10. Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius (SNES) - 1hr 20mins 

The fourth Parodius game overall and the third and final release on the SNES, or Super Famicom technically as this never left Japan. It is also the only game in the series built from the ground up for the hardware, as oppose the the other two being ports of the arcade games.

It's more of the same, but sometimes that's all you need. Everything here is dialled up from the first two SNES games thanks largely to the inclusion of the SA-1 chip. The title roughly translates to Chatting Parodius Live! which is fitting as there are a large amount of voice samples in the game. I obviously have no idea what he is saying, but there is a Japanese guy shouting quite frequently throughout the game, seemingly commentating on what's happening onscreen. 

There is an option to turn this off so you can appreciate the music, which is very wecome as just like the previous games the music is fantastic, with a remix of That's the Way by K.C. and the Sunshine Band being a highlight.

I'm gonna have to pinch moots gif idea here, just to show off this boss:


Bloody marvellous.

8/10

My list

That girder swing is massively enjoyable even in gif form.

I'm not even sure there are dozens of us, but welcome. Interested to hear what you make of it, speed boost aside.

Is the Castlevania dlc its own thing or does it just get incorporated into the existing Dead Cells stages + new ones? Is it possible to just have a Castlevania run? Loved DC eventually but I think I've had my fill of the main game.

I bought and started this the other day. Played a couple of hours and crashed when a bird got stuck going across a river. I closed it all down and started again and was put back to about an hour in. The hour they expected me to play again wasn’t particularly good the first time so yeah, away it goes. Seemed quite charming up to that point.

Yeah, there was so much that wasn’t explained at all - even down to the controls tbh. It didn’t seem like a purposeful From-style work it out yerself thing either. More an oversight, which judging from my limited time with the thing, seems about right.

Nice, it's a toss up between that an Inscryption for my next modern game then.

12: Dredge (Switch) 8/10

This gorgeous little creepy fishing simulator is a real treat, and pretty much just what I was hoping from it.  The fishing stuff is fantastic in and of itself so I was glad the scary/threatening bits weren't too overbearing.  I would totally play this if that stuff wasn't included at all.  

It's a joy to look at and watch your little boat floating around, seeing an island off on the horizon and wondering if you can make it there before nightfall, or if you're better off going back to dock and planning out your trip for tomorrow.  There's plenty of different fish to catch and items to upgrade your boat with, and kooky people to meet.  The actual fishing is pretty basic and you can't go too wrong.  It's mostly about planning your day out and figuring what you want to achieve.  

There's really not too much wrong with it, but I would say the menu system needs a rethink; it's very clumsy, and I wish the map was more handier.  I can't be arsed remembering where I found something!

72. Aliens - Arcade (<30mins)

Konami belt scrolling blaster that's content with being a flyweight experience because it has the license to back it up.  Instead of close quarters combat you weild a plasma rifle, which can be fired horizontally from a standing or crouched position.  Alongside the standard stages there are into the screen boss fights, flat 2D side scrolling sections (with three way fire) and super scaler style special stages.  Along the way you'll be blasting standard aliens, facehuggers, bigger versions of the standard aliens, differently coloured versions of the standard aliens and an alien queen.  Luckily Konami went wild with poetic license so there are also things like zombies, giant mobile brains in jars, screen-filling monstrosities and half a dozen hybrid xenomorphs.  The design choices mostly came out alright.  Mostly.  Every now and then (well, twice) you'll stumble across a loader you can jump in do deal some delicious double damage.  These bits don't play well, but you get to jump in a loader and deal double damage, so it's still a win.  Playable characters are girl who might be Ripley (P1) and guy who might be Hicks (P1).  Other than the sprite they're identical afaik.  You can't jump, so aside from brief diversions it's just walk and shoot until credits, without much in the way of crowd control or tactics.  

Not a great game then, but I bet it was a great way to spend a pocketful of 20p's in 1990.  It doesn't last long enough for its flaws to take the shine off the whole alien(s) thing, and it would've surely been one of the most tempting cabinets in any arcade at the time.  [4 out of 6]



73. Alien3: The Gun - Arcade (30mins)

You'd probably assume that playing a lesser-known 30yr old Sega lightgun rails shooter without a lighgun would be an absolute disaster, but I definitely didn't hate my time with this.  Admittedly the quirky visuals and Alien licence were the main draw - it has a weird pseudo 3D look which is mainly achieved through the use of flat sprites and scaling effects.  To the untrained eye it's horrific, but for those who lived through the rapid switch from 2D to 3D in the early-mid 90s there's clearly something here that would've have had undeniable clout for at least a fortnight in the ulta-specific sweet spot of 1993.  It's either hideous or beautiful - choose your poison wisely - but whichever way you slice it it's a very individual (and oh-so of its time) look.  It plays okay too, to an extent, and some of the music is excellent.  Sega basically gave Alien3 the T2: The Arcade Game treatment with this, but tried to tech flex a little in the process.  It's got big bowling alley energy, so I'll give it its dues with a [3.5 out of 6].  If I'd played this at the time on a loud cabinet with two oversized swivelling uzis attached I reckon I would've been reluctant to start knocking down pins, regardless of whose birthday it was. 

