One of the best things about the 8-bit age was the prolific public domain scene, with many high-quality pieces of software being published in listing format in magazines.

One US publication that was particularly prolific in this regard was ANALOG (Atari Newsletter And Lots Of Games), which regularly published commercial-quality machine code programs for readers to type in, save to disk or cassette and enjoy at their leisure.

Today’s game hails from those hallowed pages. I give you Bacterion! The Plague of 2369. Nice.

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

When you’ve developed a successful franchise, the natural thing to do with a sequel is to throw everything that made the previous games good out the window and try something completely different.

I’m being facetious, but this is actually something Nintendo has done more than once over the course of several of its classic series’ lifetimes. Sometimes it works indisputably well — few people would consider the reskinned Doki Doki Panic that we Westerners know as Super Mario Bros. 2 to be a “bad” game, for example, despite how different it was from its predecessor.

Sometimes, though, we get something like Donkey Kong 3, and no-one is quite sure what to make of it. And that’s kind of why I really, really like it.

Donkey Kong 3 first released in 1983, two years after we first met Mario (then known as Jumpman) and the titular giant ape, and one year after we turned the tables on the moustachio’d menace as Donkey Kong Jr. It released almost simultaneously for arcades and the Nintendo Family Computer in Japan, but didn’t head West until 1986.

In Donkey Kong 3, you take on the role of Stanley, an exterminator who has been called in to deal with a bit of a pest problem. Not only do there appear to be swarms of angry Beespies and Buzzbees in the local greenhouse, there’s also a bloody great ape hanging from the ceiling doing his best to provoke them. It’s up to Stanley to deal with this problem once and for all. And then deal with it again. And again. And again.

The game’s arcade roots are immediately apparent in its structure. This is very much an early ’80s arcade game in that you’re just expected to keep playing until you can’t survive any longer. There’s no end to it; you just play and play and play in an attempt to beat the high score. Despite the fact that the same can be said of both previous Donkey Kong games also, it feels particularly apparent in Donkey Kong 3 due to the fact that individual stages can potentially be quite short.

All you need to do to win a stage, you see, is shoot Donkey Kong repeatedly up the arse until he disappears off the top of the screen. Every so often, you’ll have the opportunity to acquire a super bug spray which makes this task much easier with longer-range, faster shots — and its duration carries over between levels, meaning you can potentially clear two or three stages in the space of five seconds or less if you’re quick about it.

This becomes more challenging as the game progresses, of course, and that’s where the various enemies come in. At the start of each stage, Donkey Kong rattles the beehives at the top of the screen, releasing the boisterous bastards and beginning the action. At this point, you need to start prioritising what to do: do you concentrate on filling Kong’s bumhole with insecticide, or do you attempt to score some sneaky points by shooting down the bees as well?

Just to make matters even more interesting, some of the bees will attempt to steal the five flowers at the bottom of the screen. Keep all of these safe until you get rid of Kong on that stage and you’ll get a hefty bonus — perfect for high score chasing. But keeping an eye on this, naturally, distracts from the main objective, so you need to try and strike a good balance between all the different things you’re there to do — and keeping yourself safe, of course, since being an early ’80s arcade game protagonist, Stanley is extremely fragile.

Donkey Kong 3 is actually loosely based on a Nintendo arcade title that predates even the original Donkey Kong: a little-known 1980 release known as Space Firebird. This is a Galaga–esque space shooter that, interestingly, actually predates Namco’s popular title by a year — though, of course, Galaga’s source material Galaxian came before them both.

In Space Firebird, the majority of the game consists of fending off waves of erratically flying, diving insectoid enemies, but of particular note was the fact that it had a “boss” confrontation if you performed well enough. Here, you would have to blast a pathway through a large, gradually descending enemy to hit a vulnerable point in the middle; the way you shoot Donkey Kong up the arse in Donkey Kong 3 is clearly inspired to a certain extent by this.

There are more subtle influences from Space Firebird at play too, though — most notably the behaviour of some of the enemies. For example, both games feature an enemy that takes several hits to destroy before exploding into dangerous shrapnel; in both cases, the only safe spot to destroy it from is directly underneath, and this isn’t always easy to remember in the heat of battle!

All sounds pretty fun, right? And it is! It’s just so radically different from the two prior Donkey Kong games that it’s understandable why some people might have found it a tougher sell than its predecessors — especially when coupled with the fact that by the time it released in the West, it was a very dated kind of game compared to many of its contemporaries. That was the year the world first saw Zelda and Metroid, to name but two incredibly high profile examples on home consoles, and meanwhile in the arcades we were treated to the technical wizardry of OutRun and the exciting espionage action of Rolling Thunder.

Looking back from a modern perspective gives us the luxury of considering Donkey Kong 3 on its own merits, however, and you might be surprised to find how well it holds up today. It’s extremely simple in both concept and execution, certainly, but it has an immediate, addictive quality about it that makes it ideal for quick pick-up-and-play sessions — or perhaps even impromptu high score contests with friends.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting piece of Nintendo history — and evidence that the company has never been afraid to be brave and experiment, even with its most high-profile franchises. Plus how many other games let you fill a gorilla’s rectal cavity with poisonous gases, all in the name of good family fun?

