, chronicling the long journey of my Warrior(s) of Light throughout Eorzea. Why did I want them? Well, it was like a scrapbook. I don't crack it open as often as I should, but when I do, a flood of warm memories washes over me. Huge story moments, funny gags, and posing in front of cleared raids alike all remind me of good times in this digital world.

For Final Fantasy XIV, taking copious screenshots seems encouraged by how powerful its Gpose tools are. But so many games now account for the love of snapshotting perfect moments. The "photo mode" has become ubiquitous, and even games like Tears of the Kingdom have entire mechanics based around their camera functions.

So let's get back to the quandary that started all this: how many screenshots is too many? Is it possible to over-do it? Maybe or maybe not, though I know which answer my Nintendo Switch is giving me. Moreover, I think this whole saga has only made me more conscious of why I take screenshots. Am I doing it instinctively? Do I want to preserve this moment? Am I, honestly, sometimes caught up in trying to take a perfect snap of a character or scene because I know it'll make for a good article image later? (That's a distinctly games writer problem, I know.)

I do think the screenshot function is an ultimate good for the industry. I also think it has fundamentally altered the way players perceive games. When I reach a new vista, I absolutely stop to see if the lighting looks good for a new photo mode snap. This can be an incredibly rewarding way to engage with a game; it can, at least in my experience, also prevent me from taking in the moment as-is. I've spent more than a few cutscenes just snapping away. It's not quite the same as staring at a concert through an iPhone viewfinder, but it does frame how I'm viewing the game in the moment.

The post How many screenshots is too many for a game? appeared first on Destructoid.

Some RPGs sell themselves on epic, sweeping tales. Others on their complex, robust battle systems, or their unique approach to actual role-playing. Visions of Mana doesn't necessarily lack in these departments, but its draw for me after some time spent in its world is simply cozy, familiar comfort.

I was surprised that was the takeaway, after spending roughly 45 minutes or so blasting through a two-part demo at PAX East 2024. To be clear, I don't hold any particular nostalgia for the Mana series, as I never played it growing up. Any personal attachment I have is mostly for the Secret of Mana box art, an all-timer if ever there was one.

Yet the second I started swinging weapons and bashing monsters in the overworld of Visions of Mana, it felt familiar, like I'd done this before. Maybe it was the influence of the Mana series surfacing. Or maybe Visions of Mana is just a cozy adventure to mosey through.

There's always a hero, there's always a tree

Val, the hero of Visions of Mana, is a guard for his elemental alm and childhood friend Hinna. The two are off on a journey, a pilgrimage to the Tree of Mana, and countless perils and obstacles likely await.

I didn't get a great sense of what the story is about in Visions of Mana, aside from a trip to the Tree of Mana and dealing with a lot of elemental affinities along the way. I'll say that I didn't really need an infusion of story to sell me on this, either. Most of the setting and vibe is communicated through the world and its characters.

Visions of Mana is bright and cheerful, even in frigid areas like the snowy Mt. Gala I battled my way across. Characters like Morley and Careena, my two party members alongside Val, clearly stick out. The world incorporates much of the Mana iconography you'd expect, and that's on purpose, as Mana producer Masaru Oyamada explains to me in an interview after the demo.

"In terms of the world building, really, we started off with the visual of the Mana tree and kind of built things around that," said Oyamada. "Thinking again, about you know, how much of an expansive field we wanted to achieve with this game. We originally started by kind of assessing the technological elements, how feasible that would be, and through that, that was really how we built the game and the world within the game."

The open fields are fun to run around in, either on foot or on the back of the pikul, adorable dogs that act as the party's mounts. They are perfect, and I swear to protect them from all harm.

This also means a world full of quests to accomplish, whether on the main path or through side quests. Oyamada says there will be reason to back-track too, thanks to the traversal options that different elemental triggers in the world offer. For example, the vessel of Sylphid, the Wind elemental, can control air currents; and so when faced with a rocky outcropping without many places to platform across, an elemental trigger can open new paths across.

Scrappin' time

I also got a chance to dig into Visions of Mana's combat, which sees your team of three fight monsters and enemies in real-time, action-RPG combat. To put it simply, fighting feels good in Visions of Mana. Move sets are fairly simple, with two standard attacks and a small allotment of extra moves based on your class. It'll feel right at home for anyone who's played an action RPG in recent years.

The customization and skill application comes in when you start accounting for classes. Different elemental vessels open up new classes for each character, not only changing their arsenal of attacks, but incorporating elemental effects into their strikes. The Vessel of the Moon, for example, can create pockets of slowed time. I had Careena pick up the Luna Globe and she became a Moon Charterer, dropping tiny pockets of slowed time like Dio from JoJo's, freezing enemies for Val and Morley to beat up.

Each character feels distinct in their own way, though. Morley wields blades and knives, at times reminding me a bit of Vergil from the Devil May Cry series. Val, meanwhile, has big Protagonist energy, often taking up the vanguard and providing defensive options on the field. I didn't get a great feel for Careena, as her moves felt pretty varied between classes, but she definitely came off as both technical and able to really employ elemental effects. Oyamada says the team definitely wanted each character's actions to reflect their individual personality and characteristics, and that comes across.

There are plenty of options, but they rarely felt overbearing. Even the difficulty felt tuned just right; fights had some challenge, some push-back, but I still managed to cruise through without too much trouble. I did run into a pack of ultra-high level foes in a lower level area, which seems like either a reason to return or a challenge waiting, for those willing to dare it.

A new Mana after all these years

It might feel a bit superficial to simply say, "Visions of Mana is a comfort food RPG," but it really is. Characters wear their emotions on their sleeve, the world is bright, the combat is fast and enjoyable and rarely feels arduous. The music, something the team has talked about before in a recent Xbox showcase, ties it all together to feel like a grand journey.

On my end, I was curious why the team finally chose to pull the rip cord on a new Mana. While the series has seen some remakes and re-releases, this is the first fully new Mana game in over 15 years. As Oyamada puts it, the team had been working on remakes, but throughout the process he did think about what would be a good way to create a new installment.

"But at the time, you know, a lot of the original staff members who worked on the game, including [Koichi Ishii], had actually left the company," Oyamada told me. "So again, you know, I was very much focused on, what can I do? In terms of like, if I were to make a new installment, what would be a version of it that people would accept? What would be, sort of, a game that would be worthy of being called Mana?"

Trials of Mana, the 3D remake of Seiken Densetsu 3, is the "big turning point" that Oyamada identifies. It was ambitious and fairly well received, and it got the team thinking about what it could do for a new installment.

Series creator Ishii had his own philosophy for the Mana series where, according to Oyamada, he wanted to give himself a "challenge," in terms of making something new and in game systems. But Oyamada approaches it from the standpoint of "someone who just loves the series."

"And so whether that be you know, the monster designs that [Ishii] originally came up with, or whether that be the visuals of the Mana tree," said Oyamada. "Or whether that be, you know, like the way the system and the lore with which like, these elemental spirits reside in this world. I've always felt that those are some of the strongest parts of the past games, and so I wanted to be able to incorporate them into this newest game too."

Indeed, Visions of Mana feels like a passion project from a Mana fan. It's a sentiment that comes across even to me, someone not quite so well-read in his Mana. But I also think Oyamada and the Visions of Mana team are tackling something fresh here, too. The open zones and linear battle sections tying together, with elemental traversal and good, solid action, layered over with great art and music, all gives me the feeling of booting up an RPG classic on a Saturday morning. It's even pushing the established envelope a bit on the tech side. Oyamada says that scope of work from increased platforms, and what the team wants to achieve on the technical side, are why Visions is launching where it is; notably, not on Switch.

Maybe that's what Visions of Mana ends up being: a cozy Saturday morning RPG. If it does achieve that, I think it'll be something worth keeping an eye on. Visions of Mana is currently planned for summer 2024 on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

The post Visions of Mana preview: Creature comforts in RPG form appeared first on Destructoid.

We're closing in now on a year since the launch of Final Fantasy XVI, the most recent (non-remake trilogy) entry in the long-running RPG franchise. Its second DLC, The Rising Tide, is just around the corner, and a PC version is on the docket too.

Final Fantasy XVI received a fairly warm response at launch, though its more action-oriented framework has certainly been the topic of fervent discussion since then. For what it's worth, I enjoyed it, and am admittedly in the target demographic for what's coming next: a new DLC framed around Leviathan, my personal favorite Final Fantasy summon, with more story, quests, and more.

At PAX East 2024, we got the chance to sit down with the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI content drop and its leads: DLC director Takeo Kujiraoka, producer Naoki Yoshida, and localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox. There were a few questions on my mind, ranging from their perspective on XVI thus far and what they still felt they could add to the RPG, to what the future might look like beyond the PC.

I also just wanted to know how big the sea-serpent fight would be. And the good news is, it sounds like it's pretty big.

Reclaiming what's lost

When it came to how the team feels now, almost a year removed from the initial launch of Final Fantasy XVI, feelings seem positive. The goal was to bring something new to the series, while also taking it back to some fantasy roots; Yoshida noted that recent Final Fantasy games had leaned a bit into the science-fiction side of things.

"There was a lot of pressure on us," said Yoshida. "But with the launch, seeing the feedback, seeing the player response, seeing how people really connected with Clive's story, and really kind of fell in love with Clive and these new characters, we were very relieved at that."

Going into this, I was curious about how the decision got made to finally do DLC after all. Over time, the sentiment went from no plans, to the possibility, to what we have now. Even then, the door hasn't been entirely shut. So I asked the team why sentiment shifted, and how Leviathan came about.

"We wanted to make the main game a perfect game," Yoshida said, about the XVI team's original plans. "That's not to say, though, that we didn't have an idea of what we would do in a DLC if the players reacted to the main game well."

Indeed, there was a little nugget left in the story, through the mention of "Leviathan the Lost," an Eikon that mysteriously did not appear as part of Clive's adventure. As it happens, there was some talk of Leviathan, though extremely early on; Yoshida clarifies that while Leviathan was something the team thought about, it ultimately turned out that the legendary serpent would be the lost Eikon. It wasn't finished content that was sliced out or anything.

"The plan was always to do those original Eikons and not have Leviathan in the main game," Yoshida clarifies. "And then if we had the opportunity, we could add it into a DLC."

So why Leviathan? Well, it helps that everyone knows Leviathan. It's in a lot of early Final Fantasy games, and still makes prominent appearances in recent entries like Final Fantasy XV. As for what Leviathan brings to the table?

Clive's got a (water) gun

As revealed during the panel at PAX East 2024, Clive will get a new Eikonic form with The Rising Tide, based around Leviathan. Interestingly enough, its signature trait is that it's a ranged weapon, something new for Clive's arsenal. You can see the hero of XVI shooting out various blasts and projectiles in the DLC trailer here:

Though it's a slight paradigm shift for Clive, it was important for this to feel distinct from Clive's other options. Kujiraoka cites combat director Ryota Suzuki's vision, of each form having its own distinct feel.

"The concept for creating Eikonic abilities up to now has been, you don’t want overlap between the elements," said Kujiraoka. "You want each kind of set to have its own unique feel. And so the concept for designing Leviathan was, again, we needed something that was going to feel completely different from the existing abilities."

Through playing and testing though, the team at Square says it doesn't feel awkward. The ranged attacks end up fitting in with Clive's playstyle and other abilities, feeling fluid while still being pretty distinct.

"We found that since we’ve added it internally, a lot of the dev team members and the QA team members have now switched one of their three, their favorite three, to Leviathan because they love how this works so much," said Kujiraoka.

Jill's turn

Those extra tools will help some of the endgame content coming in The Rising Tide update. There's set to be a new zone, new items, and much more as part of this DLC; the DLC director likens it to an expansion for an MMO, saying you can probably expect at least 10 hours of new game content, which is notably higher than the previous DLC Echoes of the Fallen.

And another important note for fans of a certain ice-wielding fencer: Jill is set to play a larger role in The Rising Tide. The new area is in the Northern Territories, where Jill hails from, and thus will incorporate a bit more of her character.

"The theme, one of the themes for both of the DLCs, was that it’s going to be this adventure with not just Clive, but that Jill and Joshua and Torgal, we’re all going to be together for these two final quest lines before the end," said Kujiraoka. "So while Echoes of the Fallen kind of focused a little bit more on Joshua, he had a lot more of a forward role during, in The Rising Tide it’s going to be Jill that’s going to have more lines and more connection to this story in this one."

Weaving all this into the existing story and lore was challenging, the DLC director tells me, but ultimately The Rising Tide should feel like it slots right in as another part of the main game. This includes some more difficult endgame content, too.

"Once he gets that final element [from Leviathan] there, then Clive is going to have all these new abilities," said Kujiraoka. "We want to have a place for him to showcase those abilities as well."

Ultimately, that likely lies in not just the quest content, but in the new roguelite mode that's on the way too. It seems to add some really high-difficulty challenges, including one that Yoshida and Kujiraoka teased at the XVI panel at PAX East, leading to a secret encounter.

Come to me, my Ifrit

Of course, a new set of Eikonic abilities and a new Eikon obviously means a new Eikon fight, too. Though the DLC turnaround time was tight, between the launch of XVI and the imminent arrival of The Rising Tide on April 18, the team wanted the experience of fighting Leviathan to be "equal" to the other massive Eikonic battles. And they also wanted to turn another knob, while they were at it.

"The Eikon-versus-Eikon battles up until now well, they are again, those setpieces," said Kujiraoka. "We didn’t make them over-challenging, because they’re parts of the story and we want people to be able to experience them and get through them, so they can continue the story.

"However, this one being the final Eikon battle before [the finale of the game] is that we wanted to make this challenging," Kujiraoka continues. "We wanted to make it kind of have that worthwhile feel, and so we wanted to be focused really on the combat of this Eikon-versus-Eikon battle, even more so than the previous Eikon battles, so that players will have that sort of feeling of becoming Ifrit and using all the skills they’ve built up over all the other Eikon battles and using all of those here to defeat this final Eikon."

It's especially interesting to hear that the Eikon fight will incorporate more of Ifrit's moves. The team points to The Rising Tide as the "peak" of Ifrit-versus-Eikon fights, and considering how big and gorgeous the base game's battles were, I'm now very curious to see what they've put together for Leviathan.

A future on a new platform

The Rising Tide isn't the only XVI project in the works, though. Square Enix is also currently working on a PC port of Final Fantasy XVI, which Yoshida says is "going smoother than we thought it would," from the team's perspective. Currently, one project the team is working on is figuring out where its optimization and technical specs will land, taking the loading speed of the PlayStation 5 into account.

"It creates that seamless type of gameplay that we had as one of our main concepts," said Yoshida. "We want to have no breaks in the game, we want everything to be seamless. And so, to replicate that is the thing that we’re working on right now. And so to replicate that on PC, you’re going to need a pretty high-spec PC. So right now, what we’re doing is we’re testing the game, and our current optimization, on a lot of different systems to see, again, what are going to be those minimum specs for playing the game in a way that is similar to the PS5 experience."

Yoshida confirms this does mean a demo is on the way, so players can test their systems and see if they can handle the load. On top of that, Square Enix is also working on customization settings, the kind that "players have come to expect from a PC game," and making sure those are included. Plus, creating a package that includes both base Final Fantasy XVI and its DLC.

Of course, with Final Fantasy XIV just recently hitting Xbox Series consoles, I had to broach the subject: could Final Fantasy XVI see another new platform after PC? As Yoshida characterizes it, the DLC and PC version is what's in front of them right now.

"And once we get that done, that’s when we start thinking about 'okay, can we expand this to more systems?' and working on it, because again, I don’t want this to end with just the PC version. I want to continue to expand," Yoshida said.

The takeaways

As the interview was winding down, I was curious about what lessons each of the leads felt they'd learned from the making of Final Fantasy XVI. It's a back-pocket question I like to ask developers once they're on the other side of launch day, and though the XVI team is still working on projects like the PC version, I was curious what parts of this Final Fantasy they felt would carry into their future projects.

For Yoshida, it was about the workflow and creating stories with current technology. “There's so much detail and so many tiny things that you have to pay attention to now, you know, when creating an object, like how are you going to use that object? How are you going to create that object? How is it going to be used in these cutscenes," said Yoshida. "And you kind of have to have planned everything out ahead of time, you can't just do it as you're going because production will stop if you don't have a certain thing. And so learning what things you need at what point in time and learning to have those beforehand to make your whole process more efficient, is something you have to take into account.”

He goes on to point out how having detailed plans ahead of time, even for tiny little details, can speed things up, which helps with efficiency and cost reduction. It's not just about the money, though. It helps with tying everything back into the story, a crucial part of games like Final Fantasy XVI.

"I think one thing that Square Enix uses as a selling point for a lot of their games is the story and that user experience of the story within the game," said Yoshida. "And I think by being able to do this, not only do you lower those costs, but we'd better tie things into that story experience and make it more seamless, and that's going to that's going to help us moving forward."

Kujiraoka notes how the team came together to produce The Rising Tide soon after Final Fantasy XVI's launch, as a sign of taking knowledge from making the game and being able to make more, faster. The Eikon-versus-Eikon fights are a great signpost of this.

"These kinds of battles take a lot of people a lot of time to create, and we got it down, we got it streamlined down into this process, where we're able to put this together quickly and efficiently, because of that time that we had spent together, creating those previous ones for the base game," said Kujiraoka. "And, you know, getting this process down where we can create it quickly, but also have something very exciting. Something that a lot of other projects would look at this and say, ‘No, we don't want to do something that is way too much work, especially in this amount of time,’ we're able to do that because of the work that we put in together."

As for Koji Fox, the localization director, he highlights the English-first approach to Final Fantasy XVI and the surprising dynamic it created.

"This project kind of spoiled me, in the sense that we got to record English first," said Koji Fox. "And Square Enix games never do that. It’s always, you do the Japanese first, and then the English and other languages have to kind of take that, do the ADR, match the motions, do everything afterwards."

The localization lead goes on to point out this introduced some interestingly different obstacles, though. "I mean, there were more challenges because now you're creating it, you'd have to work with ad-libs and you have to change things on the fly and make things kind of work, in a sense that, because the work isn't already done, you're the one creating it," said Koji Fox. "But on the other hand, there's a lot of freedom there. So it's going to be difficult going back to a project where I have to go from the Japanese."

