A real lack of recent games: Enter the Gungeon

There's this super weird thing about using this blog as a writing exercise in that sometimes I just, uh, forget to finish up a review and never hit that publish button. Or I go back to a game after the review is done and feel like it should be re-written but can't find the energy.

I finished ETG several months ago. Finished with, that is to say, since it is a roguelite.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to roguelite design. Some of my favorite games in recent memory were roguelites, but most of them I find rapidly tedious and get sick of very quickly. They're plagued by forcing you to repeat the first level endlessly and even worse have this sickening unwillingness to program in any amount of conveyance. They're built around the idea that fun is something you need to work for and knowledge is something you acquire through repeated, repetitive play throughs. It's pretty easy for the latter two to turn into pure tedium.

The moment I saw Enter the Gungeon, hereby shortened to Gungeon, I was certain it was a game I wanted to play. For a while I waited on the game to show up in the humble monthly bundle, as I have a sub rolling ever still and humble puts up most Devolver Digital titles sooner than later. But it went cheap on the humble store and they'd given me credit for a referral so I decided the time was now!

I'm pretty certain I'll end up with an extra key sooner than later, it's probably in this month's bundle, knowing my luck.

Regardless, Gungeon is presented as a roguelite dungeon crawler fused with a shmup and a twinstick shooter with cool boss battles; the results lean a fair bit more toward the former than the latter, though this game certainly co-habits the design space you'd put Nuclear Throne and probably several other games I haven't played in. It has a few more buttons that Nuclear Throne and leans harder on the roguelite looting side than gaining XP or gaining loot, with various results.

It also loves puns and loves guns.

A slice of Indie: Morphblade

I really liked Gunpoint. My understanding, from reading the news around Gunpoint, was the next game by its developer was Heat Signature, which is this amazing sounding game about ... Actually go google it, but basically it's about being a little tiny space pod that slowly captures larger and larger ships, then battles with those ships, can lose those ships and so forth. I haven't read too much about it since it's like reading about Axiom Verge 2 or Double Dragon Neon 2: They will probably happen, but it is very far away from now in time and I don't want to think about being in my forties.

Regardless, apparently the developer of Gunpoint put out another game, on the third. I learned this when I was browsing through news of the Humble Bundle Monthly, which means not only did the game come out without me knowing but also entered a position of me owning it without knowing I was owning it beforehand. Which is pretty nice.

Eight long weeks of rolling: Divinity Original Sin

the review is actually negative, nice one steam

In gaming, there's a layer to reading reviews not quite as present in other entertainment mediums.

Gaming is very, very subjective. You might argue it combines all the subjective elements of other forms of entertainment and rolls them together, creating a truly finicky state. From there, you read reviews and wonder is that person's subjective view going to work with my subjective view? And it's hard to tell.

So, often enough, I hit on games that get rave reviews but I'm baffled at how high its marks are. Sometimes it goes the other way, sometimes bad games click. I do think there are some objective elements to gaming: Visual fidelity and quality, clarity of explanation and coherence in UI, so on and so forth. But most, if not all of it, is sort of up to the end user.

Divinity Original Sin is the byproduct of the kickstarter era of a couple years back. I think you could argue there's a pretty clean sweep of isometric-ish rpg-is titles born of KS; a "sequel" to Planescape Torment, a sequel to Wasteland, a "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate-ish and then whatever D:OS was supposed to be spawned from. I suppose on a level it is worth noting the game was marketed on its own graces, without claiming it's going to relive torment or BG2 or the lost direction Fallout took.

That being said, I can't really say I understand how or why this game is so positively reviewed. There's not so much hype to it, not really, as I don't know anyone who played it other than a friend I fear I unfortunately talked into it.

Sorry about that.

Eight long weeks of rolling: The Witcher 3

The Witcher series is one of the oddest progressions in the history of RPGs. It's also, maybe, one of the best attempts and best successeses at creating a real RPG that actually has you play a role in a story as opposed to a video game where a story plays in the background while you grind for goat butts.

The thing that stands out here is that the first Witcher game is weird and janky, and I rather liked it, but it was clearly limited by its engine. The Witcher 2 is much closer to realizing what they wanted to do, with an interesting and multi-threaded story that can go many different ways. The Witcher 3 realizes what Witcher 1 and 2 wanted to do - It's one of the few games I've ever played where the feeling of budget or design rarely if ever hits that sense of them wanting to do something

The Witcher 3 might ultimately be compared to Skyrim, albeit with mods so ladies can get their bits out, and then it would utterly crush Skyrim. That's not to say Skyrim is a bad game in any means, but Skyrim feels so bland and lifeless compared to the sharp wit of TW3. Though, to be fair, I have my complaints about the writing style as well, but Skyrim never makes you stop and pause to think about how much you're going to mess with people's lives. TW3 will trick you into it.

