Moot's been on a fucking tear!  Moreso than usual anyway.  

I never knew (or perhaps forgot about) Streets of Rage 2 on Master System.  Dodgy port aside, I'm dirty I never got it for christmas in primary school tbh.

Been tempted with that Pang Adventures a few times.

51. Splatterhouse 2 - Megadrive (1hr)

I've dabbled with this in the past, but I don't think I made it much further than the infamous hanging devil babies.  For a retro run this is a very specific type of ride, as I spotted precisely zero randomness in the whole thing.  It's very much the Wardner of scrolling beat 'em ups (I know I mention that game a lot these days, but I have a special love for it after replaying it recently).  It's basic, it's extremely harsh in places but if you're willing to learn the patterns it's doable.

It's got chunky sprites, a nice early Megadrive feel to the whole shebang and a weird pose if you press up that makes Not-Jason look like he's weeing.  Good stuff, doesn't really stand up without a specific pair of rose tint lenses, but I had a blast and I'll play no.3 at some point.  78%  

Batman Returns is brilliant, glad you liked it.

The MD version of the '89 Batman is meant to be good, although I doubt it tops the NES game.

Splatterhouse 3 is more like a traditional scrolling beat em up if I'm remembering correctly. I think it got a bit of a poor reception from fans because of it.

From 2019....

Batman: The Videogame - Megadrive

Saw this in the Kim Justice top 100 MD list and realised I'd only ever seen screenshots of it, or possibly played it briefly.  Was surprised to see it looked a bit like a Batman skinned Vigilante.  Turns out there's more to it than than that, chiefly some 8-bit to 16-bit crossover zone platforming, which is a struggle to get used to at first.  The more I played the more I realised it's not as terrible as it first appears but it took a while to retrain myself to be comfortable with the mile-wide nasty streak.  With patience even the trickier sections can be bested by mortals although a couple of stages in particular left me wondering where I'd be without save states (both vehicle bits for a start).  Bosses are simplistic in a good old fashioned 'work out the specific weakness and do that' way.  One stood out in particular as it requires you to face away from it and jump over a flurry of advancing blows before catching it with a batfist on your way down.  Took a while to get to grips with the pattern for that.   Clearly nothing to write home about in 2019 but I'm pretty au fait with the era so I'm happy to hang my hat on this being a minor belter in 1990.  [7].

Wish I had Covid.

There’s something about those CHUNKY sprite games that instantly puts me off and makes me think it’s going to be crap. I’ve got no idea why this mental association has formed. Was it easier to do big sprites therefore more likely to reflect a game that had had less effort put into it?

Splatterhouse 2 I remember as being one of those ones I wanted but it got a terrible review in (I think) Mean Machines Sega. Rented it a few years later iirc. All I remember from it is the pissing.

It’s possible larger sprites on older hardware means less power left over for the things going on around the character.

I think I gave that a 6 too. Flawed, but much better than you'd expect.

Got my eye on Mayhem Brawler when it gets a proper discount. Played the demo on Xbox, it's a cheap copycat SOR4. Was doing plenty right.

A game I'll never play that I enjoy reading opinions on.  If I try a 3D Souls type it'll be Sekiro or a 60fps Bloodborne.  Congrats on the new job.

52. Eldest Souls - Switch (8hrs 3mins, one billion deaths)

Finished this last night and I still can't decide quite what to make of it.  It does many things very well, but the missteps cause massive bleed damage to any sentence that might start with the word 'overall'.  

I love boss rush games.  Furi, Shadow of the Colossus and Cuphead are crackers. I'll include the three home console Punch-Out games as I reckon they fit the bill in hindsight, and they're all fantastic.  I wish Titan Souls was too, but I'll mention it rather than include it as I settled on a pretty mean [7] for that in the end.  This is one of them, but with added SOULS, I guess.  There are a relatively small number of guardians you'll have to beat en route to the credits, with no enemies in the areas between.  To successfully take them down you'll most likely lose a vast number of lives while learning their patterns (or double down on cheese mode, more on that later). 