More about Donkey Kong 3

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

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Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

The time has finally come for Cao Pi to launch his rebellion against Da Ji and Orochi’s forces!

In today’s mission, we take Xiahou Dun out for a bit of a spin. This is a character that I know quite a few people who like a lot (at least partially for the “badass with eyepatch” thing he’s got going on), but I don’t have a ton of experience with him. Turns out he’s pretty fun!

Not many more missions to go now, and then we can finally leave Warriors Orochi behind… unless I decide to try and unlock all the characters, get all the personal items, get the best possible weapons and complete everything on Chaos difficulty, that is… mwehehehehe!

I’ve had at least one specific request to show Mirai some love while we’re in Senran Kagura season — and I know at least one other person who will appreciate her inclusion, too — so here you are: Mirai gets her turn in the spotlight this week.

As it happens, I was going to bring up Mirai anyway, as she is one of the more interesting members of the original Senran Kagura cast to me, and a character who has been popular among fans since the beginning.

Plus, y’know, I don’t want to get shot. Have you seen how much heat she’s packing underneath that big poofy dress?

Mirai first appeared in the original Senran Kagura games on 3DS, where she was introduced as an angry young woman with a much more youthful appearance than many of her peers, and a severe dislike of being ignored. Her Gothic Lolita-inspired fashion and Western-style umbrella certainly makes quite the impression… even more so when she reveals said umbrella to actually be concealing a firearm, which is her main means of attack.

Mirai grew up as someone who suffered greatly at the hands of bullies, which left her with severe self-esteem issues. She found it difficult to trust others and was extremely insecure about all aspects of herself — both mentally and physically.

Her greatest desire is to be taken seriously as a “proper lady”. In this regard, she looks up to her Crimson Squad comrade Haruka as something to aspire to — despite Haruka not exactly being the greatest role model an impressionable young girl could have. Well, actually, that’s not quite true; outside of the whole “sadistic mad scientist” side of her personality, Haruka is otherwise a refined, polite and confident young woman, and this side of things is certainly something worth looking up to. One should probably not pay too much attention to her tendency to drug her friends for her own amusement, however.

There are several factors contributing to Mirai’s belief that she is not yet a lady, chief among which is her physical stature. In contrast to most of the rest of the Senran Kagura cast, she is short, skinny and flat-chested, and this makes her feel like she’s still a little girl. This also makes people treat her like a little girl, and in turn this causes her to get angry and behave like a little girl, so the cycle tends to perpetuate itself.

Her anger is a defence mechanism she uses to push people away when she feels uncomfortable in a situation, but it doesn’t help her deal with her core problems. Similarly, her choice of weaponry in gameplay terms is a direct, metaphorical reflection of this; it’s quite literally very difficult to get close to Mirai!

Over time, she has come to understand that she can trust her close comrades in Homura’s Crimson Squad, and this allows her to feel somewhat more at ease with her existence. She still strives to better herself — and in Bon Appétit in particular she is shown to be doing whatever she can to achieve “womanhood” — but she knows that whatever happens, she has a group that she can rely on and a place that she can call home. Even if that place is a hideout in a cave.

Mirai also learns how to channel her emotions into something creative, much as Gessen’s Murakumo deals with her social anxiety through drawing manga. In Mirai’s case, she is a talented and popular online writer, whose works of fiction command a large and devoted audience. Some of the other cast members are aware of her “secret identity” (the one besides her being a shinobi, obviously, which they’re all aware of) but others are oblivious. In a reflection of the anonymous aspect of Japanese doujinshi culture, those who do know about Mirai’s writing tend not to reveal her identity themselves; it’s only through her coming forward herself that they discover the truth.

Mirai’s presentation in the series is extremely distinctive for a variety of reasons. We’ve already mentioned her large, elaborately ornamented Gothic Lolita-inspired dress — which is clearly designed to obscure her real figure as much as possible — but there are more subtle details that reveal things about her character too.

The fact she complements her already elaborate outfit with cat ears and a tail speaks to a somewhat whimsical side to her personality — perhaps a reflection of her creativity, or her “secret identity” on top of her shinobi status — and the fact that her default lingerie is a set of rather childish panties sporting a teddy bear on the butt demonstrates that there are certain parts of “childhood” she’s not quite willing to give up. This latter aspect is even addressed directly in Bon Appétit; when called out on this aspect of her fashion sense, she proudly proclaims that she wants to be the “first Super Lady in bear panties”.

Gothic Lolita fashion in Japan is regarded by some as an expression of counterculture and rebellion against the heteronormativity of Japanese gender and family roles. Others see it as a rejection of adulthood, since much of it is inspired by Victorian and Edwardian children’s dress. Others still see it as an attempt to escape from reality into a fantasy world, as Alice in Wonderland is often specifically cited as a source of inspiration for the fashion style.