How all of this plays into whatever these developers go on to produce, we'll have to wait and see. It won't be much longer for the next stage of Final Fantasy XVI, though. The Rising Tide DLC goes live on April 18, 2024.

The post Final Fantasy 16 interview: The Rising Tide, PC porting, and why Leviathan was lost appeared first on Destructoid.

Pinball has a visual style all of its own, a tangible reality that most interactive entertainment fails to capture. And while the past few decades have seen the release of hundreds of great-looking, great-sounding, and completely compelling games, some examples stand out in the memory of the pinball community more than others. They might not necessarily be the best games, but they are the embodiment of the pinball age at its most lucrative. Stalwarts of the genre. Masters of design. Icons.

The past few decades have seen the release of hundreds of great-looking, great-sounding, and completely compelling pinball machines. However, some stand out more than others. Here are 18 of the most iconic pinball machines of all time. Take your Skill Shot.

The most iconic pinball machines of all time you absolutely must play at least once

Below, we've listed what we believe are the 18 most iconic pinball machines of all time. While your tastes may vary, these ones stick out to us above all others for the reasons we've described alongside each one.

18. Dirty Harry (1995)

Much more than an elusive Clint Eastwood fan collectible, this pinball machine has some quirks that set it apart from anything else you'll have played. Named Eastwod's iconic character, Dirty Harry boasts some nostalgic elements that transport you back in time while you play. Staring at it brings back memories of hard plastic toy replicas of every movie that hit theatres, the kind of stuff you just can't get these days.

Maybe the best part of the Dirty Harry pinball machine is the moving .44 magnum replica that can and will shoot pinballs at targets, the ramp, and the sinkhole. That unique part makes this one of the best pinball machines of all time for us because there aren't many you can point to and say you remember them for such a specific reason.

17. Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast (2018)

The fact that Iron Maiden has a pinball machine is no surprise, is it? The band has everything else, from its own brand of beer to skins in Dead by Daylight, so this machine makes a lot of sense. What we do find surprising is that his 2018 machine is actually a sequel to one Stern released in, roughly 1985.

Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast builds upon the band's mobile game of the same name, in which its mascot, Eddie, battles The Beast. The main reason to play is for the stunning artwork because the game modes seem to be pretty standard. Of course, they're Iron Maiden's level of standard, which kicks them up a notch.

16. Godzilla (2021)

Stern's 2021 masterpiece, Godzilla Pro Pinball, packs in a meaty storyline worthy of the modern Monarch timeline. Evil aliens known as the Xilians have mind-controlled King Ghidorah, Gigan, Megalon, Ebirah, and Titanosaurus and are destroying the world using their immense powers. Players use Godzilla and its allies, Mothra, Rodan, and Anguirus, to fight back against this threat and ultimately annihilate Mecagodzilla.

This one is something special, with the limited edition featuring a functionally collapsing skyscraper that will capture three balls and send them through every floor as it crashes down. Multiballs are a bit of a nightmare to keep track of, but they feel thematically accurate here because you're trying to cause as much chaos and destruction as humanly possible in a pinball machine.

As if the iconic Godzilla theme wasn't enough, the machine also plays the track, Godzilla, by Blue Oyster Cult just to really ham things up. We can't imagine a better pinball machine for fans of the radioactive lizard and his ensemble cast of misfit monsters.

15. Cirqus Voltaire (1997)

Considered one of the last icons of pinball's golden '90s era, Bally/Williams Cirqus Voltaire is one of the most colorful, vibrant, and visually ambitious games of all time, as the player pushes through the various acts of an electric, arthouse circus — Its unique aesthetic is reflected in its psychedelic playfield, and bolstered by bright neon lighting, ethereal sound, and fluorescent tubing built into the ramps. CV is also well-remembered for its sinister "Ringmaster", a mischievous head that rises and falls to taunt the player.

14. Black Knight 2000 (1989)

The direct sequel to the more modest 1980 release, Black Knight, pinball veteran Steve Ritchie's Black Knight 2000 supercharged the follow-up with faster gameplay, an electrifying visual design, a totally radical dude 'late-'80s aesthetic, and, most notably of all, a blaring banger of a theme song, written by Brian Schmidt and powerful enough to drown out the sounds of every other machine in the arcade. When someone was playing BK 2000, you knew about it, bub. Check it out in the video above.

"YOU GOT THE POWER! GIVE ME YOUR MONEY!"

A machine that embodies the hedonism and raucous nature of the 1980s, BK 2000 is almost twee when viewed by modern eyes. But, make no mistake about it, no pinball machine was more determined to make you, and everybody else, sit up and take notice. Oh, and it was also hard as nails to boot. An incredible three decades later, the sequel Black Knight: Sword of Rage would follow.

13. Scared Stiff (1996)

Scared Stiff is the second of three pinball machines starring The Mistress of the Dark, Elvira. While we personally prefer 1989's Elvira & the Party Monsters, (and we're sadly yet to play 2019's Elvira's House of Horrors), Scared Stiff is the most commonly found of the three games. Featuring the look and vibe of her iconic TV show, Scared Stiff features comic-book gore, a backglass "Spider Spinner" and plenty of callouts recorded by the great woman herself. Gameplay is a tad on the easy side, but SS is a much-loved machine within the community, and a great bookmark for modern pinball's "middle era".

12. Xenon (1980)

Released in 1980, Xenon is a stunning and truly iconic trendsetter for the decade to come, wonderfully stylized in the fonts, colors, and architecture that would typify the following years. Not just in pinball but in all forms of new-wave fashion, music, art, and culture.

Xenon features a future-noir silver/blue color scheme, electronic music, a litany of dazzling lights, and the sultry, beckoning voice of composer/sound designer Suzanna Ciani, who entices the player with flirtatious callouts and — let's just call it what it is — "orgasmic" sound effects. Xenon defined a new era for pinball, which would step away from the bells, chimes, and rootin' tootin' cowboy themes of yore, to be replaced with an era of solid-state sound, sci-fi, and sex.

11. Monster Bash (1998)

One of the most popular machines in the collector's community, Williams' Monster Bash takes the Universal Monsters, (Frankenstein, The Bride, Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon), and reimagines them as a retired rock band, who are digging themselves out of the grave for a reunion tour. It's up to you to get the band back together and back on stage.

Monster Bash is surprisingly straightforward, gameplay wise, but is hugely popular due to its cast of characters, fun dot-matrix animations, and amusing playfield features. These include Frankenstein's revolving lab table and a ball-stalking Count Dracula. Some of the music tracks, (but not the great main hook), are a little cheesy to modern ears, but Monster Bash's overall concept is great fun, and the machine sits proudly in many a collection.

Universal should've based The Dark Universe on this.

10. Centaur (1981)

Arguably the most Heavy Metal pinball machine ever made, Bally's Centaur is in a class of its own where visual design is concerned. Styled almost entirely in black & white, the Centaur playfield is one from which no color will ever escape and is intricately detailed with the dark, comic-book artwork of Paul Faris. Centaur recalls an era of horror comics, Dungeons & Dragons, and the parent-bothering "Satanic Panic" that would tear throughout the 1980s.

The "half monster-half motorbike creature" is, quite frankly, funny as fuck today, but even that staple of metal cheese just adds to the machine's perfect "time capsule" of the dawning 1980s. A well-maintained Centaur stands today as a thing of beauty.

If pinball did drugs, then Centaur is a cabinet of whiskey and coke.

9. The Machine: Bride of Pinbot (1991)

While 1986's Pin-Bot is undoubtedly one of the most beloved classics of the pinball era, its 1991 sequel The Machine, (more commonly known as "Bride of Pin-Bot"), is pinball royalty. The Machine has the player attempt to build a robotic waifu for our boy Pin-Bot. The construction is presented as an epic event, and The Bride comes to life with a soothing and flirtatious voice (ala Xenon), as well as a wonderful sequence where the entire playfield shuts down, The Bride's birth represented by an evocative "heartbeat" light show.

The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot is perhaps the shallowest of the Pin-Bot trilogy (1997's Jack-Bot eventually followed it), but The Machine's knack for special effects and storytelling made it an incredible smash hit on release, becoming one of the first "Must-Play" pinball machines of the '90s renaissance.

8. Medieval Madness (1997)

Easily the most popular and recognized of pinball's latter-day period, Williams' Medieval Madness is something of a Crown Jewel within the collections of those able to afford it. And it's quite easy to see why, with its intricately detailed playfield, physical models and effects, and galley of hugely satisfying shots. The audio package features myriad amusing callouts, which feature Monty Python-esque comedy and a roster of fun allies and enemies.

Whether smashing castles, bashing trolls, defeating dragons, or rescuing damsels, Medieval Madness is a fast-playing, hugely gratifying game, and the ideal title to put in front of a newcomer to help them understand why pinball is so compelling. For these and other reasons, Medieval Madness is also one of the most expensive machines on the market, with original '97 models usually trading well into five figures. I told you it was a rich man's pastime.

7. Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure (1993)

In the early '90s Williams' went hard on licensed titles, often to great effect. A great example of this model is 1993's Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure. This "widebody" game, (around five inches wider than the standard pinball dimensions), is a celebration of the original Indiana Jones film trilogy, and features characters and modes inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade.

The playfield features numerous physical effects, including moving idols, a rotating temple gate, a revolver shooter, and a World War biplane. Powerful new DCS sound technology allows for great replications of the famous theme tune, along with voice samples from characters such as Indy, Indy Sr, Marion, Short Round, Willie, and Sallah. Still, today, Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure is one of the very best licensed games.

A second Indiana Jones game was released by Stern in 2008.

6. FunHouse (1990)

FunHouse truly turned heads upon its 1990 release. As pinball entered a transition period from early solid state and alphanumeric titles into a new world of gimmicks, games within games, and bold ideas, FunHouse became instantly iconic thanks to the disembodied head of mechanical carnival barker, Rudy, who taunts the player, offers hints, and even swallows balls! (behave). Fun fact: Rudy is voiced by Ed Boon, who was a Williams employee and would soon co-create the Mortal Kombat franchise.

FunHouse is perhaps the quintessential pinball game. It's fast and fluid, it's loud and colorful, it's compelling and frustrating, and it's one of the final titles that pushed the then-limitations of the market to the brink, right before the launch of a bold era of technically superior, highly polished, licesened games. It's lunchtime, go get yourself a hot dog.

5. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

One of the most popular games devised by pinball designer Steve Ritchie, (also the original voice of Mortal Kombat's Shao Kahn), Terminator 2: Judgment Day was a part of the then unheard-of billion-dollar marketing drive for James Cameron's sci-fi blockbuster. As a typical Ritchie title, Terminator 2: Judgment Day features high-speed gameplay with a heavy emphasis on complex combo shots.

T2 features numerous firsts: It is the first pinball machine to feature a button-activated auto-launcher, it was also the first game designed with a Dot-Matrix Display (DMD), and to feature a built-in mini-game, as players use the shooter to blast approaching T-800s on the DMD. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is far from the best game on this list, but it was very widely distributed among arcade centers, and, as such, is remembered by even the most casual of arcade attendees today.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, also designed by Ritchie, was released by Stern in 2003.

4. Gorgar (1979)

While the oldest and arguably most simplistic title of this list, Williams' Gorgar perhaps embodies the identity and culture of pinball more than any of the other games. The storyline sees the player battling the titular demon in an apocalyptic showdown, and the playfield is emblazoned in heavy metal iconography, parent-bothering themes, lurid horror-comic artwork, and half-naked humans, all while offering a brutal, quarter-munching challenge.

Gorgar was the first pinball machine to utilize synthesized speech, with a seven-word vocabulary that forms crude sentences. Gorgar eschews music in exchange for a constant pulsing "heartbeat", which adds to the game's unholy appeal. The kind of pinball machine that would likely appear on '80s news broadcasts as "encouraging devil worship", Gorgar's rudimentary gameplay only adds to its old-school charm.

3. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1993)

Williams' Star Trek: The Next Generation might have hit the scene during the show's twilight years, but that didn't stop fans from flocking to its huge, stunningly designed cabinet. Another "widebody" title, Star Trek: TNG took an age to come to fruition, with the design team having to almost move the stars themselves in order to score the license from Paramount — reportedly bagged on the insistence that the game's action upholds "The Prime Directive".

ST:TNG is not only a great-looking game, but it is packed out with tricky shots, satisfying combos, a Borg Multiball, and a bevy of challenging missions, culminating in a "Final Frontier" endgame. Seven original cast members recorded new dialogue for the sound package, adding to its authenticity. Today, some 30 years later, Star Trek: The Next Generation stands up easily to any modern machine — a testament to its timeless design excellence.

2. Twilight Zone (1993)

Submitted for your approval: One of the best and most iconic pinball machines of the 1990s. Offered a "blank cheque" after his success with The Addams Family, designer Pat Lawlor followed up with this excellent adaptation of another classic of Americana: Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. The pinball version of the groundbreaking TV series features references to various familiar episodes, including "Living Doll", "The Hitchhiker", "The Invaders", and "A Most Unusual Camera".

Twilight Zone sports some of the most difficult gameplay in pinball, which turned away all but the most dedicated of players. Despite this, the game is a classy-looking and highly polished delight, with a cabinet that could be found in arcades across Europe and North America for years. TZ doesn't quite capitalize on its theme as well as it could have, but the cool backglass and its rendition of the famous theme tune should instantly spark nostalgia in any arcade goer of a certain age.

1. The Addams Family (1992)

Tell anybody who was around in the '90s that you're into pinball, and never fail, you'll be met with some variant of "Oh yeah, I remember pinball!.. Yeah... Addams Family!". This is with good cause, as Williams' The Addams Family is officially the best-selling pinball machine of all time, having shifted a staggering 20,270 units since its initial release. TAF is, of course, an adaptation of Barry Sonnenfeld's 1991 movie, but nobody could have quite anticipated the game's incredible popularity.

Designed by Pat Lawlor, The Addams Family features a memorable, comic-book playfield with modes based upon various scenes in the movie. These include the secret staircase, the living bear rug, Wednesday's toy train, the family vault, and, most importantly, THHHE MAA-MUSHKAAA! The playfield utilizes hidden magnets to play havoc with physics, while an animatronic Thing emerges from a box to lock balls. As a final touch, Raul Julia and Angelica Houston recorded new dialogue especially for the game, reprising their roles of Gomez and Morticia Addams. 'Tish.

The Addams Family pinball machine was unavoidable — a cornerstone of practically every single arcade, bar, beachfront, bowling alley, and nightclub in town. You can still find them on site today, though often in upsetting states of disrepair. But perhaps the best example of The Addams Family's enduring legacy is that, whether you personally play pinball or not...

...You already knew that this was going to be number one, right?

Don't get tilted

The past two decades might have seen pinball become something of a niche, rich folk's pastime, powered by a massively inflated collector's market and the increasing rarity of machine components, but for those of a certain age, there was, truly, a time where you couldn't enter a public building and not fall over a pinball machine or three. Arcades, bars, clubs, laundries, restaurants, theaters, corner stores, and gyms. If there was a five-foot footprint empty, then it had a pinball machine plonked on it.

There have been thousands of machines produced since the 1930s, from coin-operated bagatelle tables, through to the delightful electromagnetic (EM) machines of the '50s-'70s, these would give way to the Solid State (SS) machines of the '80s, pinball's golden renaissance in the '90s, and ultimately lead to today, with companies such as Stern and Jersey Jack continuing to roll out brand new, exciting, hi-tech games for people who have much more money than should ever be legal.

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If you take a look at Metacritic, you can see that the best-scoring entry in the Alone in the Dark series is the original trilogy from way back in the '90s. The first game was such an inspiration within the survival horror genre, but that term didn't really exist until Resident Evil came along a few years later. Yet its impact is undeniable.

Now, with Pieces Interactive's new take on the iconic series doing the rounds, we once again find ourselves wondering whether we can welcome AitD back to the fore. At the time of writing, reviews for the latest game are trickling in, but from what I've seen, there's an overall feeling that the franchise is struggling to make any kind of significant comeback.

I was fortunate enough to receive an advanced copy of the 2024 remake (reimagining or whatever) and made it through Emily's story at the pace most anticipate finishing at least one playthrough. My findings left me feeling like Alone in the Dark just doesn't stand a chance in the modern games industry, and it's hard to understand why that is.

This isn't our Destructoid review, as it is more about whether or not there's any breath left in the old beast. Now, maybe you really like the new game, and that's absolutely fine. Steam currently has it sitting pretty on "Most Positive." However, is it enough to truly revitalize the series? Or has the bar for remakes of classic survival horror games been set so high by Capcom, that attempts by others – even the genre's OG – struggle to compare?

The birth of an elder

Back in 1992, gaming was still very much in its infancy. We were one year away from the likes of Doom and the SNES console only hit the US market a year before that. What I'm saying is, it was a long time ago. But a new 3D adventure was about to launch on MS-DOS, bringing with it gaming visuals that had never been seen before, a story that encompassed mystery and Lovecraft-inspired horrors, and gameplay that favored fleeing over mindless fighting.

The original Alone in the Dark by Infogrames has cemented itself in the annals of gaming history, its legacy still living on to this day. Its genre-defining aesthetic and puzzle mechanics went on to inspire Resident Evil, which released in 1996. For good or ill, Capcom's legendary series has remained a staple in horror ever since, but its enormous success likely means that a lot of people probably don't even know where its influences began.

A sequel to AitD was released in 1993, followed by a third entry in 1995. This culminated in a trilogy pack, which came out in 1997 (according to Metacritic). After that, the series went on hiatus until the early 2000s. By this point, we'd had three Resident Evil games and the emergence of something even more boundary-smashing: Silent Hill.

Enter a new nightmare

With such mighty names building reputations in survival horror, even the likes of Alone in the Dark had its work cut out for it. Capcom and Konami (or Team Silent, I should say) were coasting on the success of their respective franchises, so the granddaddy of them all lay dormant until 2001. Then along came The New Nightmare by Darkworks.

Look, having never played the game myself, I can't offer up any personal insight. What I can say is that, for the most part, a lot of people didn't seem to look too favorably on the latest installment in the influential series. With a meta score of 66, an argument could be made that it's not really a terrible game, just that it's more of an average horror title at best, judging by scores then.

A few more years passed us by, then we got 2008's Alone in the Dark by Eden Games, which seemed like an attempt at shaking things up by offering a different play style. According to the Wikipedia entry:

It is set out through DVD-style "episodes", where the player can choose to start the game from the beginning or choose to skip to a section if they get stuck. If they choose to do so, the past events are recollected in a "Previously on Alone in the Dark…" cutscene at the start of the episode.