Witchers are tricky.

Eight long weeks of Rolling: Final Fantasy VI

I'd been eyeing picking up the PC port of FFVI with an emotional range running far closer to trepidation than excitement. I've always been worried that various games won't live up to my memories - FFIV, for example, is just kind of dull and dodgy - but Square put VI up for what felt like a low discount during BF sales.

I say "felt" because $4.80 USD doesn't really seem like a great deal for a >20 year old SNES game, port or no port, but as it turns out Square's webstore messed up and accidentally reversed the discount. So it was actually supposed to be less four eighty, not on sale for four eighty, and man I am not playing anything north of five dollars for this game. But I happened to have bought during the price error, so I guess that's good? Oh well, thanks store error, you save me the monies again.

Or technically don't, since it's not like I would have bought it if it wasn't at least this cheap.

2016 - Year of Sonic - Year in review

Usual caveats and ranking and caveats to ranking apply. All of this is subjective, these are my reviews, if you think as I do you'll agree. But you don't, so here's how the system generally breaks down;

A - A game I would recommend to people who don't like a genre, something good enough for people generally against it to try. These are the games I think you should definitely look into. This isn't a ranking like "10/10" or "four and a half stars, delivered pizza to my house, performed sexual favors and then changed the oil on my car", this is evaluating games subjectively, from my perspective, who I'd recommend them to. Which is the point of reviewing, to me, anyway.

And these are the games where I'd say "More than the usual". Mind you, I don't mean you should move hard outside you genre just to force yourself to try them. If you hate shooters, it's unlikely an A-rank game is going to redefine how you look at them. Look for them on sale and the like. These are games in X genre that appeal to people who don't usually like X genre.

B - Being games are excellent examples of their genre, but don't stand outside their genre. You have to be interested, at least a little, in playing this sort of game. They have to be your jam.  That's not to say a B rank game is necessarily more or less fun than an A rank game, as frankly, I had the most fun with a B rank game this year. This is more that it tends to be a little more bogged down in genre conventions and you need to be keen on how it works.

C - Games that you need to want to play the genre to want to play. Essentially, if B rank games are games where if you like ARPGs you'll like them, C rank games are ones where you need to be in the mood for the genre to like them. If you're not feeling it, well, you probably won't feel it.

D - Games I feel personally won't appeal to most people even within those that like the genre. That's not to say D rank games are all unplayable, or even that they're all garbage. Just that I'm not sure even if you were in the mood you'd be up for these.

E - Games I never finish reviewing, so they don't go on this list. There's about 10-20 games a year that fall into this category.

Also, this is a listing of games I reviewed this year, very few of which are ever actually from a given year. This is a guide to going through Steam sales and picking out stuff you might have missed at a low price, not a guide to the latest and greatest. I'm not even suggesting you buy these games this year.

I generally tend to lean toward lowering the ranking of games that are more difficult. As I said, this is about recommending games, and "difficult" is something of a subgenre. I've never met a "tuned to be difficult game" I would actually say I would recommend to anyone to pick up and try. There's lots of good ones, but the harder you tune a game, the less people who can play it and enjoy it.

The Gap: There's a four month gap in my reviews this year, which often happens around March, but went kinda wild this time. Basically, I played Serious Sam 3 - which I hated - Arkelash Legacy - which was disappointing - and spent like fifty hours dicking around with Skyrim but never actually finished it. Also Phantasy Star 2, which I think I eventually reviewed but who cares.

Play relevant month: Broforce

You can talk about the toxicity of hyper-masculinity if you want, but there's something truly epic about the 80s era of action hero. Banal, ridiculous and adorned with giant muscles alongside giant guns and often giant chins, this was the point where PC didn't quite come into the picture but film making had decided exactly how they wanted to do it. For better or worse.

Broforce is both a tribute and a homage to this lost, actually kind of tedious to watch era of film making. I don't know what Broforce originally intended to go about making, but as we'll explore, Broforce is about bros very much re-creating that action film charm. As an aside, bro in this case is both the name of all the characters - with such classics as Bronan, Brobocop and Ellen Ripbro - and a description of their bro-dentity. Bros are generally slanted toward male, but there are female bros, just as there are female action heroes.