All of these are certainly relevant to Mirai. In Bon Appétit, she discovers that her pursuit of “Super Lady” status would ultimately lead her to becoming the “mother” of the group, thereby reinforcing traditional gender roles, much to her chagrin. We’ve already talked about how she wishes to reject certain aspects of adulthood — such as grown-up underpants. And what is a writer if not someone who deliberately immerses themselves in fantasy worlds whenever possible?

There’s a “Lolita” connection in Mirai’s music, too; much of it is very obviously Russian-inspired — most apparent in her Bon Appétit track Classic Romance -A Woman in Her Prime- — and the original novel Lolita was written by a Russian-American author. While Gothic Lolita fashion may not appear to have a lot to directly do with Nabokov’s controversial work — aside from the associations with childhood — it is noteworthy that Nabokov was a fan of Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, and had translated that classic into Russian. A tenuous link, perhaps, but if nothing else, the Russian-inspired instrumentation and driving rhythms are very fitting for Mirai’s personality.

It’s hopefully apparent by now that, like most other characters in Senran Kagura, Mirai is much more than she might initially appear to be. In fact, while she might initially appear to be an angry loli with a small-chest complex — a well-worn trope in Japanese popular media, for sure — spend a bit of time with her and you’ll find a complex, interesting and rather likeable character, around whom you’ll certainly never have to endure a dull moment!

More about Senran Kagura

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Driving tanks has been a proud part of video gaming culture almost since the very beginning.

With 1988’s Vindicators, Atari went back to its Combat roots and tasked up to two players with infiltrating a series of space stations in their “strategic battle tanks” and then, naturally, blowing them up from inside.

It’s probably most remembered today as one of the games Tengen released for NES that was unlicensed, making use of custom cartridge hardware to defeat the NES’ “lockout” chipset. The Atari ST port is pretty solid too, though!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

I’ve been following Wreckfest on and off for what feels like a very long time now.

Originally announced by Finnish developer Bugbear (creators of the vastly underappreciated Ridge Racer Unbounded) as Next Car Game back in 2013, Wreckfest was designed as a spiritual successor to the company’s cult hit FlatOut series, as well as a natural evolution of older titles such as Psygnosis’ Destruction Derby series, popularised in the PS1 era, and the even more venerable home computer title Street Rod from Logical Design Works and California Dreams.

After more than four years of early access on Windows PC and another year of getting the console versions up to snuff, Wreckfest is now available in all its glory for home computers, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. So let’s get our hands dirty!

The core appeal of Wreckfest has always been its damage model. Indeed, back in the earliest stages of Early Access, the sole playable version of the game was a tech demo in which the player could drive a car around an abstract environment filled with all manner of static and dynamic hazards all intended to cause different types of destruction.

With this in mind, it will not surprise you to hear that Wreckfest is a game primarily concerned with the less glamorous end of the motorsports scene. Much of the game is focused on banger racing and destruction derbies, but there are a few twists on the formula and some enjoyable surprises along the way, too.

There are several ways you can enjoy Wreckfest as it exists today. Firstly and most simply, you can take on the career mode. Here, a series of challenges are divided into a set of tiers, with progression to the next dependent on scoring a particular number of points across all the events available to you. Alongside this, you gain experience to increase in level and unlock additional upgrade parts for your vehicles, and earn credits to purchase new cars or upgrade your existing ones. It’s sad that I even have to mention this today, but there are no microtransactions.

Right from the beginning, Wreckfest makes it clear that it’s not just a game about racing. The very first event in the first tier is a destruction derby in which all the participants are driving ride-on lawnmowers, for example; this serves as an excellent introduction to what to expect from the game, since the fragility (and relative agility) of these vehicles allow you to cause maximum chaos in the minimum amount of time.

Other events include destruction and banger racing (which, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I see a difference between), which are full-contact racing events; heat-based races, in which you compete in two heats of three laps in an attempt to reach the final six-lap heat; conventional multi-race tournaments; and “folk racing”, which is not something I’d come across before, but which is apparently a popular Nordic variant on rallycross designed to be inexpensive and accessible to newcomers. Perfect for anyone with a clapped out old banger that has seen better days, then.

Alongside these events there are occasional one-off challenge races that allow you to unlock various unusual cars such as the aforementioned ride-on lawnmower. These usually unfold in some sort of peculiar circumstances; one sees you driving an Only Fools and Horses-style three-wheeled van and attempting to beat 23 school buses to the finish line; another sees you participating in the unusual event of “sofa racing”, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Each career event also brings with it at least one optional challenge for you to take on alongside the main objective. These vary from event to event, but include tasks such as leading the pack for an entire lap, dealing out a total amount of damage to all your opponents, or causing a particular number of a particular type of accident.

Yes, the events you participate in throughout Wreckfest are very much full-contact. Regardless of event type, every racer (including you) has a health bar that can be depleted through crashes with other cars and the environment, and the car’s body is dynamically broken and deformed with every impact. Bits fall off, parts crumple and general performance is affected — though pleasingly from a gameplay perspective, never so much that it becomes impossible to be competitive. By the time you’ve taken that much damage, you’ll probably get wrecked completely, which eliminates you from the event altogether.