That does sound like a pretty interesting take on the series, but with a score of 58 ("Mixed" on Steam), the gaming world seemed to collectively show, at best, vague disinterest in Alone in the Dark. Having said that, I hear the fire effects were pretty phenomenal for the time. But that didn't appear to be enough to rescue an iconic horror franchise from the deathly claws of obscurity.

Then we got Alone in the Dark: Illumination in 2015, an entry that flew so far under the radar I'm willing to bet some of you reading this hadn't even heard of it until now. That includes me. Then there's the Uwe Boll-directed movie adaptation. But we don't talk about that.

Fast-forward to 2024, and Pieces Interactive (along with publisher THQ Nordic) is giving it a go, perhaps more in a "return to form" sort of way, but with a flavor that leaves a Resident Evil 2 remake aftertaste. Not always a bad thing, mind, but you have to admit that AitD was always going to be compared to Capcom's modern interpretation of the RE brand.

Hopes fading?

Although the 2024 version of Alone in the Dark has only been out a day, it doesn't feel like it's going to be a reboot worthy of much note. Maybe extra content or patches to fix some of the more egregious issues could stop it from falling into the gaming abyss any time soon. But I don't have a lot of hope, and I can't point to just anyone one thing making Alone in the Dark struggle so hard to return.

While it's tempting to compare it to Resident Evil – both in terms of the classics and the newer remakes – the one thing RE has done is remain in the limelight, and therefore relevant. From the first three installments back in the '90s to the way RE4 massively switched up the genre with its now-influential over-the-shoulder look to reinventing the name through the seventh and eight installments, the remakes have been more of a ballast.

In the case of Alone in the Dark, it just went away, came back, went away, came back. Rinse and repeat. Maybe there's something to be said about the fact that studios not typically associated with horror have been having a crack. Pieces Interactive was mainly known for the Magicka games, while Darkworks was relatively new, having only developed one game prior to New Nightmare.

I'm disappointed more that Alone in the Dark 2024 may go down as yet another example of the franchise struggling to keep its head above the water by the fact that Mikael Hedberg's name is attached to it. While it's not always about the writing, I have to ponder the notion that if the writer of SOMA (what I consider to be one of the greatest horror games of all time) can't make it work, then maybe there isn't much hope for its future.

But that's my take. It just feels like we've circled the airport several times now, and no one knows whether a landing will take place.

The post Alone in the Dark: is it time to let the series go? appeared first on Destructoid.

Being an avid fan of 2.5D ray casting engines, I have a strong fascination with Ken Silverman’s Build Engine, which was the foundation upon which Duke Nukem 3D was built. That somehow led me to William Shatner’s TekWar.

Despite Duke Nukem 3D being what made the Build Engine famous, it wasn’t the first game released on it. There were a few that came before it, and Capstone was responsible for more than one of them.

Capstone Software is a kusoge topic in itself, as much of their catalog is either crap or sub-crap. While researching DOS games to cover in this column, many of their games rose to the top thanks to the preservation efforts of SNEG. However, a good many of Capstone’s worst games were based on terrible licenses, so they are no longer available. One of these unavailable titles is 1995's William Shatner’s TekWar which, for a multitude of reasons, I’m pushing for having it re-released. Come on, Nightdive.

William Shatner’s TekWar is based on a 1989 novel called William Shatner’s TekWar by William Shatner (ghost-written by Ron Goulart). In the early ‘90s, William Shatner’s TekWar was picked up for comic books, a TV series, and this game as a way to prove that William Shatner’s face was an effective marketing tool to sell garbage.

It was poorly received, but people are still trying.

If you don’t know who William Shatner is, he played a small role in a niche 1960s TV series called Star Trek. Since then, he’s coasted on that success and recognition, mostly in the aforementioned effort of selling garbage. Today, you might know him from shows like Weird or What and The UnXplained where he tells you that, while it’s just a theory, Alien Nazis definitely built the pyramids. Aliens just love piles of stone and use them to refuel their invisible spaceships. His entire existence now seems to be thrashing against the forces of irrelevancy, and he will tell you anything you want to hear if you’ll just make him feel important.

Unsurprisingly, William Shatner’s TekWar starts with an ad for the TV show, William Shatner, elaborate logos, bad CGI, and William Shatner. 

You’re an ex-police officer who is awoken from cryosleep imprisonment by William Shatner. It’s maybe the 2043, and there’s a new drug on the market called Tek. It’s an addictive experience that puts its users in a blissful simulated environment where they can briefly feel happiness until the drug kills them.

That may have sounded nefarious in 1989, but these days, it sounds like the next product that Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg would take credit for.

In the future, the cure for a drug problem is murder. William Shatner forces you to use your police skills of assassination to take down seven drug lords and stop their plan to spread addictive happiness through the internet. You’re judge, jury, and executioner all in one, and rather than try and get to the societal root of addiction, you’re just going to kill the people supplying the demand. Law and order 101, baby.

You’re given the choice of seven “TekLords” to take down, and I don’t know why. Judging by William Shatner’s lectures and the environmental storytelling, there’s a chronological order by which you’re supposed to tackle the levels. Nothing fancy, just left to right, but I’m not sure why they bothered giving the option.

Not that it matters. You absolutely can tackle the levels in any order. Aside from William Shatner trying to tell William Shatner’s TekWar in a linear fashion, there’s no real difficulty curve. Each level starts you off on a subway platform with your pockets emptied down to the bare essentials. Every time you enter a level, you have to rebuild your arsenal. Only keys carry between areas, and they get taken away when you go after a new TekLord, anyway.

I don’t even know how I would quantify difficulty in William Shatner’s TekWar. Every level has you entering a city area. You’re supposed to avoid causing too much commotion, and if you keep your weapon holstered, rent-a-cops will ignore you. However, it won’t take long before someone who doesn’t like your face just starts blasting at it from some unseen corner of the map.

One of the best parts of the Build Engine is its handling of map sectors that allow level designers to create the illusion of verticality without true room-over-room. This enabled the creation of levels that resemble real-world environments, which was something that games were pushing for in those days. So, William Shatner’s TekWar features areas that, in superficial ways, feel like urban environments. However, Capstone fell into the pitfall of those early games, which is that the levels are designed to feel like real places first, and how they function as the setting for gameplay is a distant second.

As such, many of the rooms and areas you enter are entirely pointless. Much of William Shatner’s TekWar is pointless.

You’ll undoubtedly find yourself circling areas trying to locate the chosen TekLord without success. That’s because, while each TekLord drops you in what seems to be the same subway platform, the levels are often broken into different stops. So, one TekLord might require you to disembark at one spot, scour the level, and then, when you find yourself stuck, return to the subway to move to another platform and repeat the process.

But, like I said, the only items with permanence here are the keys. So, you might think that you need to search for the keys on earlier platforms to take them to the final area and unlock the door to the boss, but that’s not always the case.

There are only two unique keys: red and blue. When searching for any given TekLord, there are always multiple places these can be found, and often there are copies in the area where said TekLord is located. This means any earlier levels are pointless. You can’t even use them to load up on munitions because, like I said, guns get dumped when you transition to new areas.

It’s so distressingly confusing. It feels necessary to search the earlier subway stops just in case there isn’t a required key in the last area. I don’t trust that William Shatner’s TekWar won’t just reload all the enemies again.

The baffling mission framework would be bad enough, but William Shatner’s TekWar isn’t fun to play to begin with. As I said, the levels are designed more for looks than function. They’re confusing mazes filled with areas that would be pointless, even if you were allowed to take your toys with you.

The enemies are just left to sort of roam the environment. Anytime you enter an area, they’ll start blasting at you indiscriminately. Since they just fire bullets that don’t show as projectiles, your character just begins taking damage. There’s no way to avoid it. Your screen starts blinking red, and your life bar starts depleting slowly. Very slowly. In the meantime, you need to try and hunt down everything in the vicinity that is making your screen flash.

In any other game, taking such constant, unstoppable aggression would mean you die a lot, but I didn’t see the game over screen too often. That’s because, in order to balance the difficulty, Capstone just piled on the health. Even while taking continuous damage, your character’s healthbar is massive. Rather than meticulously place enemies to create a fun and challenging experience like a video game is supposed to do, Capstone kept tweaking player health until you had a fighting chance. That’s, uh, a very unique way of doing it, I suppose. I mean, it feels god-awful to play, but it’s a way to ensure the player can suffer their way to the finish line.

Speaking of which, each TekLord you kill awards you with a symbol. At some point, you’re supposed to take these symbols into the Matrix (the virtual internet, of course) and put them into slots scattered throughout. I wouldn’t recommend doing this until the end, but regardless, it’s one of the worst sequences of gameplay I think I’ve been subjected to.

To its credit, William Shatner’s TekWar does a decent job of presenting a virtual world within the Build Engine. It differentiates itself from the rest of the game quite well. Unfortunately, it’s filled with inescapable traps and obtuse puzzles that take forever to solve. While I was trapped in this part, my partner asked me what I was playing. I told him.

He cringed and asked, “And how is it?”

“I’m in Hell,” I replied.

It feels almost merciful after you complete the Matrix section and you're dropped back into normal gameplay. It's a short fight and then William Shatner tells you what a good job you did. Speaking of merciful, there was never a William Shatner’s Tekwar 2.

I’ve discovered that playing Build Engine games as they were released is next to impossible for me. The lack of mouselook feels awkward to hands that have been trained with that control style, and I can never find keybindings that feel right. Thankfully, there’s a Build source branch called BuildGDX that supports William Shatner’s TekWar, much like eDuke32 enables Duke Nukem 3D to run on modern setups. I’m not sure how thankful I should be that someone made William Shatner’s TekWar more accessible to me, but at least I didn’t struggle with PGUP and PGDN to move my virtual neck.

One of the reasons I like playing bad games is trying to analyze the decisions that make them so terrible to play. William Shatner’s TekWar, for all its ineptitude, seems to have come from a place of ambition. 3D environments – even fake ones – were a new frontier in video games, so the playbook was still being written. When the trail hasn’t been worn, it’s easy to wander off in the wrong direction and be unable to find your way back.

If I had to imagine the design document, I’d say that the initial idea was that they’d drop players in an environment, and then they’d discretely have to find their way to the target and eliminate them. The problem there is that it’s difficult to then throw obstacles in their way, and it creates a lot of variables that need to be planned for. Eventually, when all the loose ends need to be tied together, your player winds up with a towering health bar.

We get so caught up populating pedestals with games that set precedence that we miss out on the other half of the story. But while a soufflé that successfully rises looks much better, I’m more interested in the one that collapsed after the house was shaken by a Buick driving through the front door. Anyone can succeed, but it takes talent to fail as hard as William Shatner’s TekWar.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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We need sites like MobyGames now more than ever. With the ongoing enshittification of the internet, where useful and trustworthy information is being buried under a mountain of worthless garbage, user-driven databases are becoming the last reliable, trustworthy sources. How standards have changed.

It’s been 25 years since MobyGames was founded. However, its future was never guaranteed. In fact, I’m not sure I recall a time when it wasn’t at risk of disintegrating. But roughly two years ago, in 2022, the website landed in the hands of Atari. At the time, I thought that was another twist in a series of bad turns, but now, I’m not sure that’s the case.

I was given the chance to speak with Atari CEO Wade Rosen and the general manager Jeremiah Freyholtz about the state and future of the site, which is something I couldn’t pass up given my history with it.

I joined the MobyGames community in 2009. While I made some small contributions to the database, my main reason for joining was to cut my teeth writing about video games. What I did there 15 years ago led me here. Users are able to submit reviews for any game listed on the site, so that’s how I taught myself to be a critic. All my reviews are still up there, including the first I ever wrote, and it’s awful. I keep it up to show how much I’ve developed my craft, but I’m not going to link you to it out of shame.

More importantly, however, I connected with the community there. At the time, the forums were an active place just for talking about video games. Just a bunch of people who loved video games from all eras, all who had very particular and eclectic tastes. I fit right in.

In 2010, the founders of the site sold it to GameFly Media, and the results were catastrophic. It was done without informing anyone in the community. One day, there was just a GameFly logo at the bottom of the screen. Some longtime approvers and contributors resigned immediately. Even the most optimistic, however, quickly lost faith when the company rolled out an updated look for the site sometime in 2013.

The original look of MobyGames was aging fast, but the new version was broken and unusable. The remaining community crumbled. The forum conversations dried up. Even I left after it felt like there was nothing for me there anymore.

One day at the end of December 2013, one of the community members messaged me over Steam. The old site was back. Suddenly, and out of nowhere. It was a gosh-darned Christmas Miracle.

GameFly had sold the site to Jeremiah Freyholtz (who we knew as Reed at the time) and Simon Carless of Blue Flame Labs. They had rolled everything back. More importantly, they were planning to do the work to help restore MobyGames.

The community, having been so badly burned by the Gamefly deal, was skeptical. Work was beginning on Blue Flame’s own refresh on the site, and while Reed was communicating and taking the community’s feedback into consideration, it would never be possible to please so many passionate people. In retrospect, Blue Flame saved MobyGames. At least from my perspective.

Unfortunately, the community would never quite be the same. Don’t get me wrong; a good many of the people who I used to converse with in the forums are still there, and a lot of people still contribute to the site. But the random talk about video games in general and their history never really came back. That probably moved to the Discord server, as is often the case these days.

However, the updates slowed down pretty quickly. In 2014, Simon Carless clarified that MobyGames didn’t make much revenue. This meant that Freyholtz had to focus on other things and couldn’t devote all his attention to the site. They brought on community member Tracy Poff to maintain things and fit in what upgrades they could.

I made regular donations to the site. I thought this was the primary, and I have no idea why because the site always had ads. Freyholtz told me, “Actually, for most of our history, the site was supported primarily by ads and affiliate links. Although we had donations at times, it was a smaller piece.”

Sometime in 2020, Antstream bought the site, but things remained very much the same. So much so that I didn’t even notice, and neither did much of the community. However, it did open up Atari’s entry.

According to Wade Rosen, “We made a strategic investment in Anstream back in late 2021, which owned Mobygames, and as part of that investment secured the option to buy Mobygames outright. We exercised that option in early 2022. MobyGames was something that I had identified pretty early on as something I thought made sense within the Atari family.”

“For me, Mobygames has always been the source of truth for information about video games,” Rosen said. “That has been particularly valuable to me in game publishing, first at Ziggurat and now at Atari.”

When it was announced in 2022, I thought Atari’s acquisition would just be a repeat of the GameFly situation. The Atari I knew up to that point was coasting on past success by occasionally releasing (very) substandard entries in older series. But since Rosen took over as CEO, the company has made strides in proving that game preservation is their business model. Now it doesn’t seem like such a bad fit.

Development on MobyGames went into overdrive. The site got another interface update, but beyond that, a number of additional features were added. One of the more interesting additions is still in beta, which is MobyPro, a paid subscription tier that provides improved analytics. Little changed for users who just want to access the database for free, but for people who commonly research games, like myself, it’s an appreciable addition.

“Originally, I wanted to do MobyPro about a decade ago,” Freyholtz explained, “but felt that it and the overall long term vision was untenable with the old backend from 1999. So instead, we put our efforts into first building a new site and infrastructure - effectively a new foundation from which to work from. Tracy Poff (the other developer at Moby) and I worked on that part-time, on and off, over the course of many years. Along with feedback from the approvers as we developed it. Ultimately Atari’s investment and support enabled us to get it over the finish line!

“It was a massive project and I’m relieved we made it to the other side,” he added. “Especially since the site and database is now in the best shape it’s ever been.”

As for how the community responded, Freyholtz says, “The community has been energized by the rapid pace of development we’ve been able to achieve since the upgrade. Prior to that improvements and bug fixes took *forever*. And with MobyPro, it’s still very early days, but it’s off to a good start!”

I asked if contributions have picked up since the site’s update, and Freyholtz provided a graph to illustrate.

That is certainly a graph. We’re missing an axis here, but it definitely goes up.

Things are still in the midst of improvements, however. MobyPro is available, but it’s still in early access. The site is already in better shape than I’ve ever seen it, but I was curious about what other additions were planned, so I asked Freyholtz.

“Oh absolutely, there are many!” He replied. “And some have been added since launching the new site. A favorite of which is Game Relations. Which allows contributors to link games to any of its expansion packs, DLC, conversions, compilations or special editions.”

“But overall we’re focusing more on improving the UI and processes for our existing data types before expanding too much into other areas.”

Game relations, in particular, have been something requested by the community since the time I was active there. Things like expansion packs and DLC would be listed with their own entry in the database, and you’d typically need to look at the description to see what they related to. The game relations panel just shows it at a glance.

Speaking of community requests, I had to ask a cheeky question about whether or not the Famicom Disk System would become its own platform.

“As for Famicom, there are differing opinions about that (and some other platforms) in the community, and I’m not sure where we’ll land on that yet,” Freyholtz explained. “Currently we document it as a tech spec, which you can find here.”

Yes, this has long been argued about in the community, even as far back as when I was active. If it’s not clear, I’m on the side that thinks it should be a different category. After all, the Sega CD and Turbografx CD are listed as separate platforms.

25 years is practically ancient on the internet. 1999 was even before the dotcom bubble burst and ended Web 1.0. To close out the interview, I asked both Rosen and Freyholtz what they think MobyGames will look like in 25 years.

For Wade Rosen, “I am excited to see the professional layer added to an already rich body of information and active community. As you look forward to how the site will document and discuss more modern games, it opens up a host of possibilities. It is hard to predict exactly what it will look like, but my expectation is that MobyGames will continue to excel at its core mission, and it will remain the most authoritative source for video game information.”

As for Jeremiah Freyholtz, “I think it will make the current MobyGames look like a baby in comparison, in terms of capabilities and scope of video game knowledge. And will be an increasingly important part of the industry.”

MobyGames has gone through some rough patches in the past, and there’s no guarantee that it won’t hit another. However, with Atari providing Jeremiah Freyholtz the ability to implement his vision for the site, things are looking more optimistic than ever. Here’s hoping that the new owners and, more importantly, the hard-working community volunteer contributors and approvers can keep this important resource going strong far into the future.

As Freyholtz puts it, “Check back on our 50th Anniversary!”