My chosen gif won't display, so have two jpegs:





74. X-Men - 32X (45mins)

Part tech demo part scrapped game, this was the holy grail of gaming for me once upon a time and I was flabbergasted to find it among the 32X roms on the SuperConsoleX3+.  I literally wrote to magazines about this game, having foolishly got swept up in the 'affordable entry point to the next gen' mushroom add-on hype (admittedly only really perpetrated by the official Sega magazine, the swines).  Letters page retroactive spoiler: the answer to 'is X-Men still coming out on the 32X?' was something along the lines of 'probably not lol'.  And nor was Wing War, the cunts.

So why was I desperate for an X-Men game?  I'd never read any of the comics, rarely (if ever) watched the cartoon and didn't even recognise the chap strutting around in screenshots (Bishop, apparently).  It can be summed up in three words really: 'Zyrinx' and 'texture mapping'. 

Tackling the Zyrinx part first then.  A bunch of talented programmers who had previously been involved in the Amiga demo scene worked on two Mega Drive games published by Scavenger inc.  The first was Sub-Terrania, a brilliant Thrust style gravity based shooter released in 1994, and the second was Red Zone, which cemented itself as one of my favourite games ever for ages.   The B&B Retro Club thread pretty much proved it to be a game you had to be there for (the overwhelming consensus in there a decade or so back was 'meh', iirc), but if you were there, and went in hard on the copter/overhead shooter hybrid shtick in '94, it was absolutely wonderful.  The mags cottoned on to its charms - it received 94% and 93% in the two most prominent Sega mags iirc - so it's not a deeeep dive hidden gem, but it was hardly a household name, even at the time.  We're not here to talk about Red Zone, unfortunately, but in terms of LOOK WHAT MY MEGA DRIVE CAN DO that game was a whopper.  Thankfully I also enjoyed the way it played, the well-pitched but brutal difficulty and - perhaps most importantly - the music, which is up there with the Koshiro scores for 16-bit bangers imo.  It's all the work of Jesper Kydd, who's made a bit of a name for himself in the intervening years, but he's never dropped a better track than Datarum.  The way he builds and layers tracks to avoid falling into the trap of repetition, oh boy.  Along with a team called Lemon (eventually responsible for Amok on the Saturn, where Zyrinx went to to release Scorcher), Zyrinx coded a 32X tech demo that did the rounds at the time and gave gullible numpties such as myself a (lens flare) light at the end of the tunnel.  I can't embed YouTube vids there days, so here's a link.  Flat shaded, gouraud shaded, texture mapped?  You want 'em we got 'em.  Swoon.  They probably even had BUMP MAPPING in the locker.  This might be why I enjoyed Motorhead so much on PS1, because if you squinted it could've been a Scavenger game.

Which leads me into the texture maps thing.  We all wanted polygons at the time, but flat shaded polygons went from being flavour of the month to undesirable roughly as quickly as Spliffy jeans.  Texture mapped polygons were the future, and all half dozen of the 32X owning cognescenti really had was a hobbled but smooth DOOM port, a terribly insensitive (*shakes fist*) April Fool's joke in the OSM regarding VR Deluxe and Daytona, and the 12-15fps glory of Metal Head, which I pretty much only played (repeatedly) because of the ermahgerd taxture mops thing.  Screenshots of X-Men started to appear in magazines at the same time as beans were being spilled over the secret tech demo, and all of a sudden the future didn't look quite so extinguished.  

Of course it quietly disappeared almost immediately, along with another Scavenger 32X game called Heavy Machinery.  The latter seems to be lost to the sands of time, but I distinctly remember the American magazine Diehard Gamefan covering it a few times, and possibly even reviewing it (memory is hazy on this - I could check the loft I guess but there's still rat shit up there).  All that seems to exist now is some fuzzy VHS footage, but the game was clearly some way into development.  Probably further along than the game I'm supposed to be reviewing now, tbh.  Unscrupulous mags tended to jump the gun like that sometimes.  Sega Power once reviewed Street Fighter II: Champion Edition on the MD (with unsightly black borders behind the energy bars and no turbo speed settings), which obviously went back into development and became Special Champion Edition, yet somehow escaped without much egg on their face because there wasn't an internet rabble poised to duff them up in 1993. 