The fact that your own vehicle’s damage is calculated in the same way as that of your opponents’ means that you have to be a bit careful; you are by no means invulnerable, even in destruction derby events, and so you often have to strike a careful and strategic balance between dishing out some punishment and keeping yourself safe. Paying attention to the way you crash into opponents is very important, as is attempting to cause accidents by forcing opponents into each other or chunks off scenery. You’re specifically rewarded for causing certain types of accident, so it pays to experiment at times; the direct approach isn’t always the best one!

The environments on offer in the game are designed to cause chaos, too, unfolding on a variety of different surfaces and, in some cases, being arranged seemingly specifically to cause pile-ups. The figure-of-eight track is the most obvious case of this, but there’s also a great track that unfolds on part of an oval speedway course where you make complete 180-degree turns at either end, often putting you against the flow of traffic from racers elsewhere on the course.

The folk racing events are a particular highlight in this regard, unfolding over gloriously bumpy, messy courses that are a real delight to coax your rustbuckets over. Again, there are interesting decisions to make here, too; do you go full Dukes of Hazzard on that tempting-looking ridge (and perhaps hope you land on a particularly obnoxious opponent’s roof), or do you play it a bit safe with the upcoming corner in mind?

Elsewhere in the game, other ways to play include a server-based (and mod-friendly) multiplayer mode and a custom single-player mode in which you can set up pretty much any type of event you’d care to mention — including the sort of asymmetrical matches you see in the career mode’s challenge races.

Wreckfest’s recent major patch for PC that came alongside its console release attracted some controversy from “PC Master Race” types who felt that the game was being “dumbed down” and “killed” to appease the filthy console peasants. Naturally, this culminated in a review-bombing campaign on Steam, and naturally, most of what they’re complaining about is absolute nonsense.

The roots of most of the complaints stem from one of three sources: the handling, the damage model and the opponent AI. Let’s look at these one at a time, since I’ve played the game numerous times over the years during its development.

First up, the handling. The biggest complaint from longstanding fans of the game is that the update that accompanied the console release made the game “too arcadey”. In fact, what has happened is that the game’s default settings now err somewhat on the side of “simcade”, similar to Bizarre Creations’ Project Gotham Racing series, only on filthy dirt tracks rather than city streets. What this means in practice is simply that you still have to slow down a bit for corners, but not quite as much as you used to. We’re not talking Ridge Racer-style powersliding around corners here.

This is a good change that fits the tone of the game well. The sim-like handling of the earlier versions was rather incongruous with the chaotic nature of the game; Forza Motorsport this ain’t. A game about crashing into people isn’t much fun if you have to take corners sensibly at 20mph. It’s much more enjoyable — and accessible — now, but if you want a more realistic ride, there are still default “assist” options that you can turn off, as well as support for dedicated driving controls. You can even play with a clutch pedal mechanic implemented if you so desire!

Next up, the damage model. The most common criticism here is that the “normal” damage model now makes the cars “feel like tanks”, while the “realistic” damage model feels like the old “normal”. For context, the old “realistic” mode made for some absolutely hilarious crumpled messes of metal, but it did so by making the cars feel like they were built out of tin foil. Fun in isolation, but not especially conducive to satisfying gameplay, particularly given the full-contact nature of the events in which you participate.

The “realistic” damage model, as it stands now, provides a good balance between allowing you to scrunch up your vehicle into an unrecognisable battered mess and still allowing you to stand a chance at completing a race. The “normal” mode, meanwhile, still allows for damage, but is also a lot friendlier to newcomers by allowing greater margin for error. Again, this is clearly a change made in the name of wider accessibility, and it works well in context.

Finally, the opponent AI is the one criticism I can see a certain amount of value in, although perhaps not to the degree that the review-bombers have been trying to make out. Specifically, the game suffers from that age-old racing game problem where it sometimes feels quite difficult to get out ahead of the rest of the pack; it’s honestly quite hard to tell if there actually is any “rubber-banding” going on, because it is possible to develop a convincing lead if you drive well, but it can be frustrating to reach the final corner of the race and see 10 opponents suddenly sail past you just because you braked a bit too hard.

I should also add that literally as I type this, Bugbear has released a hotfix patch that, I quote, “reverts AI rubberbanding to Summer 2018 settings” (i.e. when the PC community believed it was “good”), “increases the chance of AI raceline mistakes for Novice and Amateur AI difficulty” and “disables rubberbanding for Expert AI difficulty”. So I guess that’s that, then. Stop moaning and go enjoy the game!

Ahem. Anyway.

The opponents are aggressive, but that most certainly isn’t a bad thing in a game like this. After all, you’re encouraged to shunt, smash and spin out your competitors at every opportunity, so why shouldn’t they have the opportunity to do the same? And it’s worth noting that they do it to each other as well as you; it’s not uncommon to see the track littered with flaming wrecks (and, occasionally, depending on the vehicle, corpses) by the end of a longer event, even if you drove like a perfect gentleman for the duration.

There’s something else important to note, too and that is that the PC version — the source of all these complaints, since the console versions have been very well received at the time of writing — is extremely, extremely mod-friendly. There’s Steam workshop support, allowing for quick and easy subscribing to favourite creators and creations, and there’s already a huge variety of additional content available for free — including both game content such as tracks and tweaks to how the thing actually plays.