The post Talking MobyGames’ 25th anniversary with Jeremiah Freyholtz and Atari CEO Wade Rosen appeared first on Destructoid.

In the early ‘90s, Hulkamania stopped running wild as Hulk Hogan pursued his dream of acting and testifying at trials about steroids. The result was godawful stuff like Suburban Commando and Mr. Nanny. However, he also had a short-lived TV show called Thunder in Paradise.

I have never watched Thunder in Paradise. It’s not because it’s something I wouldn’t watch – I’ve intentionally watched tonnes of terrible things – it just hasn’t been a priority.

But then I learned that I could satisfy my job, my passion, and my chronic Hulkamania with one swipe, thanks to 1995's Thunder in Paradise Interactive. That’s right, the Hulkster’s show somehow had a video game. Appropriately, it came out on the maligned and ridiculed Philips CD-i. I don’t own one, but the game also came out on DOS because one platform can’t hold back the most powerful force in the Universe, brother.

It took some DOSBox magic to get running. I’m not sure if it was particularly picky about hardware back in the day or if DOSBox just wasn’t prioritizing compatibility with Thunder in Paradise Interactive for some reason, but I had to pull out the big guns to get the glorious mixture of boats, bikinis, and 24-inch pythons on screen. I felt really smart after I cleared those hurdles, but then I burnt my hand taking a pizza out of the oven.

If you’ve never seen the show, it features Mr. Hogan as “Hurricane” Spencer and Chris Lemmon as Martin “Bru” Brubaker. They are two guys with a boat who spend time on the beach and fight people. That’s about all I know.

For the interactive version of the show, you play as Zack, who might be the nephew of Hurricane. I’m not sure why he’s hanging out with two slabs of testosterone and beef. The game is a typical FMV game based on the episode “The M.A.J.O.R. and the Minor.” I’m not sure if Zack was always a character in the show, but I do know that he was in that episode. Here, he stands in as the player character.

The game opens with Hurricane Hogan strapped into a neural link thing that is maybe supposed to allow him to control a steroid-infused slab of human beef with wires coming out of his dick. It’s not really well explained.

After nearly frying the Hulkster’s brains, the eponymous M.A.J.O.R. stomps off. I can’t remember if it’s really explained what the M.A.J.O.R. wants to do, but apparently, having him on the loose with only half a brain puts the former WWF Champ’s daughter in danger. So, they get in their boat to chase him and strap the child into the brain-scrambling device so that he can control their boat’s weaponry.

I’m aware that the further I try to explain this, the more questions get raised, but this is what happens in Thunder in Paradise Interactive. This weird sort of augmented reality angle comes up as well since Zack is using a “soft gun” to shoot dudes. I imagine that this is so they didn’t have to show a minor murdering a bunch of people, but once again, it raises a bunch of questions. What are the stakes here? Does the robot man also have a boat?

These questions may have been answered by watching the episode, which I didn’t do. That’s how I live my life: ignorant and uninformed. The CD-i version came with a disc that had the episode on it, but I don’t think that was the case on DOS.

While the cutscenes hurry you through the episode’s story, it gets interrupted in three parts to provide you with gameplay. It’s routine FMV cursor shooting, sort of like Corpse Killer. The first part has you protecting the Hulkster’s boat from missiles and flying cubes. You have a normal energy gun, rockets, and maybe a shield thing. It’s just marked as “Q” on the HUD. There’s a database menu after the first battle that tells you what Q is, and I know I watched it, but my brain rejected that information.

Either way, your rockets are limited, Q only has a few uses, and your energy gun takes a long time to charge up. I did not succeed here on any of my attempts. Every so often, the game would cut away so I could watch Hulk Hogan and Chris Lemmon tell me what a disappointing piece of shit I am and how I should be humiliated for sucking so badly.

When you lose, the scene ends so the heroic duo can further explain how you let the whole team down, and then it proceeds to what looks like a luxury beach resort.

In this section, it’s another cursor-based shooting section, but it’s more like House of the Dead or, more accurately, Area 51. Guys in hazmat suits pop out from cover and try to kill Zack, and your job is to click on them with the cursor to make them stop. I would swear that this section always had the first dude take off half my health, and then, no matter how well I did after that, Zack would get worn down over time.

Once again, Hulk Hogan would interject and chastise me for not saying my prayers and taking my vitamins. Eventually, after getting shot enough times, Zack collapses into a pathetic heap in the sand. This results in Hogan’s daughter being kidnapped for some reason. You’re essentially told that they soft-pitched you the hero role, and you still swung and missed somehow.

So, the whole team goes to some industrial factory or something. All the vats make me think it’s a brewery. Once again, the big strong dudes set off in one direction while sending the questionably armed kid with the egg scrambler glued to his head in another. This leads to another shooting section.

While the slow panning around of the luxury beach resort was pretty boring, the factory is even lamer. Thunder in Paradise Interactive seems to realize this because the bad guy (who we learn now is actually Rampike and not M.A.J.O.R.) eventually sends you to a virtual reality city. For some reason. Again, I don’t get the virtual reality angle here. So then you watch the camera slowly roam around the city, stopping to let guys shoot at you. This is marginally more fun than the brewery because you get to play “Guess the City.”

That doesn’t last because eventually, you’re sent back to the factory to fight because Rampike wants in on the laser tag. Despite the fact that now Rampike sometimes pops out from cover instead of the hazmat dudes. I was able to take him down once, and then I was sent down to the basement, where Zack was killed instantly by the M.A.J.O.R.

Zack then wakes up from a coma, looking up at Hulk Hogan and Chris Lemmon. They’re just like, “Since you were busy dying, we had to do everything ourselves, idiot.” Then after Zack passes back out due to intense shame, it cuts to Hogan and Lemmon telling you, the player, that you embarrassed yourself but at least you can try again.

I did try again—a few times—and I always lost every game. Every once in a while, the actors would tell me I was doing great, but I think those instances were just glitches.

At one point, I learned that you can skip the boring, camera-panning sections by pausing and unpausing the game. After that, I learned that your gun recharged during these moments, and I ran out of ammo and just died quicker.

This was some best-effort gameplay, too. I was using all of my neurons to try and figure out what I was doing wrong, and it got me nowhere. I just kept getting told I’m an embarrassment by a guy who managed to combine a racist rant and sex tape in a single scandal.

Aside from that, Thunder in Paradise Interactive isn’t the worst FMV game I’ve played. However, whenever you set your expectations to “FMV game based on a show nobody remembers,” it’s really not hard to be pleasantly surprised.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Thunder in Paradise Interactive for DOS might be the cure you need for your chronic Hulkamania appeared first on Destructoid.

While no live-action film of Final Fantasy VII has been announced, it's not hard to imagine Hollywood doesn't at least have an overly eager eye on it. Depending on perspective, that's either a threat or delight to muse over, especially when you consider Square Enix isn't too shy to flirt with the big screen — looking at you, Spirits Within and Advent Children.

For better or for worse, I often find myself musing over ideal actors for the inevitable, like Zelda or Shadow. So, in case Hollywood goes for it, I'm shouting out my choices now. In honor of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's launch, here are my picks for a live-action FF7 cast that I think, if made now, would be worthy of such a classic legacy.

Cloud Strife - Cody Christian, Darren Barnet

As one of Final Fantasy’s best protagonists, Cloud deserves someone who can understand him and his complexities. So who better than Cody Christian, Cloud’s current VA? The transition wouldn’t be too jarring, as his resume’s mainly live-action, being in Teen Wolf and All-American. Plus, he's proven himself to play the ex-SOLDIER quite well. 

If Hollywood wants more stardom, I offer up Darren Barnet. Striking success with shows like Never Have I Ever and Blue Eye Samurai, he’s done video games and adaptations, including Immortals of Aveum and Gran Turismo. He can grow into the role, much like Cody has been. It’s a tough role but I'm confident Darren could carry the Buster Sword and rock spiky yellow hair.

Tifa Lockhart - Britt Baron, Jessica Henwick

Who doesn't like Tifa? She has a heart of gold and kicks (and punches) some serious ass. You’ll need someone skilled in combat and not afraid to get their hands dirty. Britt Baron, Tifa’s VA, stars in many live-action projects including the wrestling-oriented show GLOW.

On the other hand, there's Jessica Henwick. She's portrayed many badasses on-screen in projects like The Matrix Resurrections, Game of Thrones, and Iron Fist. Whoever they go with, Tifa will be in good hands (or fists in this case).

Barret Wallace - Colman Domingo

The gun-armed Barret strikes fear into the hearts of Shinra yet has a heart of gold. You want an actor who can balance it with finesse and poise. That's where Colman Domingo comes in. His award-winning work in Euphoria and Rustin and his badassery in Fear the Walking Dead prove he has the chops. It's the perfect duo that I can't help wanting to see come to fruition.

Aerith Gainsborough - Hailee Steinfeld

As the last living Ancient, Aerith is a key figure in FFVII’s narrative beloved for her carefree and brash personality. I'd go with Hailee Steinfeld to deliver on all fronts. While she's done action-oriented roles, projects like Arcane, Dickinson, and True Grit show her versatility as an actor to handle those sincere moments with wit and ease. If anything, it proves she can blossom as the beloved flower girl.

Zack Fair - Xolo Maridueña

Being Cloud's mentor and the protagonist of Crisis Core, Zack is as charming as he is audacious. For the role, you need someone who exudes infectious energy and fierce determination. Enter Xolo Maridueña. His starring roles in Cobra Kai and Blue Beetle nail Zack’s qualities with precision aim, with the latter even letting him conjure a Buster Sword to use. It's practically asking for Xolo to become the SOLDIER we all know and love.

Yuffie Kisaragi - Karen Fukuhara, Stephanie Hsu

Energetic and vivacious, Yuffie brings more than her Materia and ninja moves to the party. The character requires someone not afraid to embarrass themselves and step out of their comfort zone. Enter rising stars Karen Fukuhara and Stephanie Hsu.

The Boys’ Karen Fukuhara’s very much capable of taking on the Wutai warrior with comedic finesse (as well as kicking ass). The same can be said for Everything Everywhere, All at Once's Stephanie Hsu, as her background in musicals and comedies fits the lovable ninja precisely. Either of these actresses can make Yuffie just as fun as she is in-game.

Red XIII - Max Mittelman, Regé-Jean Page

An experiment of Hojo's, Red XIII aids AVALANCHE on their quest to stop Sephiroth. Like others, I’ll throw in current VA Max Mittelman for the role. His performance is extremely impressive for someone who knows him as Ryuji from Persona 5. I also nominate Regé-Jean Page. Known for his roles in Bridgerton and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, his voice and range is pretty close to Red's tone now.

Cait Sith - Ewan McGregor

It's a magical Scottish cat. Need I say more to justify Ewan McGregor? Despite being a respected actor (and Obi-Wan Kenobi), he's not afraid to experiment with genres. Cait would be fun for him to do outside of Star Wars and various ventures. If anything, it'd showcase Ewan's versatility as a voice actor, something he hasn't done much of.

Vincent Valentine - Hayden Christensen

Many characters claim to be edgy but none come close to the immortal gunslinger Vincent Valentine. So, of course, I picked Hayden Christensen to play him. Known for Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels, he's due for a vengeful comeback. Vincent would be a great character for Hayden to strut his stuff.

Cid Highwind - Bradley Cooper

Chain-smoking mechanic Cid deserves someone who knows their way around things. Luckily, there's one fit for the job: Maestro's Bradley Cooper. Sure, given his resume, it’s a rich pick, but I don't think anyone could do the role justice like he would. His charisma and nailing of a Southern twang is a major draw (or drawl) for me. While a surefire blockbuster, Cid is right up his alley.

Rufus Shinra - Taz Skylar

Nepo baby Rufus Shinra needs someone who can nail his cockiness. I vouch for Taz Skylar. His role as Sanji in Netflix’s One Piece radiates a sort of charm that makes him enjoyable to watch. Plus, given his recent foray into Hollywood, this would be a great way to make an even bigger name for himself.

Tseng - Andrew Koji

As the leader of the Turks, Tseng is intimidating and precise, so it requires someone who can command a room and kick ass. So, I turned to Andrew Koji. He's wrecked people in Warrior and wants to play Jin Sakai in the live-action Ghost of Tsushima. While he hasn't had many dramatic performances, Tseng may provide a good character for Andrew to spread his wings with.

Rude- Kelvin Harrison Jr.

Rude is a tight-laced Turk of few words, opting for results rather than reason. An actor I think would knock it out of the park is Kelvin Harrison Jr. Starting from 12 Years a Slave, he's gained traction in Hollywood, leading films like Waves and Chevalier. Rude, while not as musical, is a role that can shine if done right. Kelvin may be the actor to do just that.

Reno - Brandon Perea

The funny man against Rude, Reno is quick to crack both a joke and your bones. While he's seen as comedic relief, he's pretty ruthless given his hot-headedness. With this, I chose Brandon Perea. He's new to acting, but his performance in Nope convinced me to choose him. He's witty, brash, and prime for another scene-stealing role. He's just the type of actor that'd make Reno as fun a character as he is.

Sephiroth - Robert Pattison

Sephiroth needs to be played by someone menacing and fierce. May I present to you Robert Pattison. Yes, I think the Twilight and The Batman actor would be a good Sephiroth. He's got insane range and can bring in lots of newcomers. Also, Robert’s a huge FFVII fan, calling it one of his favorite games. His portrayal as the perfect SOLDIER can strike plenty of chords with audiences. Also, he hasn't done many villain roles, so Sephiroth would be the best character to take a stab at.

The post If FF7 ever sees the live-action treatment, here’s who we would cast as Cloud and the gang appeared first on Destructoid.

My outlook on Tactician Mode in Baldur's Gate 3 changed when a goblin first pushed Lae'zel into a bottomless chasm. It wasn't necessarily a moment exclusive to this difficulty setting, but having what should've been an easy kill lead to a character's death made me rethink how I approached battles going forward.

Generally, Baldur's Gate 3 is a challenge on whatever setting you pick, but Tactician is brutal. The setting forces players into a new mindset: Fully take advantage of all the systems BG3 offers, or die. Honestly, it's amazing how different the game feels with the difficulty spike, and I love it.

After finishing the campaign twice as custom characters, I figured I'd try something new and play as the bullish githyanki Fighter Lae'zel. To experience the world as she does, I emulated her struggle for survival and cranked the difficulty up to its hardest setting. Thus began an amazing and grueling journey where Scrolls of Revivify are treated like candy, and Withers is suddenly my best friend. So far, I've only logged about 15 hours, with me being a decent way into Act II, but my experience is a lesson in how far I can push BG3's party.

Screenshot via Destructoid

Why is Tactician so grueling in BG3?

Tactician's one-liner in-game description notes it's a "tough campaign" intended for anyone eager to experience "strategic combat." That doesn't do the difficulty justice, though. Balanced expects strategy, while Tactician pushes players to their limits. The former has challenging combat; the latter is a ruthless DM taking their frustrations out on players.

Enemies receive substantial buffs in Tactician, with the most evident being harder hits and far larger health pools. They also sport better equipment, namely more elemental arrows, ensuring the entire party joins in on the pain more often. AI improvements made most encounters a fight for survival, as enemies utilized their newfound smarts to make life a living hell.

Some hours into the campaign, I considered giving up. Admittedly, I'm not great at CRPGs in general, and I was questioning why I wanted to challenge myself even further. With the changes to combat, Baldur's Gate 3 felt like a slog because, to me, the default setting was challenging enough. There were even points where constant deaths and overwhelming brutality became less frustrating and funnier, given how often party members crucial to specific plans would go down before they could even begin their turn.

I was cracking, but amidst those cracks was one where light shone through, and everything suddenly clicked. Baldur's Gate 3 isn't at its worst here in this setting. Rather, I was in the wrong and stubbornly sticking to habits formed mindlessly playing through Balanced. Like a follower of Loviatar, I learned to embrace the pain and worked with it. If I hadn't, there would have only been suffering.

Screenshot via Destructoid

Falling in love with Tactician Mode

There wasn't one specific change that made me fall for Tactican; it just somehow happened. I looked into guides after realizing something needed to give, and those helped to some degree. But what I really needed was to ultimately pay better attention to what was available.

In previous playthroughs, the first fight with Auntie Ethel is fun, if not grating, because of her clones. With some decent planning during the fight, it's not too bad to overcome in the normal setting. However, Tactician forced me to change. The witch kept killing me, so I'd have to restrategize long before the encounter began. She spawned clones as soon as the fight started, and they systematically took turns picking off my team. For a while, I was at a loss, then took a step back to examine the arena and my party's kit. The fight wouldn't trigger until standing at a specific point, leaving room open for the team to spread.

The clone's attacks lacked their previous focus as a result. This left everyone still up and allowed me to go forward with my plan. Since Astarion and Gale had access to Magic Missile, they dispatched the clones, leaving the real Ethel open for Lae'zel and Karlach to attack. It was a simple change in how the fight played out, but it showed how effective strategy can turn fights around.

Screenshot via Destructoid

Positioning is key in BG3

A little positioning saved me again against the Grym. Initially, I positioned Shadowheart and Karlach on one side of the map with Lae'zel and Wyll on the other. The plan was to scatter attention, bait the boss onto the forge, and then slam it shut, but it refused to comply with attempts to turn it to scrap.

I had to switch things up a little to win this one without turning the encounter into an endurance match. Everyone's positions remained the same, but I found a rhythm for baiting the boss from one side of the arena to the other. Through trial and error, I realized I'd need to juggle who was attacking to take advantage of the boss's targeting parameters. The Grym targets the last person who hit it.

I didn't want to change the construct's course, so I only used actions that wouldn't trigger opportunity attacks. Wyll's convenient new position also let me cast Cloud of Daggers, damaging the construct in a way that didn't draw aggro. Even with a beefy new HP bar, the Grym's potentially grueling encounter didn't take me any long, as the battle turned into a game of tag it couldn't win. It wasn't something I would have thought of in other playthroughs because BG3 never forced that consideration.

Screenshot via Destructoid

All differences in BG3 Tactician mode

Tactician mode is harder than Balanced, but that doesn't exactly explain how it is. Additions such as more advanced combat AI are what make it a blast to play through. Others, like increased HP and enemy attack rolls, can make the experience more frustrating. It still helps to know exactly what you're signing up for when choosing this difficulty.