Anyway, enough tangents.  X-Men.  It's terrible.  It's a lot closer to a tech demo than an actual game, although in fairness there were worse games available at the time.  I'm not convinced the foundations are malleable enough to be turned into anything approaching decent though, so this is just a barely playable curio really, full of placeholder ideas and not much else.  Guide your massive Bishop through texture mapped corridors, bashing pre-rendered ninjas and clockwork fairies(?).  On the plus side, the soundtrack has clearly been provided by Jesper Kydd again, and even if some of it is just off-cuts from 'The Red Zone Sessions', which it could quite possibly be, it slaps hard in places.  Love that deep industrial clang Yamaha sound.  So in summary, I doubt this is genuinely worth anyone's time (there are six levels available and I plodded through them all), but hopefully I've explained why I was like a pig in shit wading through this turd last night.  Off the bucket list it goes.  I still can't believe it was in the folder.

75. Bucky O'Hare - Arcade (45mins)

The more I play these a Konami scrolling beat 'em ups the more I realise I'm not a massive fan.  They know what to do with a licence to draw in the coins, but they tended to put a lot more care into doing the source material justice than making genuinely good videogames.  Their licensed brawlers are all a bit flimsy really, and without the sights, sounds and smells of an arcade, or the wide-eyed wonder of a 10yr old, they're often a wee bit tedious to play to completion in 2023.  I enjoyed Aliens further up the page, but that got a pass because Aliens.  Similar deal with the OG Turtles game (which really was quite a spectacularly wonderful thing in 1990). Ymmv on the merits of the character/universe, but this is Bucky O'Hare, minus his theme tune, so it didn't exactly start with a free pass for me, and for 1992 the gameplay is pretty monotonous. You can walk, fire, jump and jump kick, plus each character has two specials and a close range attack, but that's it.  Factor in the typically unfair bosses and the fact that the flying kicks aren't as effective as you'd expect from a 4-player Konami cab and you can see why this starts to wobble midway through its 40-odd minute runtime.  There's some variety in the stages, sure, but the core doesn't offer much mechanically.  It's certainly not one I settled into any sort of groove with anyway, and these games thrive on the groove, man.  

It looks great, as you'd expect from Konami for this sort of thing at the time.  Maybe Bucky was a bigger deal than I remember, but to all intents and purposes they've put as much effort into making this look the part as they did with TMN/HT, The Simpsons or Asterix.  So top marks for that, clearly. It also sounds great and has some fully voiced (and nifty looking) cutscenes. I used the phrase 'pretty monotonous' in the previous paragraph, and if you put a forward slash between the two words that's yer nutshell review.

[2.5 out of 6].  I'm not saying don't play it (the blurb in Go Straight certainly suggests you do) especially as the shooter element is quite rare for the genre, but I would say try to play it with at least one other player, and definitely don't play it solo.  

Ftr, before I get an earful of righteous indignation from Nick, the NES Bucky game was legit.  

76. Tetris Effect - Xbox One S 

I'm phenomenally bad at Tetris, so I was mainly there to provide moral support really, but Mrs. Moot & I (sometimes just her in cheeky late night solo sessions) played through the journey mode of this and success in at least three of the stages was all my own work.  I got fed up with trying after a while, as it turns out backseat Tetris coaching is fucking annoying - as is my play style, it seems* - so I dared not touch the pad, but I reckon I participated in enough to know that this does what it's supposed to do very well.  I thought I'd hate the soundtrack but I really didn't, and the uplifting synthesia stuff really does give this entry a boost.  Horses for courses, but I don't see why this is considered as a bit of a poster child for VR - I played a timed demo on PSVR a few years back and it added nothing to the experience for me.  The beauty of the game is its simplicity, surely, and strapping a headset on to essentially play the exact same game (albeit with distracting pyrotechnics?) isn't for me, and definitely isn't what I'd call a good case for the merits of VR.  No idea where this stands on the Tetris scale but it's the best one I've tried since the GB effort.  [9] seems fair.  The tiny play window did annoy me, although after about two hours of play we realised you can zoom in with the left sick.  It's no Bust A Move 2/Baku Baku Animal, but personal preferences aside you can't deny the brilliance of the block drop GOAT, and it's in rude health here.   



*Note how I resisted the urge to drop in an outdated Leeroy Jenkins reference.

I'm potentially checking out of scanning and the evil that it bodes, so there was only one course of action really...

Never thought I'd get to actually play it. If I can find the deleted scene from the 1990 TMNT movie where Leonardo twists his mask around and beats up his brothers blinfolded (after Splinter telepathically teaches him true mastery of ninja mindfulness) the key missing pieces of my youth will be complete. It was in the comic of the film and it was in the novella of the film, so it must have existed in an early edit surely.

I'm not as fussed about the scene where Kyle Reese steals a pizza in The Terminator book-of-the-film (which I assume was in an early edit too as the Cyberdyne building reveal was in there at the end, and eventually included in the dvd cut iirc), but I'd watch it.

Scotland has two teams now?

Ooh that pic looks sumptuous.  Beautiful pixel graphics.