There are even “cheats” available as mods that do things like reduce or eliminate the costs of items in the upgrade shop, so if you just want to unlock everything and treat the game as a playground in multiplayer and custom events, that’s an option — though note that if you do make use of mods, you can’t record any best times or scores on the online leaderboards.

Normally I’m not a big fan of modding games, as I’m something of a believer in the philosophy that “if you need to mod a game to make it good, it’s probably not worth playing in the first place”. The difference here is that Wreckfest is already good, and the growing mod scene simply provides the potential for it to expand and evolve over time, regardless of whether or not Bugbear continues to support it.

Speaking of that, the release of the PC patch and the console versions also brought with it the inevitable Season Pass, which promises a total of 8 optional DLC packs containing 20 cars, 20 roof decorations and a set of car visual customisations. Again, I’m not a fan of Season Passes at the best of times, but this seems fairly harmless — particularly given the modding potential of the PC version, which makes paid DLC largely pointless on that platform.

Wreckfest is not really a game you play to “beat”, although the career mode is substantial, varied and satisfying. Rather, it’s a game you play to simply enjoy. It’s a playground filled with rusty old bangers, filthy racetracks, lawnmowers and sofas with engines in them, and it’s the sort of thing you could potentially play forever.

This is a great model for a racing game to have, and I sincerely hope that it does well; after witnessing its progression from the humble beginnings of the Next Car Game Sneak Peek to what we have today, I can most certainly say that Bugbear very much deserves that success.

Now I’m off to smash up some more fools on Rainbow Road…

More about Wreckfest

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

You know how sometimes you get yourself into a situation that, before long, makes it abundantly clear that you have made a poor decision?

Well, that’s what happened in today’s episode of Final Fantasy. Fresh from their defeat of Lich, they decide to check out the newly unlocked Earthgift Shrine, because surely a newly unlocked dungeon is something you should go and check out immediately, isn’t it?

Well… nope. Let’s maybe save these bonus dungeons for the endgame, huh? You’d think I’d know that after having played this version before, but apparently not…

One of the nice things about the two Taito Legends compilations on PS2, Xbox and PC (and the separate PSP release, which acts as a kind of “best of” compilation containing elements of both) is that it includes both well-known games and more obscure affairs.

One such example of the latter is The Electric Yo-Yo, an unusual Taito America game from 1982 that is so obscure that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page (shock!). If Giant Bomb’s rather bare-bones page on the game is to be believed, it seems that it wasn’t all that well-received back in the day — but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in MoeGamer’s lifetime, it’s that it’s always worth considering something on its own merits, devoid of its original context and popular reception.

And y’know what? I kinda like The Electric Yo-Yo. I mean, sure, it’s kind of infuriating and I’ve hurled some deeply offensive language at it during my time with it… but I still kinda like it.

The Electric Yo-Yo combines elements of Pac-Man and Qix in that it is a game about collecting things on the screen, but it is also about area control.

You control the titular yo-yo, and it’s your job to collect all the Blox on the screen while avoiding the unwanted attentions of the electrified Trion and the small green Bions.

You do this by moving your yo-yo around in four directions. The twist is that if you push in a direction where there is a block “ahead” of you, regardless of distance, you’ll shoot out your string, loop it onto the block and pull yourself rapidly across the intervening gap. The further distance you do this across, the more points you score for the Blox you collect.

With this in mind, the levels take on something of a “puzzly” feeling as you attempt to determine what moves you might be able to make to score the maximum possible points. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you just chomping your way systematically around adjacent Blox Pac-Man style, but that’s no route to a high score.

The aforementioned Trion and Bions block your path in different ways. The Trion bounces around the screen using that distinctive ’80s bounce pattern that a whole bunch of games included so they didn’t have to incorporate any sort of actual artificial intelligence, while the Bions stroll leisurely around sets of Blox that remain on the stage, occasionally leaping across gaps similarly to how you can grapple your way across using your string.

The Trion cannot be defeated, but it does serve an important mechanical purpose: any Blox that it bounces off become temporarily electrified, and collecting these electrified Blox causes your Yo-Yo to become powered up for a short period, indicated by it changing colour and the border of the screen glowing.

This is important because not only does being powered up in this way allow you to earn more points, it also contributes to a bonus at the end of a stage and makes you invulnerable to the Bions, allowing you to safely pass through them and collect the Blox that they are guarding. Reducing the total area of Blox that they are standing on also makes your job a bit easier, as they will be controlling less of the overall space in the level, allowing you free rein to hoover up more of your delicious cubic rewards.

Thus, clearing a stage is a combination of factors: calculating the maximum point-scoring routes for you to “grapple” across; avoiding the Trion and the Bions; being prepared to drop everything to go grab an electrified Blox; and using your powered-up status to go on the offensive, snatch up some Blox from beneath the Bions’ noses, and gradually take control of the whole level.