• Enemies receive a 30% boost to HP
• Enemies also receive a +2 for saving throws and attack rolls
• AI combatants react to their environment more (i.e. pushing foes off cliffs more or triggering explosives when needed)
  • They will also use items such as grenades or potions more often
• AI combatants also target opponents with low AC first and will kill downed allies
• Long rest requirements double from 40 to 80

The long rest requirement change isn't as bad as it seems. Food is plentiful in Baldur's Gate 3, so there's no need to worry about running out unless a string of combats go wrong. Resource management is more crucial since the AI's tactics will lead to using spells like Revivify more often. Otherwise, Withers will eat through your gold fast.

[caption id="attachment_474497" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot via Destructoid[/caption]

Is Tactician mode for you?

Tactician mode in Baldur's Gate 3 is unforgiving and brutal. It can feel like an absolute slog at times and probably induce a frustrated yell or two. At the same time, it's amazing at teaching players how to really take advantage of its tactical systems and learn classes. It requires studying arena layouts, environmental hazards, and team builds. I'm still not done with my own journey, but it's become my definitive way to play.

It's by no means ideal for everyone; Tactician is demanding and can ask for too much. Even if not for the combat, Baldur's Gate 3 is well worth the time for the story, cast, and well-written dialogue, so it'd be a shame to skip it over a harsh difficulty curve. However, when everything clicks and a carefully thought-out plan goes well, the combat shines brightest and delivers the RPG's most satisfactory moments.

It's a little ostentatious to say Tactician is the "correct" way to play Baldur's Gate 3, but sometimes I feel that way thanks to how well it flows. In hindsight, those initial hours of suffering were more additive, not punitive, thanks to a new appreciation for all of my combat options. Baldur's Gate 3 is fantastic no matter what you choose, but Tactician made me fall in love all over again.

The post The Baldur’s Gate 3 grueling Tactician Mode is the correct way to play appeared first on Destructoid.

Vanillaware's latest game Unicorn Overlord arrives tomorrow. The embargo is up, and by now, sites are already posting thoughts and takes on the latest from the studio behind Dragon's Crown, Odin Sphere, 13 Sentinels, and many other well-loved games.

And as I've written about previously, Unicorn Overlord takes an interesting approach. It's looking back on the strategy stylings of classics like Ogre Battle, utilizing real-time strategy and an overworld map, setting it apart from other recent throwback tactics projects. Units move and fight in automated conflict using logical progression that you've set up ahead of time, similar to the Gambit system from Final Fantasy XII.

In the 20 hours I've played of Unicorn Overlord thus far, I've been fairly enthralled. It's a breath of fresh air in the strategy and tactics RPG genre, and feels like Vanillaware both broadcasts its strengths (art, music, design, delicious-looking food) and breaks some new ground in tapping into the past.

So, ahead of the launch, I sent a few questions over to the Vanillaware staff, to ask about their process. Why did they choose to go this route? What was the development process like? And what's up with the card game in the collector's edition? We got back some answers from Vanillaware's lead game designer Wataru Nakanishi and game director Takafumi Noma, as well as Atlus producer Akiyasu Yamamoto, to learn about all that and more.

With Unicorn Overlord, there are reports indicating it was in development for 10 years. What was that like, and
was development ever influenced by other projects the studio worked on throughout the decade?

Wataru Nakanishi, Lead Game Designer: Although it was a very long-term project, I did not work on it for the entire 10 years, but rather participated in the development of other projects in between, such as Odin Sphere Leifthrasir and Dragon's Crown Pro.

One project that had a direct influence on me was 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, which I was developing at the same time. When designing the Valor Skills for Unicorn Overlord, we incorporated elements of the meta skills system used in that title as an example.

How did you decide on the scenario and setting for Unicorn Overlord? Did the setting idea come before
deciding on making a strategy game, or vice versa?

Takafumi Noma, Game Director: We set out to make a tactical RPG first and foremost. The general framework for the world, like its setting, and world map were developed next. It wasn’t until the later stages of development that we created the story and detailed characters.

The combat system of Unicorn Overlord is very intriguing, in the way it asks players to establish logic and priorities for what units will automatically do in battles. Why did you opt for this, over having direct command inputs for each unit?

Nakanishi: We wanted the focus of the game to be on troop building and the importance of preparing for battle. It would probably be overwhelming to have to give direct commands to all the units marching at the same time (laughing). The battle system itself was a result of our pursuit of combining strategy and ease of understanding.

Akiyasu Yamamoto, Producer: The project was proposed initially to ATLUS as a Tactical RPG with network elements which remained at the core of the game throughout development. The result is a unique Tactical RPG, offering a deckbuilding like experience that, even among Vanillaware, could only be brought to life by the minds of Noma-san and Nakanishi-san.

Why did you choose to forego tiles, and instead use a field map? How did that affect the way you think about
the world and battle maps?

Yamamoto: Perhaps you mean to point out that this type of game is not so common to see from a Japanese studio? As you’re probably aware, the strategy (tactical) RPG market here is quite different from that in the west. For example, the RTS genre has never really caught on here like it has with the numerous PC titles, indie titles, and more. But to return to your question, Unicorn Overlord does indeed stray from the “mainstream” Japanese SRPG tile-based system. To put it simply, the creators of UO had a true passion for the '90s tactical RPGs they played growing up, and wanted to create a new game system based on their experience with said games. If one were to draw a family tree of the evolution of gaming, I think you would find Unicorn Overlord would naturally sprout out from the same branch formed by those tiles which influenced it.

How did you go about creating some of the factions you interact with in Unicorn Overlord, like the elves and
angels? Were there any favorite factions to work on, amongst the team?

Noma: Since the guiding motif was 90's fantasy, I thought I couldn't leave out the elf. Initially I was thinking of using elves and dwarves which were common to Japanese TRPGs from that era, but after researching the original Norse mythology, we decided to stick to elves and dark elves instead.

Regarding the angel, although the original setting itself was abandoned during the production process, the design remained, and I think it ended up being put to good use. I think each staff member likely has their favorites, but I personally like all races, so I don't have a favorite faction.

Unicorn Overlord is heading to PlayStation, Xbox Series consoles, and Switch, but not to PC - is there any reason in particular you chose not to aim for PC at launch? Has there been any discussion about a PC port later on?

Yamamoto: As a publisher, we would like to deliver it to PC users as well, but per our agreement with Vanillaware, we are only releasing on console. In other words, there are no plans to port it to PC currently.

There’s been a resurgence in tactics games lately - including games like Triangle Strategy, the Tactics Ogre remaster, and even Mario + Rabbids. What do you think of this, and how do you think Unicorn Overlord stands out from other games of this style?

Nakanishi: As an SRPG fan, I am very pleased. Not only completely new titles, but also remasters of old titles are essential for the survival of the SRPG genre. I for one am very thankful for the recent trend of many SRPG titles being released.

This title, which was created in the midst of all these masterpieces, is full of unique elements such as field parts and battle systems. I believe that both fans of SRPGs of the past and those who have never played SRPGs before will enjoy this title.

Yamamoto: Going back to your previous question, the market for “tile-based” SRPGs has been well explored by major developers and historical IPs for decades. What really drew ATLUS to Vanillaware’s proposal for Unicorn Overlord was how it was a blue ocean opportunity that avoided the red ocean of tile based SRPG. We ourselves had played many tactics games in the 16-bit era of the 1990s and were moved by the proposal from Noma-san and Nakanishi-san, which led to the development of this title.

Vanillaware is well-known for its art style, especially its food. How did you decide on what kinds of food to have
in Unicorn Overlord, and does it vary by in-game region? Did you ever make any of the recipes yourselves?

Noma: At first, we wanted to be realistic and envisioned a scene of soldiers sitting around a campfire and eating porridge as their rations. However, we also wanted the food to look delicious to boost morale, so we asked Shigatake-san, who has done cooking animations for our past productions, to do the cooking animation again for this game.

We asked Shigatake-san to choose the types of dishes himself. He chose dishes that looked delicious and made us want to eat them, while emphasizing visual differentiation. The dishes that can be eaten differ depending on the region in the game, so we hope that you will look forward to that as well in your adventures. Unfortunately, I have never actually made any of the in-game recipes myself… (chuckles).

13 Sentinels had a fairly winding story with multiple viewpoints, while Unicorn Overlord looks to follow one narrative thread through the prince Alain. How did that shift your way of thinking about the story of this game, and what would you say the defining characteristics of Unicorn Overlord’s narrative are?

Yamamoto: First, I’d like to point out that although both are developed by Vanillaware, the director of both titles is different. Where 13 Sentinels came about as Kamitani-san’s vision of an adventure game, the genesis for Unicorn Overlord was rooted in Noma-san’s passion for the elements from the SRPGs from the '90s that left an impression on him. Things like giving as much gravity to the emotional connection with the characters involved as their actual battlefield functions and performance. Therefore, this work explores the story of the more than 60 unique characters and their motivations for joining the liberation army. It highlights how even the seemingly weak can bring change to the world by raising their voices and working together against tyranny and injustice. To me, that’s the real message of this story.

I’m really interested in the card game that’s included in the collector’s edition of Unicorn Overlord. How did that
come about, and was this something the development team worked on themselves?

Yamamoto: It came about when our publisher, ATLUS, asked Vanillaware if it would be possible to create a deluxe version for users who wanted to continue to enjoy the Unicorn Overlord world outside of the main game. As for accessories, it would be difficult to use something metal for logistical reasons, so we requested a paper one, and the idea we struck upon was a card game. It was the first time for ATLUS to make such an accessory, but we were able to make it a reality by consulting with a long established company that handles card games and other physical games in Japan.

The reason for the extensive size is because the main game itself was created by staff who enjoy deck building and thinking-type card games. The accompanying card game was designed by Mr. Maeda who is a graphic designer at Vanillaware. Please note that although the setting and character classes are shared with the main game, each can be played independently, and this does not mean that you cannot fully enjoy the main game without playing the card game.

Unicorn Overlord is out for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox Series X|S on March 8, 2024.

The post Unicorn Overlord devs talk history, card games, and that delicious food appeared first on Destructoid.

Look, my chums, it’s Raya Systems! They’re the ones who brought us Packy & Marlon and Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon; everyone’s favorite health-related edutainment games.

This time, I’m finally sticking a finger into Captain Novolin to check the temperature. Back in the youthful days of the internet, when making fun of bad video games was still considered a thing done by cool people, Captain Novolin was often a target of ridicule. I’ll admit that the concept is definitely a weird one, but I’d argue that Rex Ronan was much more fertile ground for jokes. Unless you like making fun of diabetics.

If you don’t know, Novolin is a brand of insulin. Captain Novolin is an edutainment game meant to teach diabetic children how to balance their diet, teach them about diabetes, and it also suggests exercise. This is back when people could actually afford insulin, obviously.

Doctor codes

I personally don’t know a whole lot about diabetes, so definitely don’t take any medical or dietary advice from me. Most of what I know comes from Packy & Marlon and my first-aid training. As I’m sure is common, I know people with diabetes, but not in my immediate family. I have my own health-related issues, but nothing chronic that I know of. Unless you count my depression, anxiety, and debt.

But that’s what Captain Novolin is for: education. Except, it’s probably for people who have actually been diagnosed with diabetes. The first screen prompted me to “Enter the code your doctor said is best for you.” I don’t even know what that means. I didn’t realize that diabetic people use secret codes. Thankfully, it provides the helpful tip that “If you don’t know your code, use 000.” I was tempted to use the code 007, but I always listen to my doctor.

I think the number you put in might relate to the amount of insulin that the eponymous superhero administers to himself.

You play as the super-hero Captain Novolin, who has the superpower of… diabetes. I’m not saying someone with diabetes can’t be a super-hero, that’s ridiculous, but that’s literally all Captain Novolin has going for him aside from a speedboat and comfortable socks. He can’t even throw a punch, though that would be admittedly off-message here. I’m just finding out that he can stomp on enemies, which would have been good to know before I spent two hours just avoiding them.

World domination

The narrative has Mayor Gooden being captured by aliens and taken to the peak of Mt. Wayupthar. The aliens are disguised as junk food. I don’t have confidence in my own plans for municipal domination, but I’m not sure that dressing up as a sundae would improve my chances. They’re not even trying to tempt Captain Novolin to eat them and throw off his blood glucose level. They mostly just try to bump into him. Maybe they’re trying to taunt him, but I don’t think the pharmaceutical company-sponsored superhero is self-conscious of his condition.

The Mayor is also diabetic and only has enough insulin to last for 48 hours. With this knowledge in mind, your job is to walk briskly (because, remember, Captain Novolin has no superpowers) to the mayor’s rescue. I suppose it doesn’t matter if the mayor is undergoing some kind of alien brainwashing or intense probing during those 48 hours. The Captain is just going to take his time and make sure he eats a balanced diet along the way.

That’s literally the goal of the game. You start out in the morning and are given breakfast advice from a doctor. You have to balance your blood glucose levels by grabbing food in the correct amounts. If you overeat, your blood glucose will rise, and if you don’t eat, it will drop. 

While the doctor gives you very specific things to eat, that’s really all that appears within the level. That’s a good thing because he only tells you at the beginning of the level, and I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast, let alone what I need to collect and avoid based on a short message. I found that, as long as you only collect one of each item, you can generally keep your glucose levels in the ideal range. However, I think the best strategy is more about pacing your eating, but I’m really not interested in experimenting. On my successful run through the game, my glucose level only went too high or low a few times, so I was obviously doing something correctly.

Hyperglycemia

Surprisingly, the fluctuating glucose levels supposedly affect how the Captain performs. He’ll slow down if it gets too high or low, which isn’t something I really experience because I’m amazing at playing bad games. That’s actually kind of neat.

However, the real risk here is death. The aliens are playing for keeps, and Captain Novolin can only stand to be touched by anthropomorphic cereal boxes so often. You can take four hits before the super-hero will take a dirt nap. You start with three lives (more can be gained through points), and if you lose them all, it’s back to the start for you.

It’s pretty brutal, actually. A lot of the aliens have movement patterns that are designed to throw you off. There’s a cookie, for example, that has a low bounce that it uses to move, but the moment you jump, it takes a high bounce to deliberately block you. In order to get past them without being hurt, you need to leap at the last moment so you’ve already cleared them by the time they take their big bound.

Of course, I can do that just fine with my seasoned, meaty thumbs. I’d expect that a child would have more trouble.

It still took my beef thumbs a few attempts before I reached the final boss, Blubberman (heh). The cookies, for example, would sometimes travel in pairs, and I never found a good strategy to avoid both. It doesn’t help that the hit detection enthusiastically sucks. There was one part in the mountain stages where a hole in the ground extended far past its boundaries, so I kept jumping too late and falling to my death.

Hello, Ranger

To be fair to Captain Novolin, it at least seems like a decent way of framing diabetes for children. There’s advice from giant doctor heads, it makes all the care required for the disease seem normal and cheerful, and, as is law in edutainment games, there are quizzes to help you learn more.

It is a pretty funny way of presenting a super-hero, however. I had to laugh when he walked up to a park ranger, and the first thing out of his mouth was, “Hello, ranger. I have diabetes.” I mean, sure, it’s a good idea to let people who might soon be rescuing your ass know that you have certain needs, but I’m not sure it will do much good when they’re pulling your alien-mangled corpse out of a ravine.

It may seem like containing all this information in a bad game would seem ineffective, but let me tell you something about the ‘90s: we’d play whatever we had. You couldn’t buy 50 games for $5 on a digital marketplace at the time, so if your well-meaning mom bought you something educational from the store, you’d play it because it was that or running through Super Mario World for the 80th time. It gave games like Captain Novolin a chance to be a fond memory instead of just a bad game. That’s something that might not happen in today’s content-glutted world.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997 on PlayStation. In those days, the NES, despite Nintendo only discontinuing it in 1995, was considered practically ancient. Things aged faster in the ‘90s.

By the time the PlayStation had passed into antiquity in the aughts, the denizens of Web 2.0 became aware of a Famicom/NES demake of Final Fantasy VII. Since Final Fantasy VII was still fondly remembered and the retro gamer identity was reaching its maturity, this was a fascinating topic of conversation. Just hearing about it took your imagination to interesting places.

It was certainly fascinating to me. I didn’t know enough about the backend of video games to really have an idea for how this was possible; a 3-disc epic on a diminutive cartridge. What radical magic!

I never took the time to play it, however. At the time, I hadn’t spent much time with OG Final Fantasy VII, so I didn’t have any attachment to it. In the spirit of the coming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I felt it was time to finally try it. And try it, I did.

I tried what I could before it crashed.

The Final Fantasy VII Demake wasn’t strictly some fan endeavor; it’s a Chinese bootleg. While the breadth and quality (compared to common Chinese bootlegs) suggest that its creator(s) had some affection for the PS1 title, they either didn’t have the time or didn’t care enough to really make a convincing 8-bit facsimile.

Final Fantasy VII Demake, like so many other knock-offs, is made from the parts of other games. Music, sprites, the battle system; they’ve all been taken from other games. Typically these come from other games in the NES Final Fantasy trilogy, but some are pulled from a variety of other sources. One thing I haven’t been able to identify is an actually unique asset.

The game itself supposedly covers much of the PS1 game’s story but is filled full of notable omissions. I wouldn’t know for sure because it won’t let me precede past the part when you arrive in the Sector 7 slums. I can make it to 7th Heaven, but then the game freezes, often throwing the NES’ typical garbage scramble into my face.

I thought this might be a one-off glitch, an issue with my hardware setup, or maybe just a corrupt version of the game, but no matter how I approached it, the result was always the same. I ran through the opening section three times, and it still refused to allow me past the bar. I blame Tifa.

In my troubleshooting, I found other people having the same issue, so I know it’s just not me. In 2013, fans hacked the bootleg and replaced all the stolen assets with ones that actually resemble the original game. 10 will get you 20 that the newer patch wouldn’t have the same problem with crashing, but I feel like that defeats the purpose. Fans spending four years to make something better isn’t as interesting as some developer cobbling together a vague facsimile of a popular title to sell in an inconsistent market.

The Final Fantasy VII demake wasn’t technically for the Famicom. It was actually for a series of bootleg “Famiclones” that were produced under the Subor name. While Subor would start making clones of more powerful hardware, for a long time, they created different configurations of Nintendo’s famous 6502 console.