My route to the end game was as follows: one shotted the first boss like a boss (although it's a glorified training session tbf).  Bested the second one on maybe my 5th attempt.  Got stuck on the third boss for what felt like two full hours, finally beat it.  Got stuck on the fourth boss for another ninety minutes.  Got stuck on the next boss for another ninety minutes.  Decided to tackle them in a different order, beat the new fifth boss in ten minutes or so.  Returned to the ice guy that was giving me gyp, obliterated him immediately.  Found another boss and wrecked it in two attempts.  Struggled a bit with the next boss - for twenty mins or so - then found the final boss and took my wife's name out of his mouth (metaphorically speaking) in three or four attempts.  This now looks like a paragraph where I stumbled around looking for my trumpet for a while then proceeded to blow it for ages; I'm actually trying to highlight the strange difficulty curve/balancing issues.  In graph form, that's an unusual roadblock, no?  As this is my 52nd game of the year, here's one I made earlier:



I'm not convinced that represents a balanced game.  The problem is caused by the fact that every time you defeat a guardian you can add an extra perk to one of three skill trees in the menu (only one discipline can be focused on at a time), buffing your stats in some way.  In theory this makes sense, as the shot in the arm is designed to help you with the presumably tougher subsequent battles.  But for me there was a clear point where the perks stacked the odds in my favour and the finely crafted git gud stuff imploded and opened the door for an outdated Leeroy Jenkins reference.  I even said in the Currently Playing thread how neatly this game handles its difficulty, as you can't brute force anything (and you really can't, early on), but with one particular bloodthirst perk you really can, to the point where it gets a bit silly.  Of course I could have chosen not to double down on what I considered to be a whopping exploit, but without it the later bosses - which are technically trickier - felt incredibly annoying, so I kept using it.  
TLDR: There's a huge question mark over balancing issues in this game, and I think they fudged some of the finer details.  In my head BOSS DIFFICULTY and USEFULNESS OF PERKS are just two sliders on a giant control panel that need to be fiddled with by the devs a little bit until they meet somewhere agreeable, kind of like a good example of a handshake deal in Theme Park.  As it stands they don't converge/complement each other correctly imo.  Or rather they do, up to the point where one starts to massively outpace the other.

Performance-wise this hangs in menus, which is annoying, and the skill trees/item slot stuff is needlessly convoluted (with minimal explanation).  You need a grappling hook to get over this early game gap, but there's no reason to ever use it again.  More annoyingly, character movement is incredibly slow.  Granted, he's carrying a whopping great sword and it's probably heavy, but the in between boss sections are a chore simply because he moves like a church, as my dad would say (which I recently realised isn't actually an idiom, it's just a weird phrase he uses).  You can locate a trinket to speed the character a little but an item hunt to bump walking speed to an acceptable level is a bit much.  

I've highlighted a lot of what I perceive to be faults here.  To the point where I've talked myself down from an [8] to a [7] I think.  Probably reads like a [6], right?  I often find the 'almost' games the most infuriating to play/sum up, and this is the biggest nearly since my Below/Flinthook double whammy last year.  For the most part this is a meticulously crafted boss rush with an extremely individual combat system that works.  Despite my issues with it I really enjoyed it, especially the first half, and the £11 I paid seems reasonable.  With a few kinks ironed out and a couple of knob tweaks it could have been superb though.  Overall it's decent despite half a page of moaning, so I'm going with a final answer of [7.5]

One more thing quickly.  This game has no sense of humour whatsoever.  It's incredibly po-faced.  Which is absolutely fine, but the ending stuck out like a sore thumb.  I'd just spent 8hrs chipping away at a lovely looking pixel art adventure, then WHAM, this Sticklebrick monstrosity appeared.  From 2:26 here.  MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT.



All that was missing was a kid playing the Jurassic Park theme on a recorder.  What the fuck is this about?  It's such a disconnect from the painstakingly odious beauty of the rest of the game.  When did cut-scenes in contemporary games have the pixels that could take an eye out?  What era is that an homage to?  It looks like a Neo Geo Pocket game with mumps.

You should join an FNF one week, that’s where the game truly shines.

It defaults to online, but you can switch to offline.

I’ve been doing some of the seasonal stuff tonight, there are a couple of really good tracks that people have made (although one of them may trigger some Hotwheels PTSD).

Did another at random to complete the daily challenge, someone built an entire traditional Japanese village in Mexico for you to race around. I was pretty impressed.

Good write up, that - should really give Strikers another go.