It’s kind of understandable that The Electric Yo-Yo was regarded as a “blunder”, as Giant Bomb puts it; it’s difficult, it’s mechanically quite complicated and it takes practice simply to get yourself to a status where you don’t lose all your lives within the space of about ten seconds. Even clearing a single stage is a significant milestone.

But looking at it from a modern perspective, at a time when the gaming community as a whole is much more receptive to challenging, technically demanding games… it really works. And it’s also interesting from a historical perspective to see an early implementation of a “grapple and pull” mechanic long before more well-known examples such as 1987’s Bionic Commando.

Yes, it’s annoying when you grapple over a gap directly into the face of a waiting Bion — but it’s always your fault for not taking your time. Yes, it’s infuriating when you can’t even clear a single stage, but, again, slow down and think a bit more carefully about what you’re doing and you’ll be surprised how much easier it is. Yes, it can be frustrating when you can’t figure out a good way to attain some high scores — but concentrate on simple survival first of all, then you can worry about getting fancy.

In many ways I guess it’s like playing with a real yo-yo; if you can’t master the basic “gravity pull” technique, you’re never going to get on to even the more straightforward tricks, let alone the ones look like you’re working magic with the string to your audience!

The Electric Yo-Yo is by no means an all-time classic or even one of Taito’s best games. But it’s most certainly an interesting, experimental game that, at the time of original release, audiences seemingly weren’t quite ready for.

Give it a go from a modern perspective, though, and you’ll find a game that is by turns cushion-bitingly irritating, immensely satisfying and, if you allow it to really get its hooks into you, monstrously addictive. Just don’t feel too bad if you can’t clear that first stage right away!

More about The Electric Yo-Yo

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Hey! Listen! Do you like Zelda? If so, then take a moment to give thanks to 1979’s Adventure for Atari.

Adventure is an early example of a top-down action-adventure, and has been cited as an important influence on the development of subsequent titles such as The Legend of Zelda. While it may look primitive today, its abstract graphics, simple sound and straightforward mechanics still do a surprising amount to stir the imagination, even today.

It’s also the first ever game to feature an “Easter Egg” — and it’s all because the programmer Warren Robinett, quite reasonably, decided that he wanted to actually be credited for his hard work!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Hello everyone, apologies that this is a day later than usual, but the weekend was… trying, to say the least.

On the positive side, we recorded a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, which should be with you later today on both YouTube and Soundcloud, so please look forward to that; it was a very enjoyable discussion. On the unpleasant side, however, the news of independent games developer Alec Holowka’s passing and the circumstances surrounding his death had a fair amount of emotional resonance for me. I won’t get into the details of that right now, as it’s still a somewhat contentious issue, but I’ll just say that my thoughts and sympathies are with those who were close to Alec at this difficult time.

Anyway. Let’s turn our attention to cheerier things and have a look at what you might have missed last week.

MoeGamer

Senran Kagura Bon Appétit: The Fastest Route to the Heart – Senran Kagura’s third game, a rhythm game with a cooking theme, is a gloriously strange affair, but it carries with it the same charming heart that the rest of the series proudly bears.

Donkey Kong 3: Shot Up the Arse, And You’re To Blame – While Donkey Kong 3 bears little resemblance to its predecessors aside from the presence of the titular giant ape, this peculiar shoot ’em up is still an enjoyable, addictive time today if you take it on its own terms.

Warriors Wednesday: Naughty Boys – Cao Pi finally launches his long-overdue rebellion against Da Ji and Orochi’s forces. But will he be able to overcome the great evil he now pits himself against?

Waifu Wednesday: Mirai – A popular character in the Senran Kagura series, Mirai’s combination of anxiety expressed through anger, self-esteem issues and creativity is something that I’ve personally always found quite resonant!

Wreckfest: This One’s a Right Banger – Bugbear’s latest title — formerly known as Next Car Game — arrives on consoles with a bang, bringing with it a substantial update to the home computer version PC gamers have been enjoying for the last year.

Final Fantasy Marathon: This Was A Mistake – You know, the thing about endgame dungeons is that they’re probably best saved for endgame, as I painfully remind myself this time around.

Taito Essentials: The Electric Yo-Yo – I love exploring the lesser-known, less well-received titles from a well-known developer’s back catalogue. The Electric Yo-Yo is a thoroughly interesting game for a variety of reasons; perhaps not the best arcade title you’ll ever play from these prolific creators, but certainly something a little bit different from the norm of the time!

Atari A to Z

This week, we take a look at one of ANALOG magazine’s many type-in machine code games, a reasonably solid arcade port from Tengen, and a genre-defining classic for Atari 2600.

Cool Stuff By People Who Aren’t Me

First up, Patreon goodness! Right now, I’m supporting chaotic “old men (and Octav1us Kitten, who I also support) attempt to talk about games, usually fail” collective Digitiser 2000, the ever-grumpy (and always hilarious) Cheap Show Podcast, the wonderfully supportive Normal Happenings, independent games writing collective The Well-Red Mage and fountain of retro computer gaming knowledge Rob “Hellfire64” Caporetto, all of whom you can find out a bit more about by clicking through to their profiles.