Final Fantasy VII wasn’t the only game to get demade for the bootleg market. The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap, Harvest Moon, Resident Evil, and Chrono Trigger are among the titles to get backported to the system. Beyond that, they’d mash things together or make sequels to games that never received one. Before you get too excited, however, most of them are of extremely shaky quality. Most of the assets are just recycled from other games, and there wasn’t a whole lot of quality control.

Still, it’s quite the rabbit hole that isn’t well documented outside high-profile discoveries like the Final Fantasy VII bootleg. Most Chinese bootleg games are just copies of existing games released in massive compilations. It can be an adventure. Just because it says 50-in-1 doesn’t mean that you’re getting 50 unique games, as often they’d just be duplicates with, if you’re lucky, the difficulty tweaked a smidge. It might have Super Mario 64 on the cover, but it’s probably just Super Mario Bros. 3 on the PCB. Other times, it will just bafflingly mix up art by having, say, Little Nemo: Dream Master on the cover with Pokémon written over top of it. Wild stuff.

For that matter, the Final Fantasy VII demake came on a cartridge labeled Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which, if you’re not savvy, was the game’s sequel movie. No, none of the movie’s story makes it into the game.

The part that I did play was a bizarre experience. The story, or at least the translation, is almost verbatim from the original. However, Midgar has a lot more brickwork than I remember. The environments are a mishmash of medieval fantasy tilesets. The Mako reactor that Avalanche blows up in the beginning is a dragon’s head. The slums look like an idyllic forest village rather than shanties cobbled together in a desolate, sun-deprived wasteland.

The monsters that show up in random battles are a similar mishmash. What’s worse is that the variety of them in just the first area is extensive and not balanced. One fight could be a group that goes down with a few swipes of Cloud’s large scimitar (the original bootleg had no buster sword), while the next could be a grueling battle against armored foes that have healing spells. The reactor boss itself isn’t much of an issue, but it’s all down to luck if you make it to them at all.

You need a combination of extreme patience, a good imagination, and extensive knowledge of the original to really appreciate the Final Fantasy VII Demake. With no real cutscenes, memorable moments are kind of glossed over or omitted entirely. This is something that only existing fans would really appreciate. That, and people who don’t have access to the PS1 version.

This is just how some children in China experienced video games growing up, so many have nostalgia for the bootleg games and consoles that they had access to. It’s a unique way to experience the industry; chewed up and provided in whatever way they could manage. I’m almost envious.

When the Final Fantasy VII bootleg was discovered and proliferated across the internet, some considered it an incredible achievement for the NES. On some parts of that, I disagree. The cartridge used a large PRG ROM to store everything, then moved CHR data to RAM. This is pretty much exactly how the Famicom version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as some other titles, did it. The scale of the game is also not much more impressive than something like Dragon Quest IV.

However, what was impressive is that a bootleg developer known mostly for hack jobs went to the effort of such an extensive remake. Demakes are a bit more prevalent today, with games like Bloodborne and Dead Space getting the PS1 treatment. Even then, those efforts usually just stop after a small, reimagined portion. Shenzhen Nanjing Technology probably could have done Midgar and called it a day, but to actually go beyond that shows some dedication beyond just wanting to fill a cartridge with a recognizable knock-off. That’s a weird sort of respect to show when you’re cobbling something together from stolen assets.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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I have a number of valuable games in my collection. Some I acquired through lucky timing, others I’ve actually shelled out for, but all of them are the result of questionable priorities. None are as valuable as my copy of Little Samson.

As of today, Little Samson is worth more than two months of rent for my small, one-bedroom apartment in a nowhere town. That’s really depressing because it both illustrates how ridiculous the collectors market is for video games and how ridiculously expensive it is just to afford a roof over my head for a fraction of a year.

But I don’t collect games to pretend I have some sort of valuable asset. I collect them to play and appreciate. And to demonstrate this, I put Little Samson in my NES. Then I kind of wiggled it around a bit to get it to display properly because I really need to replace my console’s pin connector.

Son of the shining path

Little Samson comes to us from Takeru, also known as Sur de Wave. The company was pretty short-lived, which is a massive shame. In total, they only did about four games, and Little Samson is the only one that came stateside.

It’s hard to find much information about Takeru, but another game they made for the Famicom, Cocoron, was helmed by Mega Man creator Akira Kitamura. As for Little Samson, the director here was Shinichi Yoshimoto, who was one of the designers of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. Real Capcom royalty.

Given the company’s pedigree, it may be unsurprising that Little Samson is a good game. Perhaps not the maximum utmost, but it is Duck Tales good. It’s Super Mario Bros. 2 (US) good. Beyond that, it’s an impressive game for the NES. The graphics are solid, and the character animation has an anomalous level of detail. The characters move with a fluidity that seems almost impossible on the console. It flaunts it, too, with Samson doing a full twirl in the air every time he jumps. It’s practically excessive.

The clouded mind

From the outset, Little Samson gives the impression of heavy Mega Man influence. The game opens by allowing you to select from four levels, but really, this just allows you to select what order you play through the character tutorials.

There are four playable characters in the game that you can usually swap between during gameplay. Each one has different abilities and uses. Samson and the mouse, K.O., can climb across walls and ceilings. The dragon, Kikira, can fly and can charge her shots. The Golem, Gamm, has the most health, can walk on spikes, and has a punch that does a lot of damage. K.O. has the smallest amount of health but drops bombs as an attack. A single bomb placed well can do catastrophic damage to a boss.

Little Samson gives plenty of reasons to switch between characters. Rarely is a segment of level traversable by just one of them, but there are sometimes alternate paths that the right character can take. I don’t believe bosses have weaknesses, per se, but you can sometimes work out strategies with a specific character that can make encounters easier.

They all have their own individual health bar as well, but if a character dies, it functions as a death for the whole party and kicks you back to the beginning of the stage you’re on. However, unless it’s Samson who dies, that character is eliminated until the end of the level. So, there’s a lot of swapping characters to try and preserve their health bars.

There are also branching paths, though I don’t think this is extensive. The only one I really know how to replicate is falling down a hole during a particular boss battle. This takes you to a sequence where the bell that all the characters live in gets stolen from Samson and you have to ride a giant crab to a boss to get it back.

However, this time around, I wound up completely skipping an ice level midway through the game. I’m not entirely sure how I pulled that off. Nintendo Power Issue 40 says you skip the area if you haven’t maximized Samson’s life bar, but I’m pretty sure I did. Maybe not.

Acting under orders from above

Little Samson is an all-around good time, but there are some questionable design decisions. Most are minor. But the one that sticks out most in my mind is the fact that, when you die while playing as any other character than Samson, they’re unavailable unless you either have a potion in their inventory.

Potions are essentially like E-Tanks from Mega Man 2. You use them to completely restore a character’s health. However, each character can only carry one. The potion goes to the character that picked it up, and you can’t trade between your party members. This means that if a character is knocked out and they don’t have a potion, you can’t use them until you finish the level or hit a Game Over screen.

If Samson, on the other hand, dies, then you just get kicked back, and everything is fine. If you lose a character on a boss battle, you’re forced to retry the boss battle without that character. This can be fine in many instances, but on the last gauntlet of levels, I found myself expending my lives to hit a Game Over screen and resurrect my party. That’s really annoying and shouldn’t be necessary. Have some sympathy for Samson.

More like Son of Sam

As for why Little Samson is so valuable, that’s a good question. While it’s no doubt a scarce game, Nintendo had a minimal print run for the NES, which former Nintendo of America President, Howard Phillips, recalls was about 10,000. Even if Little Samson was only produced in that amount, it’s not the only game on the console that was.

The answer is probably merely that it’s sought after because it’s always been sought after. The value of a game isn’t a mathematical equation. The concept of supply and demand only goes so far when explaining it. Before the collector’s market was really tracked and established, Little Samson was already considered valuable. So regardless of how much circulation the game has, it’s probably always going to maintain a reputation for being expensive, and that reputation alone is going to keep the price high. Especially to people who collect as an investment, which is such an aggravating concept to me.

Ideally, Little Samson will get a re-release at some point. I’m actually surprised it hasn’t yet. Folks like Limited Run Games and Retro-Bit often do reissues of rare and expensive games, and Taito (now a subsidiary of Square Enix) has been delving into its back catalog and partnering with people to have them resurrected. 

It’s possible that the rights stayed with Takeru, and no one knows who owns them now, but that’s just speculation. Hopefully, we’ll see Little Samson again sometime. 1992 was an easy year for an NES game to get overlooked, and it’s a crime that it didn’t get more attention. 

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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Ah, Star Wars Arcade. No, not that Star Wars Arcade game. Not that one, either. I’m talking about the 1993 Star Wars Arcade created by Sega. Except I’m not. I’m talking about the 1994 port for the Sega 32X.

Ah, the Sega 32X. I own more games for that growth of a console than anyone should. One of the easiest to find, and one that I’ve owned since I picked up the console, is Star Wars Arcade, which is an expanded home port of the, well, arcade version. 

One thing to know is that the 32X was nowhere near as powerful when it came to 3D as the Sega Model 1. However, one of the things I kept hearing about Star Wars Arcade was that playing it out in the wild was very expensive. They may have been thinking of Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, but regardless, any home port is usually better than no home port at all. And since the 32X port is the only port of Star Wars Arcade, it could have been worse.

Save your quarters for laundry

The 32X is a fun piece of kit. At the time, Sega of America thought that rather than transition into the Sega Saturn like Japan was doing that year, they’d extend the lifespan of the Sega Genesis with an add-on that would end up being the 32X. It was a huge blunder that split developers and may have torpedoed the Saturn’s chances in North America. Sega of Japan also reportedly followed the advice of Sega of America because the Sega Genesis did so much better in North America than the Mega Drive did in Japan.

The 32X, despite being an obvious stopgap, isn’t a bad console. It has a really great port of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, and that counts for a lot. However, beyond that, there weren’t very many games that were released in it. But why would you? Developers in North America knew that the Sega Saturn was coming down the pipe, so why develop for something that was going to be obsolete in a year? As a result, there were close to 40 games released for the expansion system, which is sad for anyone who bought one.

Like with most of my personal problems, I blame the parents. Making the Genesis more powerful sounds groovy to me, but it was mistimed and strategically mismanaged.

There were a few good games on the console, and Star Wars Arcade was one of them. It’s not the best game on the console, and it’s not even that great, but if I had played this when I was a kid, I would have been over the moon. 

That's no moon...

Star Wars Arcade puts you behind the joystick of an Incom T-65B X-Wing Starfighter, or if you’re playing with a friend, a Koensayr BTL-Series Y-Wing. It kind of follows the movies by sort of depicting the Battle of Endor (Death Star II), but also kind of, sort of mixes it with the Battle of Yavin (Vanilla Death Star). You start off fighting TIE Fighters. Then, once you’ve exploded enough of them, you move on.

The console version gives you the option for Arcade or 32X mode. Arcade gives you the four stages of the, er, arcade version, while 32X mode is significantly extended. Arcade mode is Tie Fighters, Super Star Destroyer, Death Star Surface, and Reactor Run. 32X is TIE Fighters, more TIE Fighters, more TIE Fighters, Death Star Surface, Trench Run, more TIE Fighters, Super Star Destroyer, more TIE Fighters, Death Star Surface, Reactor Run.

It’s a reasonable take on the space battles of the movies. The Death Star surface is particularly impressive, with turbolaser towers filling the skies with their beams. The level reminds me of the first stage in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader. Obviously, the scale and visuals are different, but the fact that it was pulled off reasonably well on the 32X is sort of impressive.

More TIE Fighters

What isn’t impressive is the combat. TIE Fighters kind of just appear on your tail, and your job is to get them in front of you. Rarely do you see them just wandering the area in little groups. They’re almost always just right behind you.

You can’t do a loop or even roll, so evading them is mostly just speeding up and slowing down, and it doesn’t really seem to matter which you choose to do. If you’ve got the pedal down, they’ll still sometimes pass you, and if you slam on the brakes, they seem to be able to do so just as quickly. For many of the early levels, my best strategy was to just fly in a straight line and continually vary my speed until someone got in front of me.

You have your lasers and your proton torpedoes. The torpedoes replenish over time, so whenever you hear the lock-on sound, you may as well just fire and forget.

The missions where you need to fly through weird spaceship tunnels are more interesting. It’s here where you mostly see the graphical difference between the arcade and 32X versions, but it’s honestly not that bad. While everything is flat-shaded and textureless, the level geometry feels pretty close. It’s more impressive than 1993’s Star Fox on SNES, but the framerate does drop quite heavily in some areas.

Hook hand

But while it’s impressive Star Wars Arcade has some pretty hard-to-ignore deficiencies. The hit detection is questionable, for one thing. It’s very hard to see lasers or tell when a big ball of energy is going to hit you. TIE Fighters can also seemingly fly through walls, which makes the star hole segments feel kind of janky. It’s definitely playable, but when you can’t tell what is hitting you from where, it loses some of its effectiveness.

My biggest issue, however, is with the controls. Decelerate and Accelerate are A and B, respectively, while the C button is to fire your lasers. If you’re on a three-button controller, B and C together fires a proton torpedo, but that isn’t part of my issue. The problem is that accelerate and decelerate need to be held to maintain your speed, so if you want to fly slowly and fire your lasers at the same time – which you often do – you’re in for some finger gymnastics.

The proper way to play might be to set the right side of the controller on your thigh and work the buttons using your fingers. However, I’d often just use my thumb for A and B and my index finger for C, hook hand style. It got painful, especially since the edge of the buttons began aggravating my thumb.

I’m not sure why X wasn’t used to fire lasers on a 6-button controller, since you could then use the end of your thumb to fire and the middle of it to maintain speed. Let the inferior 3-button people suffer.

Don't fail me again

Star Wars Arcade was a launch title for the 32X, which was a good decision, even if it didn’t overcome the bad decisions around the console. It showed the add-on’s 3D capabilities, which were decent at the time but would quickly be superseded by the PS1 and Saturn when they arrived in North America the next year.

It’s one of the top-shelf games for the 32X but, as I’ve established, there isn’t a whole lot of competition. In fact, a similar 32X game, Shadow Squadron, might be even better, but my attention span has yet to hold out past the second level.

It’s also maybe worth noting that Star Wars Arcade came out the year after Star Fox and Star Wars: X-Wing. Both of which are a lot more robust. But that alone just underlines the problems with Star Wars Arcade. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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I don’t think it’s really possible to quantify the “worst game of all time” or even compare kusoge that well. There are so many ways that a game can be deficient, and it’s hard to say what the worst way is.

A game could be disappointing. It could be technically deficient for its era or mechanically lacking compared to others in its genre. For my money, the worst kind of kusoge is the boring kind. A broken game is at least fun to analyze, but an uninteresting game is just exhausting. As excruciating as it is, I would rather play Hoshi wo Miru Hito than, say, Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum.

But then there are the games which you just can’t believe anyone tried to charge money for. 1994’s Club Drive for the Atari Jaguar is one such title. It’s just not… anything. It is a college student’s Introduction to 3D Design mid-semester project submission that someone stuck a price sticker on. Or, at least, that’s how it feels.

Cat loaf

The Atari Jaguar was a spectacular failure during a period of spectacular failures in the console market. Many people in North America like to neatly believe the ‘90s were largely the SNES vs. Sega Genesis followed by the PS1 vs N64 (and the Sega Saturn, if you’re being charitable). However, the early ‘90s saw a lot of consoles try to break into the market and fail, such as the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Phillips CD-I, Amiga CD32, or the Neo Geo CD.

Atari was still trying to bank on the name recognition it built in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, and the struggles of the Atari Lynx had taught them nothing. In late 1993, they trundled out the Jaguar, which they marketed as the first 64-bit console, inadvertently making themselves another casualty of the “Bit Wars.” A laughable 50 cartridge games came out for the console before it was discontinued in 1996. As bad as the library was, there were some unfortunate casualties, like Rebellion’s Alien vs. Predator.

Club Drive was not an unfortunate casualty. In fact, its inclusion in the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration means it isn’t even a casualty at all. It was, by some accounts, supposed to demonstrate the console’s 3D capabilities, and it failed substantially.

A game, I guess

It’s kind of hard to describe Club Drive as a game. There are three modes: collect, race, and tag, with the latter being relegated to 2-players. Collect has you collecting, uh, Everlasting Gobstoppers or maybe Koosh balls. Or, y’know, I guess they could be unstable molecules. In any case, you drive around four environments picking up some of these… things.

Race is pretty self-explanatory. You drive around a track and try to cross checkpoints as quickly as possible. In single-player, you’re going for the best time. There are no AI opponents. In multiplayer, it’s actually a race, which is the closest Club Drive gets to being an actual game. However, the tracks themselves are really just suggestions. One track has you driving around a big house. It tells you the route you’re supposed to take exactly once and then lets you loose. I became instantly lost but eventually blundered over the finish line.

The last mode is tag, which is a mode, I guess.

It doesn’t matter what you pick. You’re mostly just left to drive an ugly car (that has several color options) around mostly flat-shaded environments. The cars control like lobotomized shopping carts, the physics and collision detection are mere suggestions, and the levels are small and painful to look at. Thankfully, you can see all of it in less than an hour. If you have a friend, you rented the game, and it’s still 1994, you might be able to trick yourself into enjoying it for a weekend, but otherwise, I’m sorry for your luck.

Sedative

The fact that positive-ish reviews for the game exist is pretty staggering. Although, a writer at GameFan said, “Some nice static screens and smooth play help, but besides cruising around the house, this cart is the equivelent [sic] of a sleeping pil [sic],” before adding, “zzzzz.” That’s what I look for in my games, “static screens.” Yet despite those hurtful words, the writer gave the game 69/100.

At the time, some critics seemed impressed with the 3D graphics, which might just be them trying to soften their criticism. 1994 was the year that Stunt Racer FX hit the SNES. To be fair, Club Drive does run reasonably smoothly, and it outputs at 640x480 resolution, which was quite high at the time. These are both things that Stunt Racer FX can’t claim. Yet, the framerate still tanks when you add another player.

However, Stunt Racer FX is actually a game. It also has multiple modes beyond just racing, but these are actually designed well enough that I can recognize it as a finished product. Yet the SNES wasn’t as powerful as the Atari Jaguar. The game was just better designed.

That, in itself, is pretty unfortunate. Club Drive was designed in-house at Atari where the developers should have been the most familiar with the hardware. If that was the case, they didn’t really put it in a good light. 

