Belated hootemer: Starward Rogue

You ever get an idea of what a game is, and wanting that game, in your head? And then when you get said game, you realize you either had it wrong or were thinking of an entirely different title? And you're left in the possession of a game you're now trying to figure out if you even wanted? Well, here's Starward Rogue, and here's me.

Starward Rogue is an "Arcen title". If you've never heard of Arcen, they make a lot of weird games. That's sort of their thing. They're probably one of the most prolific indie developers. On a basic level I admit I feel affection toward Arcen, they try to do something different and keep trying. Some of their games are successes and some aren't, but that just makes them more endearing.

Which kinda makes Starward Rogue a little weird to review. Starward isn't an especially creative or unusual venture, and how I mixed it up with something else is very strange to me. In fact this game is almost a little ironic to review now, but it's just coincidentally a title that appeared in a humble monthly - albeit a humble monthly I didn't pay for, and instead got from a friend - which it has in bundle common with some other games I've been playing.

Anyway, the game is a completely top down roguelite or maybe even roguelike twin stick shooter. I'd say it is "simple" but the game manages to be extremely complex in spite of the fact it's a simple premise and it all kinda rolls from there. I'm putting it under shootember because bullets and shooting, man, bullets covering the screen.

Arcen style yo

Retro reviews: Phantasy Star II

Phantasy Star 2 was released in the odd period between the NES and SNES, where it felt like developers really weren't tapping the power of the Genesis at all. The original Final Fantasy is its immediate FF neighbor in the West, and while Phantasy Star 2 is visually more enticing than that, it is so much worse looking than FFIV. It's funny how these games are divided by years, but as a teenager, it never really connected how big the gaps in development were. Graphical quality was increasing in huge jumps, as both the technical development improved and the sprite art improved as well.

Actually it's kinda funny how people in the modern day have zero concept of the gaps between game releases. I read some complaint about how Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (which is bad, don't get me wrong) made a guy "thankful" he had a SNES as a child. Alex Kidd predates the SNES by like, a year or something. You weren't playing Alex Kidd when the SNES was available, unless you rented it, at which point you were renting an old goofy Genesis game.

In spite of the fact I owned a Sega Genesis - a generation 1 model, in fact, bought almost on the day of release in North America- I never finished PS2. The game was rather unpleasant in terms of difficulty curve, as it never really became super obvious as a small child that 90% of RPG difficulty
could be mitigated with grinding and just drawing maps. The game is already far enough back that my only memory is getting the first new party member, and how awesome the box art is. It also seems to have nothing to do with anything, but hey, whatever. That art owns.

I really miss the era of non-anime box art for western releases of Japanese games. It went away sooner than later, but that is some trippy shit instead of the cool but kinda plain Japanese release art. Stuff like this dying out reminds me why I hate weebs.

RPGs on the SNES and Genesis were more expensive than their less memory equipped cartridge compatriots, owing to the necessity of adding additional physical media within their plastic prisons - the so-called 'battery backup' that actually really was. (I've read some games, however, had flash memory instead) As such, PS2 - and many of its ilk - weren't games my friends and I bought when I was young enough that this game was new, but rented. It's such a weird thing, remember how you'd basically "borrow" these games from a store and you'd often be praying weekend to weekend - or weeks apart - that someone didn't send your saved game off to oblivion.

Top Seven Zones I'd like to see remixed in Sonic Mania

I just can't stop talking about Sonic these days. I recently watched a video that presented the youtuber's personal picks for the top seven they'd like to see. It's a good video, feel free to watch it before I go over my picks.

And now, I use the break function, because reasons

I hate this game: Galak-Z

Under normal circumstances, I try to do two things with video games. The first is to try to appreciate the nuances of the production, understand that if something is bad it could be bad for a variety of reasons. Take Sonic Adventure 2. Sure, I disliked it, but Sonic in 3D is hard. And the game had lots of good points, stuff I enjoyed.

The other thing is to try to let my opinion relax, don't start screaming. But you know what? Sometimes, a game just makes me want to scream.

Galak-Z is a space shooter of the 360 degrees of motion sort. I haven't played anything like this in years, and I think the closest thing I could compare it to is probably Ur-Quan Masters. It's not a genre flush with new titles, and I don't think anything has come out in this space approaching the AAA category in generations of gamers. Galak-Z, in a lot of ways, attempts to bring the AAA appeal to this sort of game.

It starts out so well...

Facsimile souls: Lords of the Fallen

First things first, and I feel like I'm doing this a lot, Lords of the Fallen is spoken of as a clone of Dark Souls. I played a couple hours of Dark Souls in something like 2012, and found I hadn't quite gotten the hang of the xbox controller enough to enjoy it. I told myself I'd go back, once I felt like I did, and yeah that took years. I've been meaning to, but I've been rushing through a lot of games lately.

As an aside, this game has too many buttons. It amazes me, looking back on people mocking console players for babby controller sort of stuff. The xbox one controller here has something like twenty or whatever inputs, and when I first got my 360 controller I couldn't reliably hit the right button every time. There's just so many! You know how many buttons my precious Sega genesis had? A d-pad, a start button and then three. The SNES doubled that, but it didn't use the shoulder buttons often. I'm not sure when controller design blotted up to such numbers, but it's pretty impressive

Anyway, I don't strongly remember Dark Souls, but it's pretty evident right from the start that this game is attempting to copy a lot of elements of it. I mean more mechanical elements, gameplay and so forth, not stylistic choices. As such, it's sort of a RPG, although 'rolling person game' might be a better use of the acronym.

Unlike DS, Lords of the Fallen is specifically about one mang, and one mang only. Though you can customize your mang in various ways that as far as I can tell don't matter much to the experience, you play as HARKYN, a convicted criminal, possibly of the heretical iconoclast sort, possibly of the just a violent punchy man sort. Harkyn has made his way to the... Top of the world? A temple? A place where people are and it's cold? Anyway you're here to have sex with sexy ladies and dodge roll everywhere.

And there's like no ladies up here because it's a monastery. Er. Yes.