Here’s a selection of recent YouTube and podcast goodness from several of this lot:

And from around the WordPress reader this week, here are some articles for your reading enjoyment:

What do we owe our readers? (100 Word Anime) – Irina muses on the subject of how writers should approach the way they write: should they consider themselves in “debt” to potential readers and thus obligated to provide what they want, or should they concentrate on the things they want to express themselves?

What was my first… WHAT DID YOU SAY?! (KAWAIIPAPERPANDAS) – bodellyt looks back on their first hentai experience with a certain degree of revulsion. Meanwhile I’m here thinking back on the fact that my first anime was Urotsukidoji and wondering if I could have made better life choices…

The Wrath of 121+ Questions (Livid Lightning) – LightningEllen got a bit behind on all those “awards” posts that ask you to answer a bunch of questions so your readers can get to know you a bit better. So she decided to catch up in style… by answering all of them in a single post.

Love³ -Love Cube-: The Erotic, and Normal Aspirations of Young Adulthood (Shallow Dives in Anime) – Dewbond picked up Love³ after my glowing recommendation, and it seems much enjoyment was had! Check this out if you want to read another perspective on this lovely visual novel.

Pokémon Trapinch (MrGilderPixels) – And finally, check out this super-cool pixel art commission from my dear friend, podcasting partner-in-crime and super-talented artist Chris Caskie.

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During difficult times like this, your support of my work means the world to me. (Hell, it means the world to me at the best of times, too, but I especially appreciate it when my mental health has been less than optimal.) Thank you, as always, for appreciating what I do, and particularly if you’ve been sharing it around and contributing to the best couple of weeks this site has had for quite some time.

We’re all going to get through this. Even though I’m not entirely sure what “this” really is right now. But by looking out for each other, taking care of one another and supporting one another… we’ll make it through this.

Have a great week, and do your best.

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

What is up, friendos, and welcome once again to The MoeGamer Podcast, featuring both my fine set of pipes alongside those of my good friend Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels.

The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos (including the Atari A to Z retro gaming series); you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes. Please do at least one of these if you can; it really helps us out!

Or you can hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer.

Today’s episode is a bit of light relief after our rather academic discussion last time around — a discussion that Chris subsequently realised had a major flaw in it! Oh well. It’s a “constantly evolving theory”, after all…

Today we decided to settle down and talk a bit about some of our favourite boss encounters over the course of gaming history. This is most certainly a subject we’ll come back to on more than one occasion, but today features a nice mix of different baddies from a variety of different games and platforms!

And, of course, we also take the time to look at the recent gaming news — including talk of Shovel Knight, Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate, Mega Man and more — as well as what we’ve been up to in terms of gameplay recently.

It’ll be a little while before the next episode, as Chris is away for a short period, but we should be back later in September. In the meantime, thanks for your support, and we hope you enjoy today’s show!

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

The ABBUC Software Competition is an annual contest that, since 2003, has been challenging modern Atari enthusiasts to show what they’re capable of with their favourite home micros.

We’ve already seen one previous example of a competition winner in the form of X:8; today we take a look at the title which took second place in 2012. I present to you: Callisto.

Callisto is a very solid, very challenging shoot ’em up that really shows off the Atari 8-bit at its best. It just wasn’t quite enough to win the contest that year. 2012 was a very good year, it seems!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

If you, like me, have been around the mobile gaming block a bit, chances are that you have a certain image in your mind of what Asian free-to-play games look like.

You’re almost certainly picturing energy bars, timers, feathers, coins, gems and an overwhelming array of things to do, all of which seem dead set on distracting you from completing the actual main story of the damn thing.

Well, if you’ve ever felt like this, Pokémon Masters is a refreshingly straightforward breath of fresh air… or at least it is right now at the time of writing, a little after its official launch!

In Pokémon Masters, you take on the role of a young trainer who has come to the artificial island of Pasio with their Pikachu in tow. You’re looking to enter (and hopefully win) the Pokémon Masters League, a prestigious event which consists of three-on-three battles rather than the more commonly seen one-on-one confrontations.

Pokémon Masters has a markedly different emphasis than the mainline series of games, as you might be able to discern from the name. Here, the game is not so much about collecting the Pokémon themselves as it is about befriending their masters — all of whom are drawn from various installments of the series from over the years.

Each master you encounter is one half of what the game calls a “Sync Pair” alongside a single Pokémon, and narratively speaking there’s a strong emphasis on masters developing a particularly strong bond with this single Pokémon rather than filling PC box after PC box with beasties who will never see the light of day again after they get recorded in one’s Pokédex.

Like most mobile games, Pokémon Masters unfolds as a sequence of visual novel-style story sequences punctuated by battles. Here, the accompanying visuals for the story sequences are represented in full 3D, with some excellent character models that are extremely true to the various masters’ iconic artwork and designs. There’s also partial voice acting in both English and Japanese, though this mostly consists of simple reactions to emphasise various lines rather than fully voiced dialogue, regardless of language.

Upon reaching a battle stage in the main story, you’ll have a sequence of one or more battles to complete without the opportunity to heal your Pokémon, change your team lineup or recharge your moves in between. This means that preparation is essential: before you enter a battle stage, you’re told which Pokémon types will be able to exploit the upcomingenemies’ weaknesses, so it’s up to you to assemble a suitable team (and perhaps enhance them) before entering the fray.