Deck chairs, etc.

There’s really little else to say about Club Drive. It feels like one of those E3 demos that console makers put out to try and demonstrate what their new hardware can do. Something like Nintendo’s Super Mario 128, which highlighted the Gamecube’s horsepower, but wasn’t actually a game that was intended to ship. But not only did Club Drive make it into stores, it doesn’t really feel like a good representation of what the Jaguar is capable of. I’m not certain there was ever a game that fully took advantage of the hardware.

I have to wonder what working for Atari was like in those days. The company had been in decline for about a decade, and it seemed like there was no escape. As Paul Rose put it, “Between 1993 and 1995, a significant portion of Atari's income had not derived from Jaguar sales, but from a patent infringement lawsuit victory over Sega. The writing was on the wall.” Sure enough, that iteration of Atari soon ceased to exist in 1996. In ‘98, the name and properties were sold to Hasbro, then later to Infogrames, who rebranded into the current Atari.

What I like most about current Atari is their acceptance of their past. Club Drive is an almost meritless game for a failure console, but they chose to include it in Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. Unfortunately, there’s no supplemental material to explain the game’s nightmarish deficiencies, which would be a feature presentation to someone like me. They also kind of gloss over the Jaguar’s failure, which is too bad. It refers to Club Drive as an "interesting historical artifact of the early days of polygonal gaming," which I suppose it is. The industry is built on successes. The failures are far more interesting.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Growing up, I played a lot of puzzle games, but I didn’t have much love for them. This is because my mother loves puzzle games, and I probably didn’t like them much because it was one of the genres she could beat me at.

However, the experiences I had playing Yoshi’s Cookie and Kirby’s Avalanche with her have left me with some nostalgia for the titles. I don’t actually play them much, but they feel good to my soul, at least.

One game I used to play with her is different, however. It’s a puzzle game that I’m actually enthusiastic about and dust off every so often. It's one that I can enjoy without the sentimental attachment, even if some sentiment is still there. That is 1997’s Tetrisphere for the N64.

Phearing Change

Despite the name, Tetrisphere has very little to do with Tetris outside of falling blocks that remove other blocks. The blocks themselves aren’t even necessarily tetrominoes, though a few are.

It actually began development for the Atari Jaguar as Phear, which is a better name despite its lack of marketable brand recognition. According to the ancient tomb, Electronic Gaming Monthly, at the time, Nintendo was on the hunt for developers willing to stuff their games into a cartridge, so they scooped it up for their own.

It was created by H2O Entertainment, who would later create The New Tetris and Aidyn Chronicles (which I can’t believe I haven’t played) for the N64.

The concept is that you have a sphere that is covered in various shapes of blocks, and with the power of block fission, you need to burrow to its core, at least in most of the modes. Beyond just throwing blocks at the orb, you can also grab hold of them to shift them next to other blocks. While some of the block shapes just have to be touching, others, like the line block and square, have to be directly aligned, so you need to be careful and set up the best combos you can.

Enraged strip mining

It works so damned well. 3D block-breaker puzzle games rarely figure out how to put the added dimension to good use, but Tetrisphere nails it. The persistent cursor that you control over the surface of the orb is communicative and useful, even with the You can grab blocks from beneath others and slide them up to the other layers if you’ve got the right setup. It feels good, which is extremely commendable.

Beyond that, it also has an amazing aesthetic. While the cartoon spheroid robots that act as the cast are a bit weird, you don’t see them much. Normally, you’re just looking at a colorful sphere floating in ethereal space. The soundtrack is this amazingly atmospheric techno, and all the sound effects have this reverb to them that makes them all impactful. 

All block-breakers are about destruction, but Tetrisphere feels closest to actually destroying something. On levels with the more easy-going shapes, you’ll often trigger huge combos that stretch across the surface of the sphere, popping like atomic bubble wrap. While you can peel the sphere like a clove of garlic, the best strategy is to focus on a single area and burrow into it like an enraged strip mining operation.

And then there are the bombs (called magic for some reason) that you can pick up. While these change depending on what mode you play, in the “Rescue” mode, you can upgrade them. It starts as fireworks that blast a massive crater into the sphere, but you can upgrade it to an Atom that completely peels the top layer away with a blastwave. Even in the versus mode, the standardized bombs are fun to use with their big echo-y booms.

Lonely Rolling Star

Singleplayer consists of rescue, hide & seek, puzzle, time trial, and vs. CPU. Rescue requires you to clear off enough tiles in an area on the core of the cube to release a little guy trapped inside. Hide & Seek, is similar, but you’re looking for a picture plastered on the core. Each level gives a bit of a variation. Puzzle gives you a certain number of moves and drops to clear the board of preconfigured structures. Time trial is lame. Vs. CPU is essentially multiplayer for lonely people like me.

They’re all decent variations of block destruction, but I feel like the versus mode makes the best use of it. Any of the one-player modes tend to be laid back, but it’s versus where you really need to strategize. As is typical, big combos result in garbage blocks being dumped on your opponent, and they’re not easy to get rid of. This can lead to panicked moments where you have to open a new hole to expose the last few core tiles to win the game.

In contrast, modes like rescue and hide & seek seem a little vanilla. However, there’s enough in Tetrisphere to suck up an impressive amount of your time. It does, however, lack the endlessness of something like Tetris. Unless you’ve got a rival to compete against, it’s likely that you’ll clear the single-player modes and move on.

The Core

It surprises me that Tetrisphere has been left on the N64. As far as I have been able to find, there has never been a sequel, Nintendo has never ported it, and I can’t even find any indie games that cop the gameplay. It’s not that I think Tetrisphere was wildly impactful, but it’s weird to see any game be so forgotten about, even one with the arcane knowledge of how to make a block-buster puzzle game work in 3D.

And really, I’d love a sequel. Tetrisphere already has a masterful aesthetic that would be difficult to top, but it still has potential with shinier graphics. At the very least, I would like to see it on the Nintendo Switch Online N64 service. Does Nintendo not still own the publishing rights to it?

I suppose, on the bright side, it’s pretty cheap and easy to find on the N64.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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Between 1989 and ‘96 was the best time to be alive. We ate sugar for breakfast, groceries were affordable, and the internet as we know it today didn’t really exist. Mark my words, the world started going to shit after American Gladiators went off the air.

The show almost feels like the embodiment of how excessive and unself-aware the time period was. Big ‘roided up guys and ladies in spandex with radical names battling the general public in colorful and ridiculous feats of strength. I barely remember it, and I still think it was awesome. I was a bit too young for it, but my sister and I would watch Gladiators 2000 (the children’s version of American Gladiators) some mornings before school.

Those are some cozy but very hazy memories.

I’d say that’s why I picked up 1991’s American Gladiators for NES, but that would be a lie. I figured it would be bad, but I couldn’t predict it would leave me nostalgic for a show that I barely remember.

If you’re not familiar, American Gladiators was sort of a proto-reality show where a number of contestants from the general public would try to win a tournament against each other. Most events also involved battling against the “Gladiators,” who were essentially game show bosses. 

So, for example, “Swing Shot” has the contestants try to grab balls and bring them back to their hoop while attached to a bungee cord that allows them to leap around. The Gladiators are just there to frustrate them by slapping those balls right out of their hands. That was the typical setup; the contestants tried to score points while the Gladiators tried to prevent that.

I say “general public,” but really, most of the contestants are pretty fit in their own right. They just aren’t drinking steroid shakes for breakfast, so they’re usually dwarfed by the Gladiators themselves. 

The NES version (other console ports are different) of American Gladiators has five events from the show: The Wall, Human Cannonball, Assault, Powerball, and Joust. It supports two players if you have friends, or just one player if you’re like me. However, it’s alternating multiplayer, so you’re not going to be directly jousting your friend. Instead, you simply compete for score with one person wearing blue and the other hot pink.

To complete one of the game’s four levels, you have to succeed in each of the five events without losing all your lives. This is terrible, because if you choke on one of the events, you have to complete the rest all over again, and some are much harder than others. Each of the mini-games is completely different, so I’m going to go through them from easiest to most difficult.

Powerball

In Powerball, you find yourself on a field with five holes you need to drop balls in. There are three Gladiators trying to slap your balls, so you need to avoid them. You start with one ball, and each time you either get slapped or sink a ball, a new one appears on the opposite end of the, uh, Powerball court (or whatever). You win if you fill all the holes.

This one isn’t so much the “easiest,” but it’s just the one you don’t “lose.” If you don’t succeed in jamming up the holes with your balls, you still just proceed. The event is marked as complete. You just don’t get as many points from it. So, regardless of whether you win or lose, Powerball is essentially a gimme.

Assault

In the show, Assault was probably my favorite event. The contestants had to shoot a target with a variety of Nerf guns while a Gladiator with a much bigger Nerf gun tried to snipe them. It was fucking awesome.

The 8-bit interpretation is, I think, a reasonable representation, even if they had to take a different approach. You run up a vertically scrolling screen, while the Gladiator slides side-to-side in a gun-chair. You just have to avoid their shots until you make it to cover, where you find a little rocket thing, which enables you to shoot at the Gladiator. You only get a couple of shots, and the Gladiator takes a few to knock out. This varies as you proceed through the levels.

It’s not exactly how it works in the show. For example, the Gladiator doesn’t usually die in a fiery explosion when the contestant wins in the show. However, I think it does a decent job of capturing the general challenge of the event.

Human Cannonball

This one sounds completely made up, but it really existed in the show. A contestant grabs a rope and tries to knock a Gladiator off a podium by swinging into them. It sounds like a good way for someone to get injured, so I looked it up. Apparently, there was a documentary about the show made last year, and one of the Gladiators, Malibu, says he had his head split open on his first day on the show during this event. The official American Gladiators YouTube channel apparently had a clip of this listed as the “Hit Of The Century,” and it got taken down sometime after the documentary was released. Yeah, the context kind of changes how impressive the hit might have been.

So, it’s a bit, erm, interesting that whenever you knock a Gladiator down in the NES game, they emit a rather high-quality digitized scream. Like, a real terror scream and I’m pretty sure it’s stock audio that I’ve heard before. It’s shockingly hilarious.

The event takes some getting used to, but it’s not too bad when you get a feel for it. You just have to learn to time your jumps so you grab the end of the rope and let go when your ass is basically right in the Gladiator’s face.

Joust

Most people probably remember American Gladiators for the Joust event. A contestant and a Gladiator would battle it out atop these tall pedestals with giant cotton swaps. In contrast to Human Cannonball, this event looks the most safe. As safe as, say, Sock’em Boppers, which I’m pretty confident concussed a few children.

The NES version kind of sucks in a way that reminds me of China Warrior. You kind of just flail at the Gladiator while trying your best to figure out whether it’s the high, mid, or low attack that is most effective. You can read their movements to an extent, but it’s hard to tell if the collision detection is bad or if you’re just not hitting your foe correctly. As long as you’re hitting them more frequently than they’re hitting you, you can generally gain ground until they fall off their podium (screaming, of course).

Afterward, you do some quick platforming to the next podium to challenge another Gladiator. It’s not impossible, but it is rather unpredictable and hard to control.

The Wall

The Wall is just… Okay, deep breath here. In the show, The Wall is, like, a recreational climbing wall. In the NES game, however, it’s about a mile high. And sometimes, it also goes sideways. The goal is to reach the top, and every so often, a Gladiator shows up to try and knock you off.

To move, you have to rapidly tap A and B to move your left and right hand to different positions. The climbable area is essentially just a grid. To its credit, it makes it pretty easy to tell where your hands are and if you can grab a certain spot. However, getting your hands on the same horizontal level is another matter. And if you don’t actually grab that grate, you’ll fall. There are some extremely narrow spots where you need to be very careful of where your hands are. Maybe I was missing something here, but sometimes my dude would grab too high, and then I was screwed.

Most of the mechanics here are fine. The Gladiators can be avoided by putting an ungrabbable spot between you and them. Hitting A and B rapidly while having to slow down for trickier spots works decently, and it only hurts your carpel tunnels a lot. However, the fact that I couldn’t get my hands to cooperate and one mistake made during this massive journey meant losing a life, the whole experience quickly became frustrating. And physically painful.

And this is where I got caught up. I could rarely win all five games within five lives, especially when it came to The Wall. I managed to complete the first and second levels, but I gave up on the third because I hit a part in The Wall that I couldn’t figure out how to get around. After the rage subsided, I watched a video of someone playing through it, and I don’t even know what the hell they’re doing at that part. The spot they fit through is one tile too narrow to climb, but they manage it by doing a weird, one-handed shimmy. Is that a mechanic or an exploit?

When I started playing American Gladiators, there was a really weird glitch. On The Wall, if I hit the A button, my dude would just fall to his doom. Just drop. It confused me to no end. I read the manual, and it just said, “B button for left hand, A button for right hand.” However, that just wasn’t working for me.

And then, on Assault, I’d press a button to start the round, at which point it would instantly end and start tallying up my time bonus. Pretty sure that isn’t how the game is played.

I thought I was doing something wrong, so I just moved on to other events while checking Assault and The Wall every so often to confirm the bug was still happening. Eventually, through no effort of my own, it just fixed itself. A started functioning on The Wall, and Assault didn’t just instantly hand me the W.

It’s kind of ironic that the real barrier for me to make progress in American Gladiators was literally The Wall. Aside from its unreasonable expectations, it’s not really that bad. I think that if I played it with save states rather than on original hardware as I did here, I’d probably take the time to play through it.

No, wait, scratch that. I’d still have to figure out how to magically shimmy through that section of wall. Gosh, I think I just really want to like the game, so I’m forgetting that the third level actually requires arcane knowledge to complete. It’s just so close to being a… well, okay, maybe not a good game, but one that would be worth a weekend rental. Agh, it’s so unfortunate. We could all use a little more Nitro in our lives.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Umihara Kawase is a weird game to explain, but I’m going to try to anyway. It looks and sounds like an amateur production put out by some unknown publisher and created by some unknown developer, and maybe it is. But it’s also one of the best games on the Super Famicom.

I first heard about it on GameCenter CX (season 5, episode 1), and that was around the time that the series was finally making it stateside with Yumi’s Odd Odyssey (Sayonara Umihara Kawase). I finally jumped into the series in 2020 with Umihara Kawase Fresh, which was the topic of my second review ever written here at Destructoid. I absolutely loved it, which made me go back and finally play the earlier titles.

And you should, too.

Rubber banding

Umihara Kawase is a game that is built entirely around its central mechanic, sort of like, er, the Kuru Kuru Kururin series, maybe. I’m drawing a blank, but I don’t mean it’s like Bubble Bobble, where you blow a lot of bubbles but it’s still action platforming; Umihara Kawase’s entire identity is based around its core unique idea.

And its core idea is a fishing line. The eponymous Umihara can barely jump, but she can cast a line like an expert angler. Or Batman. Probably more like Batman. You use it as a grappling hook, sinking your lure into a solid object and then using it to swing across gaps and over hazards. And yet, this isn’t Bionic Commando. Umihara is as graceless as a fish out of water, and the fishing line appears to be made of rubber, so she bounces and slingshots around.

It’s tempting to say that Umihara Kawase is easy to learn and difficult to master, but it really isn’t that first thing. Getting used to the physics so you can perform even the simplest of tasks will probably take a while, and getting to the point where it becomes second nature is a long journey. Even then, the more advanced maneuvers that the game enables may be out of reach unless you really get sucked in.

Legged fish

However, it doesn’t make things comfortable. Despite its cute appearance of a little schoolgirl working her way across abstract labyrinths, it’s an extremely brutal game, and there are layers to its brutality.

Beyond the unconventional movement system, there are no continues, and all death is instant. There are enemies in the form of various sea creatures that haunt the levels, and gently brushing against most of them will instantly drop Umihara to the floor. Aside from lives, there are no power-ups to help you. It’s just you and your fishing line.

The actual rules of the game are similarly difficult to get a grasp on. There are 57 levels, but they don’t progress in a strictly linear fashion. Some levels have multiple exits that will take you forward or backward to different fields. There are bosses, which are rather cryptic puzzles on their own, but running into them is neither a guarantee or requirement. But more mysteriously, it’s also unclear where the end of the game really happens.

In the GameCenter CX episode I mentioned, Arino reaches the end credits rather early. But then, his staff explains to him that, after 30 minutes, the game will just skip you ahead to the last level. They suggest that he needs to reach field 57 in under 30 minutes to get the game’s good ending, which, even knowing the quickest route, he fails to do.

However, after the show, the staff members go to work and actually manage to complete Umihara Kawase in under 30 minutes, at which point they get the same non-ending that Arino got. So, even the game doesn’t have any recognition for whether you took too long and got shunted to the end or if you beat it before its timer ran out. It just ends either way. So, what is even considered “winning” here?

Child's play

I suppose it’s really up to you to challenge yourself. Umihara Kawase is more of a playground. A series of challenges for you to overcome, but contrary to its initial difficulty, it is easygoing about how you approach it.

Maybe, instead, you just challenge yourself to see every field. Or maybe, like the GameCenter CX staff, you try to beat it before 30 minutes are up. That’s kind of disappointing in its own way. I like to be told I did a good job. On the other hand, high-level play just looks incredible.

The fact that there isn’t really a set goal is one of the ways Umihara Kawase feels sort of amateur. Beyond that, the graphics look thrown together. The background is just a photograph of the ocean, which gives it the feeling of a neglected arcade game. The ice rink where I lived growing up had a few arcade cabinets, and one of them was Buster Bros. or Pang!, which did the same thing. In lieu of a background, they just slapped unrelated images of, like, the Taj Mahal behind the action. It always seemed uncomfortably weird to me when I was a kid, and that’s the feeling I get here.

To add to that, all the platforms in the game are just abstract blocks of different colors. Every once in a while, you get something with a little more effort to it, like platforms made of pencils or giant eggplants, but they’re rather sparse. Mainly, you're just looking at blocks that look like placeholders. In a way, this gives the game an ethereal, dream-like (if not entirely monotonous) quality. The fact that all the exits are just modern Japanese-style front doors just adds to this.

Meanwhile, the music sounds like the soundtrack to a series of travel promo videos.

And, by the way, the HUD being so close to the middle of the screen is how it's supposed to look. That isn't a glitch on my version of the game or something.