I'm a bit disappointed there's no Brofee, but I guess she isn't distinctive enough? Ah c'mom, Pam Grier was awesome in that movie. Whatever!

Broforce succeeds because it doesn't worry about... To be frank, much of anything. It's a side-scrolling run and gun shooter, or a jumpnshootman as I like to refer to other games of this nature. But the elements that make Broforce different lies in the name. The bro. The bros. And the attitude of mayhem that may, in a way, fit the bro moniker just as well.

Bro-hem.

Witch cards will drop: Ittle Dew

If you look at my Steam game playing history in terms of hours spent, I tend to gravitate toward somewhat less action-y, somewhat more think-y games but rarely all that think-y. I'm not a puzzle guy, not really, I lack patience. I always have. I do like turn based 4x games; the reason I haven't reviewed many (or any, I'd have to check) ends up with the feeling they eat time like no other. It's kinda hard to write about a game you should probably put a good hundred hours into to get a real feel for what it's like.

I do like puzzles in some games, though. I remember the sci-fi grounded puzzles in Dead Space really fondly. Clearing jams in the artificial gravity unit or life support wings were cool, generally unique ideas. But puzzle games themselves are generally the same thing repeated over and over. Push a block. Push a block. Now, push a block.

Generally, I think the biggest issue is one of general pacing - puzzle games tend to be sluggish and mistake the deliberate pace of the puzzle gameplay with something the game should have at all points in the production. It often feels like half the challenge is not getting bored out by having to slowly shove blocks around a room while your character moves at the speed of a waterborne slug.

Ittle Dew is a block pushing puzzle game. It was done by, previous to, the same individual(s) who put out Card City Nights, which was a pretty fun single player card game. It has the same tongue in cheek sense of humor and shares the same basic art style, albeit in a somewhat different setting than whatever you want to say CCN was in.

Witch cards will drop: Steredenn

I spent way too much money in October (hint: Chicago is expensive) and now I need to get my ass in gear for the Christmas sale! And what place does one take one's ass for the Christmas sale: That's right, grinding on cards. While I idle most of the cruddier games that have cards, there's a ton of good, or at least good looking games that can be short reviewed for fun and cards. And everyone loves selling cards.

One advantage to playing a lot of games is getting to see the filtering of ideas, or even hypothetical parallel evolution. That is to say when designs are not influenced by each other, but rather arrive to the same design conclusion independently. It makes gaming feel a little less like closed individual systems and more like ecosystems of ideas, which almost makes it feeler grander in the way art likes to be played as. We're all aware of basic copying, of taking a basic "thing" from one game or a basic genre, like platformers in the 80s and FPSes in the 90s, but the more subtle cues and design hints make for a more interesting way to see games made.

And to mock their short-comings.

Steredenn has one of the oddest little names I've ever seen. Google's best translation is from Breton and it translates into Star. So the game is basically named Star. It's a simple name for what is ultimately a pretty simple game.

Anyway, Steredenn is a shmup of the side scrolling variety, built from the higher end level of pixel art where style and aesthetics are both emphasized. If the game has much of a story, well, I didn't notice. Instead - as games are wont to do in the modern indie paradigm - the game is a psuedo-roguelike, or roguelite, or something I'm tempted to call rougelite since we've fallen so far from the original design that boy is my face red.

Rougelites kinda drive me batty. Ha! Get it?

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.

DMC: Devil May Cry

I mentioned at the tail end of the Sonic wrap-up that very few 90s characters, mascots and their ilk, have survived as long as Sonic has. Although much emphasis is put on the value of 'the brand' insofar as doing remakes and reboots, very few brands actually hold up for all that long. The "Devil May Cry" series is an oughts brand, which lasted for what ultimately looks like 12 years, with this being the final game - at least for now - and one I don't think was especially well received. It's also a reboot, because reasons. REbootsons.

As I warbled on about in the Sonic reviews, I do not have much affection for "early 3d" games. I've actually never played a resident evil game, nor a tomb raider game, or Legacy of Kain or a myriad of other series born from the experimentation of this era. I've never touched a DMC game until this one either, and I'm pretty sure if I go through the list of games released around then I skipped a lot of them.

And a lot of the ones I did play I wish I could go back and un-play.

DMC is, to my understanding of genre nomenclature, generally discussed as a 'spectacle fighter' and may in many ways be the beginning of that genre, though I think far more popular is the God of War series which probably diverges heavily in terms of gameplay. I wouldn't know, since spoilers I haven't played God of War either. That has less to do with disliking 2005 era 3d games (lol) and more to do with the fact I've never owned a Sony console. I borrowed a Playstation to beat FFT, FF7 and FF8 but that's about it.

I didn't really go into DMC expecting much; the game isn't exactly a critical success and to my understanding killed the franchise, though that might be a bit harsh. On the other hand I'd read the game does some pretty interesting things in terms of storytelling, so that's sort of unexpected...

Odallus: the Dark Call

Nostalgia or "homage" driven game design is an interesting and oft-times frustrating way of building games for the end user. I've often thought about what defines the niche, and from there, whether or not I'm complaining about something most of the niche enjoys or if it's just something they piled into the game because they could.

Odallus: the Dark Call wears its retro styling in big bright pixels on its sleeve. The game resembles a visually superior Castlevania 2. Yes, that Castlevania. The one you're not supposed to mention. Look at that sentence and look at the paragraph above, and you can start to wonder what I was worried about when I picked this up in a bundle a couple weeks back.

But there's a lot of mechanics in Castlevania 2 that could be good or bad, right? Just as there's lots of mechanics in Sonic, or Shadow of the Beast, or the whole potential variety of retro gaming to draw from, including a lot of games I honestly can't remember even though I've probably played most of them.

And draw from it does, in fact. Odallus feels like a mish-mash of themes and homages jumbled together, all drawn in with an almost Berserk like overtone and pixel graphics with a sweet "television" filter that makes it look super retro in a way pixels along rarely convey fully.

The result? Well, let's see...

Bad gaming: Bound by Flame

So back in like February or whatever I was planning around doing a March bad games month while doing various RPGs and the like. Then I played more than a few bad games, in a row, and just felt exhausted with gaming. It turns out in order to play bad games, you need to have played good games. Too many bad games and you just hate gaming.

Bound by Flame was on the bad games list, but I didn't work up the energy to get down to it until April, and even then this game... Well, it has a Mixed rating on Steam and that's often for a reason. There's lots of games on Steam that get an unfair rap, and lots that get a gushy rating when they're nothing special, but straight to the point I would say this game definitely earns its Mixed rating. And yeah, I realize I played this in April... I tried replaying it recently and it's just a no-go. So this is a review written in april of a game I was so frustrated with I didn't get to it until now.

Bound by Flame is sort of the generic behind the back action roleplaying game we're all quite accustomed to at this point. I think comparing it to the Witcher is incredibly fair, as the game feels like a discount store version of the Witcher 2. This isn't to say the game is innately awful, but it shares a lot of the jank in writing and tone that makes the Witcher charming. Here it sort of works, sort of doesn't.

The basic story is there's a bunch of rather untoward cold-fueled undead and you're a mercenary protecting a band of researchers at the 'temple on top of the world'. The undead don't look or act anything like the warcraft Scourge, if you're wondering, or at least they don't early on. You end up - I guess this is a minor spoiler, but it is on the box - disrupting their ritual and have a demon stuck in your soul.

See, they're cold undead, so you fight cold undead with a fiery demon. There's a bit of witcher in there, but taken to the next level and I'm going to say I actually like the core thrust of the fiction even. I want to like this game.

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

There are a fair number of mascot, high profile games that define or defined a genre that you see surprisingly few clones or at least attempts at. For all the complaining about Darksiders being a 'zelda clone' (whatever) you really don't see many others in spite of it being a pillar franchise for an entire console. There's not really many Megaman clones - not precisely, not really - and very few Sonic clones. There are lots of platformers, of course, but of those very few really live up to Sonic or Mario. They're all brownity torture platformers that don't really have the same crisp, refreshing feel of those games.

(I've always been, as a total aside, completely baffled by the treatment of a lot of mascots and their games. Sonic is obviously the most confusing one, where they seemingly just toss out random garbage to weaken the brand, but it feels like the recent efforts in Starfox and Metroid are just baffling. Metroid especially. Metroidvanias have a market, Metroid has a market, Nintendo has ... Never mind)

Oceanhorn is ostensibly a zelda clone, or something, although I haven't played enough recent Zelda games to pretend I'm much of an expert on the matter. It is a Zeldalike more toward the charm and simple puzzle solving, also it has boats and I feel like there's some major Zelda games that had boats. It is otherwise a charming, colorful game about a boy with a sword and a shield and he has bombs and hearts.

Yay.