Fish hooks

I don’t have any hard data, but I don’t think Umihara Kawase did all that well during its 1995 release in Japan. That’s kind of unsurprising because I don’t know how you draw attention to a game like this. In a market full of jump-guys and shoot-guys, a little girl with a backpack and fishing rod isn’t what people tend to look for. The developer, TNN, seems to have only done one other game before ceasing to exist. At that point, the key staff members formed Studio Saizensen, who are perhaps best known over here for Code of Princess.

Umihara Kawase would continue on with Studio Saizensen, first following up with Umihara Kawase Shun in 1997 on PS1, then Sayonara Umihara Kawase in 2013 on 3DS, with Umihara Kawase Fresh being the most recent release in 2020. While, again, I don’t have any sales data, I’m assuming that the series is being kept alive by a cult following and the studio’s own passion.

And while no publisher was brave enough to release the games in North America until Yumi’s Odd Odyssey in 2013, all the titles are now available on PC via Steam. The original Umihara Kawase even made it to the Switch’s Online service, but only in Japan. Considering the game is completely playable without needing a translation, it’s a little strange that it hasn’t made it to other regions, but maybe Nintendo will fix that at some point because more people need to play this bizarre game.

Truly, though, if you're interested in the series, either Sayonara Umihara Kawase or Umihara Kawase Fresh are better starting points. The rubber-band physics don't change a whole lot across the series, but both those games offer better progression. You can learn the basics from those friendlier experiences before your fish grappling skills are put to the test.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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Out of everyone in my circles, I feel like the only person left who hasn't beaten Baldur's Gate 3. The FOMO of missing out on everyone's new favorite toy isn't something that typically compels me, but god — it's like I don't make a dent in exploring Faerûn. I know why; I don't want to admit this, but at some point, I've got to stop picking up every bone, rotten basket, and fork I find.

Okay, in my defense, it's not that bad anymore. I stopped picking up hoards of goblin garbage at the end of Act I, though not of my own volition. After approaching the 80 to 90-hour mark — that's shaving off a generous Early Access estimate — a friend watching me stream over Discord gently prodded me in the right direction: "Christ, Andrea, you know you don't need an inventory of broken lutes?"

But what if I do? What if I get deep into Act II, and some wayward Bard asks if I have a dozen spare broken instruments? I could be one short, miss some weird Karlach-related lore, and spend another hundred hours agonizing over my decisions.

Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really do that, though. It's far better about the item situation than I gave it credit for. It wasn't until I hit that Act I conclusion that I really began accepting my trash-collecting anxiety wasn't really rational. I say it tongue-in-cheek, but also completely serious: I'm definitely neurotic in the way that impacts how I interact with some games (a lot of games), but hot damn does it ever come out in RPGs.

For context, I'm the type to fuss over talking to that lone NPC hidden upstairs in the back of a dark inn, refusing to move on until I know what they say before, during, and after my battle against god. It's led me to a lot of cool experiences that aren't exactly useful day-to-day life skills, but knowing stupid facts about my favorite worlds does bring me some joy.

But the BG3 item thing? I swear it was killing me. Not only was I picking everything up, but I was organizing them all by value of the trash, type of trash, if I fancied the trash, so on, so on. I never really once asked, "Should I be doing this?" and let my habits spiral into disaster.

While my desire to be thorough, put in the nicest way possible, led me to some neat finds, I've gotta wonder how many hours I wasted picking abandoned cellars clean and sorting the junk neatly into boxes. I reckon it was tickling the same part of the brain tadpole that likes PowerWash Simulator or collecting everything in Final Fantasy XIV, but I highly recommend not playing BG3 like that.

What I will rationalize as fine, though, is combing for the neat stuff and keeping it. I've got every pair of undies I could ever want to drop Karlach and my Tav in, and my growing BG3 library is a lore-laden treasure trove of goofy in-universe fan fics, letters, and books on Mindflayer anatomy.

It's been months now since most of my friends finished up their first playthroughs, and while I've got maybe one or two quests left, I'm still not done. I have no idea what my real timer is at anymore, thanks to a few extended periods of leaving the game running, and maybe that's for the better. I've abandoned my worst habit of picking up anything and everything, but I still dig through every single container in some strange man's attic, looking for actual goodies. And then I go back and double-check, you know, just in case I missed one.

I still organize my inventory just so, too, while limiting myself to a select few containers. By some standards, I'd like to think my BG3 inventory is incredibly tame after selling off all the junk. I will, however, still spend an hour or so of my time after a session carefully moving and tossing items. There's the incredibly handy Better Inventory UI mod, which is surprisingly one of the few I've neglected, but my friends swear by it, so I'll get it going eventually.

Until then, give me a pat on the back for making it to Act III and dropping the chests of rotten cheese. I'm excited to finally beat this behemoth of a game myself before looping back to do it all over as Dark Urge. I swear this time, I won't spend a decade rearranging my chest of scrolls, either.

The post My Baldur’s Gate 3 organizational habits are killing me appeared first on Destructoid.

I earmarked China Warrior for this column because of its prominence in the manga Hi-Score Girl. However, while it holds some sentimental value to the main characters, they don’t actually say if the game is good. I will intervene: It is not.

While a North American copy of China Warrior would run me $40 or so (with case and manual), I got the Japanese version, The Kung Fu, alongside Genpei Tōma Den and Susanoo Densetsu for roughly the same price because nobody wants The Kung Fu. Okay, that’s not actually true, it probably has more to do with the fact that it was one of the first titles released for the PC-Engine and, therefore, most likely had a massive print run, so supply greatly outweighs demand.

The North American price mostly relates to the fact that the Turbografx 16, the North American analog to the PC-Engine, crashed and burned in North America, leading to a low print run. Maybe. The collector’s market prices are pretty dumb over here.

One thing I can tell you, though, is that it’s not because it’s good.

China Warrior puts you in the shoes of a kung-fu guy named Wang, who stands stiff and erect at all times. Wang must journey to the right side of the screen, punching and kicking his way through rocks, sticks, and non-violent protestors. Three times in a stage, he faces off against someone who can defend themselves and must cheese them to death.

I said this about Zombie Hunter a while back, but China Warrior doesn’t look like a real game. It looks like a ‘90s TV show’s interpretation of a video game; like something you’d see in the earlier seasons of The Simpsons. Wang stands impressively tall, literally as tall as half the screen, and the obstacles you battle against are so laughably ineffective it just doesn’t seem real. It is a spectacle, if nothing else.

Giant sprites of man-beef were a big draw in ‘80s video games. Hardware at the time was rather limited when it came to the size of sprites it rendered, so having big, detailed muscles on screen was something of a flex. It led to some pretty awful experiences like Altered Beast and the “Big Mode” levels in Genpei Tōma Den and Predator. As I mentioned, China Warrior was released close to the launch of the PC Engine in 1987 (it’s actually branded as Vol. 1 on the cover), so the best way to sell the hardware was to show it rendering a massive slab of man-beef.

So, the priorities for the development of China Warrior had “massive shirtless dude” at the top of the list and then nothing below it. Everything that couldn’t flex just happened because they needed to make a game out of it.

There are four levels in China Warrior, and they all involve punching your way from left to right. The only underlings you run into are these robed cultist dudes who just walk towards you. Their hands are crossed in front of them, so they’re not even trying to attack you or defend themselves. You just kick them aside because Wang is a hammer, and everything looks like a nail to him.

Three times each level, you have to fight a boss. In the first level, it’s Sgt. Slaughter, Sgt. Slaughter, and Sgt. Slaughter with a severe sunburn. These battles become a bit more varied, but by my count, there are only five unique bosses, and one of them is just Wang with different severities of skin damage. But no matter who you’re fighting, it’s mostly just a matter of finding the best way to cheese them. 

Sgt. Slaughter, for example, doesn’t do well if you just ram yourself against the left side of the screen and kick him whenever he gets close. The ballerina lady in the second level can’t really defend herself if you just push her to the edge of the screen and punch her to death. The cheesy strategy changes from boss to boss, but there’s always some way to overcome them with a cheap tactic.

Getting through the actual walking part of the levels, however, sometimes comes down to reactions, sometimes relies on memorization, and always requires you to spam your fists. It’s not too difficult to get through a stroll through a level, but if you want enough life left over to cheese the bosses with, it helps to know what’s coming up.

Wang gains more life by kicking what are apparently boxes of oolong tea(?) but look to me like cartons of cigarettes. However, you can also gain extra health by punching very specific projectiles. Sometimes, this is a rogue arrow that zooms by overhead, but other times, it’s one moth in the middle of a line-up of 20 or so. In later levels, it’s important to try and find these and remember their location so you’ll be able to stand up to your opponent’s feeble attempts to overcome your cheap tactics.

This is especially important because China Warrior doesn’t give you all that many lives and no continues. Or so I originally thought. As it turns out, it’s one of those games where you need to know a special input to continue. In this case, it's holding any direction on the D-pad at the title screen and pressing Run.

Even with that, you’re going to be repeating levels quite a bit. While you’re inevitably going to cheese the bosses because the combat sucks, it will probably take you a few attempts before you figure out the right way to do it. And while it took me a mere hour and a half to get through China Warrior, I quickly wanted to clock out and turn it off. I thought to myself, “Maybe if I was paid hourly, I’d put in the effort to get through this.” Then my dog fell asleep on me, so I was trapped with China Warrior.

By the time he woke up and went off to sleep elsewhere, I was on the last level. I figured, at that point, I’d play until I lost all my lives again, then call it a night. However, the Gods of Completionism heard my despair and chose to prolong my suffering. I managed to somehow finish the game on that continue, at which point, the cave you’re in collapses on Wang as he stands in defiance of death. He manages to survive, at which point it starts up “Act 2,” which is just replaying the game but harder.

I wound up clearing a full two levels of Act 2 on my remaining lives, at which point I finally released myself from my self-imposed torture.

China Warrior is kind of interesting from the fact that it’s prolifically bad. It drew people in with its towering, legally distinct Bruce Lee. If you played it at the time, you’d probably remember it as the most mind-blowing graphics ever depicted on your TV screen. Nowadays, if you know it at all, it’s probably as the game that everyone made fun of when it came out on Wii Virtual Console. Either way, I just hope today we can all look upon Wang and laugh.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the classic 2006 RPG, is due to release on February 2. Between 2013 and 2016, AIC ASTA and A-1 Pictures released four animated films on Persona 3. The question is: are they worth watching before Reload's release?

For many, myself included, seeing your favorite franchises adapted into a new form is thrilling. So when I heard there were four full-length animated films based on Persona 3, I knew I had to watch them. It's too good to be true! Well, in a way, it kind of is.

Spoiler alert for Persona 3 and the films.

What are the Persona 3 movies?

Let's give a bit of context here. The Persona 3 films, under the banner Persona 3: The Movie, were mostly made by A-1 Pictures (with AIC ASTA doing #1). A-1 also tackled the animated scenes in Persona 4, so they've worked with Atlus in the past.

The films came out over four years, starting in 2013 and ending in 2016. They launched theatrically in Japan, and while they never made it to the West in terms of dubbing, you can buy them subtitled off Amazon Prime for around $5 each.

In honor of Persona 3: Reload's release, I decided to watch all four films and collect my findings here for you all to see. I'll talk about how the films adapt the source material and make it better, or in some cases worse.

For Better

As someone who played Persona 3 Portable, which had no animated cutscenes, the movies made up for that. Seeing the events of Persona 3 done justice through the great animation by AIC ASTA and A-1 Pictures is satisfying. The style is consistent with the original game and outmatched the animated cutscenes in-game, in my opinion. The fight scenes are also given a one-up, feeling just as snappy and rewarding.

The films also give Makoto Yuki, the once-silent protagonist, a full voice and lines. This helps speed things up story-wise and gives him more of a personality and arc. His character development throughout the four films is pretty good and goes deep into the themes of life and death. Furthermore, Yuki's humanization in Persona 3: The Movie #3. Falling Down with Ryoji creates some great moments of friendship the game never had, if I remember correctly.

From the start, you can tell the films were made by Persona 3 fans. Throughout the four films, you'll see cameos from Social Links like Akinari and Chihiro, as well as Makoto using fan-favorite Personas like Jack Frost and Thoth.

The S.E.E.S members also have their moments in the spotlight and translate well onto the screen. Junpei is still that lovable goofball, and Akihiko punches anything and everything near him. We even get an "I've been waiting for this", which is a must for any Persona 3 title.

For Worse

The story of Persona 3 is a long one. I mean, the game takes at least 88 hours to beat, and that's just sticking to the narrative. While the base story remains, small character moments and events are shaved to their bare bones or cut entirely. Even still, it hurts characters that didn't get much time in the original, like Shinji and Jin.

While what it adds is good, it doesn't elevate things as much as they could've. For example, the concept of Personas turning on their users is glanced over, being resolved the same way for both afflicted characters.

Another thing that felt off was the unchanged ending. I know some people didn't like the pacing of the ending and the events that transpire. And, while I was confused and surprised, it felt right. Persona 3: The Movie #4: Winter of Rebirth didn't change that, and it's a missed opportunity.

On that note, the pacing was quick and went too fast. This problem came up a lot, as events happen and end within minutes and get pushed to the side. The game had this issue, and to see that adapted doesn't suit the films well.

I do want to point out that each film has a different director. While the visions for them didn't change much from each version, it feels like there wasn't a lot of wiggle room to explore. For example, Persona 3: The Movie #1. Spring of Birth covered the beginning up to Fuuka's entrance, while Persona 3: The Movie #2. Midsummer Knight's Dream gave us the rest of the S.E.E.S squad and villains.

Each film was an hour and a half, give or take. I'm unsure if the plan was always four films, but deep down, I feel like adding a bit more time to each would help smooth the pacing and make them unique.

Consensus

The Persona 3 films are solid showings of the game's narrative. They stay true to the source material and add small yet welcoming changes. That said, condensing the story and translating its pacing problems to the screen hurt the films, especially the last two. As a fan of Persona 3 and its characters, it's great to see them as lively as they were in the game.

So, it begs the question: should you watch Persona 3: The Movie and its sequels before Persona 3 Reload? Personally, I would steer clear of them if Reload is your first. The game looks to correct some of the original's errors and the story flows much better with gameplay. If you're a returning Persona 3 player, the films would help refresh your memory of the story and characters. Plus, it gives some fun moments that fans will enjoy.

Overall, they act as mementos of the original. Whether they'll age well come Persona 3 Reload's release remains to be seen. 

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I didn’t think I’d be revisiting the mind of walkedoutneimans so soon after Tyko’s Dying Together, but here we are with iPad Baby. I need a breather. I can’t take this much sensory overload.

I feel that deeply, since more and more I can’t stand the internet. There are too many people there. Too many thoughts, opinions, and content flying around in all directions. It becomes impossible to parse the important information from the irrelevant. Worse yet, companies like Google are continually pushing irrelevant content to the forefront by allowing those who produce it in bulk to rise to the top of searches.

I’m not sure why I need an interactive interpretation of this distressing reality we live in, but here’s iPad Baby to extrapolate on the relentless assault of garbage we’re under each day.

Into the sludge

You’re dropped into iPad Baby with absolutely no explanation of what is going on, and none is forthcoming. However, your screen is already dominated by an iPad perpetually displaying meaningless video and a Ring camera pointed directly in your face. The world you are in is a spaghetti nest of corridors painted with watermarked and conflicting images. Flitting around these abominable hallways, are 2D homunculi compiled of various imagery. Almost immediately, you probably want to leave.

The iPad on the side reminds me of “Sludge Content,” a TikTok phenomenon where videos are cut together with other unrelated ones. Your digital companion shows ceaseless footage of gameplay of (maybe) mobile games, the head and shoulders of a Sim, and scrolls of microtransactions. It’s meaningless to gameplay, but that’s perhaps the point. It’s just there, passively gnawing at your attention.

The actual game here is actually rather simple. When you get near enough to one of the figures, you’re displayed a few items that you need to collect from the environment and throw at them. The obstacle you run into is that the hallways are intensely disorienting, and the inhabitants of the world move at a hyperactive pace. By the time you find the item they need, they could be absolutely anywhere.

Graphic assault

You wind up just dashing through the passageways, a can of energy drink in your hand, trying to find a person to fling it at. The “people” you pass keep on dropping bizarre, meaningless statements about their lives. Insecurities, complaints, hopes, and advice bombard you in grating text-to-speech voices. The manic soundtrack playing over all of this is strangely appealing throughout all of it.

Then an alarm sounds, a horrific police bulletin appears on your phone, and darkness engulfs the world before receding. The police are after you, every bit as compellingly twisted as everything else in the world. Don’t worry. If they catch you, they’ll simply take whatever item you’re carrying and slap handcuffs on your wrists. That has always been more of an enticement than a deterrent to me.

And that’s it, really. As you find objects and pass them off to the appropriate monstrosity flitting through the hallways, more of them get dropped. Once you manage to deliver them all, you “win.”

We are all damned

iPad Baby is not as complex as Tyko’s Dying Together, and that wasn’t too deep to begin with. The message it carries behind its garish jank-pop graphical assault is also far more overt. Tyko’s Dying Together dropped you into a confusing world where the deeper meaning very gradually surfaces, whereas iPad Baby kind of gives it away in the title.

The whole experience is as anxiety-inducing as the systems that it represents. The thing about iPad Baby is that it ends, whereas social media is so entrenched in society today that it’s hard to avoid it. Not impossible, but to demonstrate how necessary it can be, walkedoutneimans contacted me through Twitter to let me know of their new perversion of the Doom engine. The trailer is hosted on YouTube, because where else would you put it?

TikTok is something else, though. I already avoid YouTube unless I really need it, but the ability to just scroll down through a bunch of videos all competing for attention makes me nauseous to even think about it. It’s just, well, sludge. Enough of my attention already goes to waste.

Upsetting

The horrible desecrations of Doom that walkedoutneimans puts out are my favorite type of art. It’s the type that looks like offensive trash, but when you actually dig in, you learn something about the creator’s perspective and maybe connect with it yourself. I mean, analyzing iPad Baby caused me to start spitting venom at the culture that is growing like mold on the ass of the internet, so it obviously got a response. 

Meanwhile, my husband leaned over to look at my screen and said, “Ew, does it always look like that?”

“Yeah,” I replied, pointing the camera at the most offensive thing in the vicinity.

“That upsets me,” he said.

Well, yeah. That’s the point.

iPad Baby is available for free over on Itch.

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