Bad Gaming, maybe: Sacred 3

One of the interesting things to me about living in this "accursed millennial age" is the outlook people have on sequels, reboots, remakes and that weird thing where Doom4, which is a sequel to Doom64 and not Doom3, was just titled Doom in spite of referencing Doom. which is weird. But the thing that interests me is the fact people complain a great deal about it happening, but usually the complaining doesn't actually matter. It most cases people who complain are invested fans. You think the people who lined up to buy Doom 3, who later complained about "the flashlight" (hint: light the darkness with the shotgun like a proper doom slayer) didn't come back for more when Doom came out? Yeah, they did. They complain then they buy.

In Sacred 3's case, it seems to have done so. This is pretty unique to me.

I haven't played Sacred 1 or 2, but I have played Sacred Citadel, which was a button mashing pretty decent side-scrolling brawler. It wasn't exactly stellar, and I think I reviewed it at a C grade a couple years back, but it was decent enough at being what it was. It had bright colorful art and a silly, vibrant style that matched up with it well. It was a humorous game, in that janky european way, so that and that alone colors my expectations.

Meanwhile Sacred 3's rating on Steam is ... Man, it is bad. It is "Mostly Negative" which is a pretty low bar. I mean, for example, Bound by Flame is "Mixed" and Blood Knights is "Mixed" as well. Both of those are janky, weird games, and Sacred 3's rating is far lower. I mean that is bad, that is hobo in a greasefire bad.

So when the humblest of bundles ran a Deep Silver 2 bundle, which put Sacred 3 with all the DLC up for a $1. And some other games, most of them I already have. So yeah, $1 to see this "mostly negative" disaster? Sounds like a plan!

Top down days: Hammerwatch

There is a terrible feeling when I look over my Steam collection.

It isn't the biggest backlog in history or something, but I'm at something like 200 games tried out of 1200 games. That's nice. What isn't nice is realizing I had bought a game I wanted to play, and then forgot to play it for a long time due to it falling into that giant pit of unplayed games. It's an unpleasant abyss.

Hammerwatch is one of those games. I got back in ... It looks like 2014? Yeesh, is that seriously right, that's brutal. Back logs are the most first world problem not involving purse dogs or speculating on ebay sales, but it's still kinda dismal when you flip through the Badge page and realize you've been playing games you're not exactly too impressed with instead of games with Very Positive scores and pretty consistent reviews.

It's also really bad when you go over how many games you've played from six months of the Humble Monthly - which ain't cheap, after six months - and that is seriously at a whooping 1/30 or something. Ok that's worse.

But I did finally manage to play Hammerwatch

Surprisingly good: Super Panda Adventures

I've been preparing over the last few weeks for the Steam Sale. Years ago this would involve putting come amount of money in my steam wallet via credit card, which you should always do ahead of time so you don't miss a deal, and then fixing up my wishlist to reflect what I actually want. I don't do this overly much nowadays, since I have way too much of a back log. Nowadays I just try to push through some of the games-that-drop cards, then buy gifts.

Regardless, if you have Steam enhanced installed, you can sort steam by Highest Drop Value. Super Panda Adventures was reliably in the upper section, taunting me to give it a try. Ironically, SPA is a lot of things I didn't really expect it was going to be. For one thing, it is actually a bit Metroidvania, though the levels are unfortunately not interconnected. You do backtrack, though, and the levels have multiple exits that feel surprisingly open. The game's art and play actually reminds me of the "tertiary" platformers of the early 90s, stuff more like Bonk's Adventure and Keith Courage, than mainstays the early Castlevania or Mario.

The game definitely feels some influence from those games, don't get me wrong, but it feels like a big fat mixing pot of platformers of all kinds stewed together with that slightly jank oddness that is indie development. It is what you expect, on the most part, with a little bit of what you don't expect. For another thing, because I implied there was more than one, it's actually a pretty solid little title that I found way more enjoyable than I was expecting.

I mean frankly "indie" plus "platformer" is generally "headache" in my mind.

They actually removed THQ from the credits: Warhammer 40k Space Marine

My personal relationship with Warhammer, and more specifically 40k, is a cliche tale. Almost generic. I played back in the late 90s, probably like 98 or somewhere around there, when the game was in its second edition and I have no idea what fantasy was like. There's a legion of people out there like me, who played a year or two, had some fun with the game then moved on with their life. In the same way there's no end of thirty something Transformers fans like me - manchildren who reconnected with the franchise at some point - there's no end of late twenties to late thirties dudes who remember the good times with Warhammer.

40k is patently ridiculous, and ridiculous with patents (look up the stuff about Games Workshop vs Chapterhouse, it's absurdity in action) but that is a big part of its charm. When done well, it carries itself with just enough of a smirk that the insanity doesn't register as the capricious nihilism and you can still, well, have fun with it. It's sort of like a crazy heavy metal van. Done well, and it's ridiculously cool, done poorly and much like the van it just feels ... Like bad things are coming.

Relic on the most part had a pretty good, but not great, handle on 40k. There were a lot of points where it largely felt in Dawn of War like they wanted to put their own spin on things but couldn't quite get there. Relic might still have the GW license now, I don't really know, given their wikipedia article is out of date and who largely cares. Games Workshop itself is now something of a joke, coasting on that positive energy but making no further gains as a company. I'm sure in 15 years whoever is building the best "formative years" brand will be coasting by as they are. Maybe that's privateer press, maybe not.

ya I noticed

As an old man thinking about getting back into painting miniatures, I can tell you Games Workshop is priced to the point of absurdity, but anyway, back to vidya games.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine is Relic's attempt to branch out into other genres than just endless rehashes of RTS scenarios that, I think, sort of fell out of favor with the rise of the crippling might that is f2p MOBA games. You can sort of respect the attempt, innately, but you can also seriously begin to wonder how it's going to go.

Much less hard to love this reset: Shadow Warrior (2013)

When I first installed this game, I had difficulty getting it to run, with a distinct audio clipping, and ended up giving up on trying to figure it out and just idled the cards off it. I don't remember if the menu option for 'XP mode' was always available, but I tried clicking it and bam the game works just fine, although it seems like load times might be a little worse. So the time above is a little past what I've actually played of the game.

Flying Hog are the guys behind Hard Reset, which I reviewed back here. Long story short, I didn't really fall in love with Hard Reset as I had hoped, instead finding the game sort of a mishmash of elements I really liked and elements I intensely disliked. That being said, indie titles from guys just getting together for the first time often have sharp edges that another game or an expansion will smooth the edges off. Shadow Warrior is the same basic genre, and possibly much the same engine, but built off the idea of taking one of the worst racist stereotypes in 90s gaming and treating it seriously.

Man, is that weird or what? Duke Nukem was and is sort of a mess, but the original Shadow Warrior was just creepy racism wrapped around Duke Nukem and the build engine. I'd heard it was quite good, but I've also heard if you're over 15 you tend to cringe a little too much for all the casual racism.

Shadow Warrior (2013) may or may not feel racist to individuals of actual Japanese background; I'm not going to pretend all the art and shinto stylings in the game might not do so, so you'll forgive me if I'm wrong. But as a white dude playing a game about a Japanese doom action hero named Lo Wang, it feels like a very legitimate attempt, albeit with some very trope visual choices. Lo Wang himself actually comes off as a very Deadpool character, in fact, with a little wiggling and a few small changes you could probably have made this in a Deadpool's adventures in glorious Nippon FPS game instead.

Kicking it Old School: Double Dragon Neon

80s nostalgia is pretty funky at times, with some games endlessly referenced as glorious masterpieces and others often forgotten. Castlevania for example comes up a lot, and I'd be the first to admit I've brought it up, but hilariously I think it might actually be well known not because Castlevania itself is a classic (which it is, but) however because the second game was so bad and the series kept going for quite a few years until I think recently fizzling out. Perceptions of what is "enduring" often seems to rotate around how the series continued into not longer being marketable.

I'd really like an Altered Beast indie game, on that note. Can someone get on that? Simple platforming, measured methodical pace, turn into a dragon? You'd think with the rise of furry games on Steam this would have a built in market. Maybe one of the modes could be, I don't know, a unicorn? Bam. Dollars.

Regardless, Double Dragon is remembered but I think it might be remembered due to being referenced or being in movies or other general things. (You got fifty thousand on Double Dragon??)  It's strange, it's like nostalgia only sort of works nowadays if people keep bringing it back up. Feels like I live in a generation where people are real eager to go 'so do you remember...' Double Dragon: Neon, however, is basically the 80s revival you want for every franchise you ever loved even if you never thought about Double Dragon. Like Altered Beast. And Sonic the Hedgehog.

I went there.

Neon is beautifully referential and direly tongue in cheek but quite concerned with being a fun game, which adds far more to the actual validity of the game for me than all the nostalgia in the world. It does use the fact it is homaging to punch a woman in the gut in the opening, but I guess if there's a way to justify brawling through legions of dudes, it's the fact they punched your girlfriend in the gut?

I honestly could have done without that, reference or not.