It’s worth noting at this point that you can put a solid team together for main story content purely from the masters you meet as part of the narrative. In other words, this means you don’t have to touch the gacha element of the game at all if you don’t want to, though if you do engage with this side of things you might be able to build a better team. Playing without the gacha generally means that two of your three slots will contain Pokémon that are suitable for the challenge ahead of you; assuming your luck is decent, playing the gacha will generally mean you can create a fully optimised team of three.

We’ll come back to the gacha in a moment; for now, let’s look at how battles unfold.

In Pokémon Masters, battles unfold in an interesting blend of turn-based and real-time. A gauge gradually fills up at the bottom of the screen, and the three masters’ Pokémon can unleash their various abilities by spending one or more segments of this gauge. Generally speaking, more powerful moves cost two chunks of gauge while basic attacks cost just one.

Once you’ve selected a move, it will enter a queue (which is initially invisible, but which can be set to show in the options menu) and everything in this queue will execute one at a time in the order that the commands were issued. There is no means of disrupting turn order once a move has entered the queue, but there are various means of manipulating the action gauge. Your three Pokémon’s speed stats combine to determine how quickly it fills, for example, while certain masters have abilities they can use to immediately top up the gauge. The upper limit of the gauge can also be expanded, allowing for more moves to be used in immediate succession.

The master skills do not spend segments of the action gauge like Pokémon moves do; rather, they have a hard limit on how many times they can be used throughout a complete stage and all its battles — usually twice. This means that you should generally avoid blowing them all in the first battle of a stage, but you can usually feel free to go ham in the last battle. It’s also worth noting that sometimes using a master skill more than once has no effect if, say, a buff causes a Pokémon to reach a cap on one of its stats, so this is something you’ll have to experiment with and get to know yourself!

Master skills are mostly based on the items from the mainline Pokémon games and will either buff or heal your own Pokémon; debuffs are usually applied to your opponents as part of your Pokémon’s attacks. One nice thing here that is actually superior to many of the mainline Pokémon games is that Pokémon Masters explicitly notes how much a particular Pokémon has been buffed or debuffed using numbers — “Attack Up 5” means a stronger increase to attack than “Attack Up 2”, for example. This is certainly much clearer than the series’ usual rather vague “Pikachu’s defense fell!” messages that we had pretty much right up until Sun and Moon.

Using a Pokémon move causes a countdown to drop by one; when this reaches zero, a rainbow-coloured button unlocks and allows any of your three Pokémon in battle to unleash a Sync Move alongside their master. These are devastatingly powerful, cinematically presented elemental attacks (often with charmingly overdramatic names) based on the Pokémon’s main type, and are great for finishing off bosses. Sometimes it can pay to chip away at a foe with weaker but quicker attacks just to charge this up more quickly.

Battles are fun! Final Fantasy fans will get a particular kick out of them because the charging action gauge mechanic is quite similar to the older Final Fantasy titles’ Active Time Battle system, only with the gauge being shared between your whole party rather than each character having their own gauge. The sound effects and animations are satisfying, and on-screen information is presented in a clear and easy to parse manner.

Clear all the battles in a stage and all your Sync Pairs will gain experience, regardless of whether or not they survived until victory. After this, you’ll receive money and various progression-related items, and then you can either continue on with the story or spend some time back at the Pokémon Centre to manage your team.

Progression takes several forms. Besides levelling through battle, you can use special manuals to immediately award Pokémon large chunks of experience points. These are fairly frequent drops throughout the stages.

Alongside this, you can use special machines to teach your Sync Pairs new moves; so far, it seems that each pair begins with one Pokémon move and one master move; unlocking a third move is usually pretty simple, requiring only five of an easily collected item, while unlocking their fourth and final move requires a much more substantial collection of various different items.

On top of this, it’s possible to both increase the star rating of a sync pair with special power-up items, and to increase their level cap beyond its original limits using various combinations of ingredients.

In contrast to many other mobile games, Pokémon Masters doesn’t overwhelm with a huge variety of different item types; instead, most of these progression elements require various combinations of training machines and differently coloured tonics and drinks, all of which can be found as drops from pretty much any battle stage you take on.

Early in the game, you unlock a Training Area, where you can challenge various battle stages that guarantee drops of a particular type and allow you to test your skills against opponents of rapidly increasing power levels. Unlike most mobile games of this type, these don’t appear and disappear based on the day of the week; instead, they feature different opponents based on the day of the week to keep things interesting and varied.

And then, of course, there is the gacha, where you spend the game’s premium currency of gems to either draw one new Sync Pair for 300, or ten for 3,000. At the time of writing, there is some controversy over a one-time special offer that guarantees a 5-star Sync Pair because this requires you to actually buy 3,000 gems (about £20-30 depending on offers) rather than earn them through gameplay, but in practice the game has a generous enough draw rate (7% for 5-star, 20% for 4-star, 73% for 3-star) that this is something you can safely ignore. Even the 3-star characters are more than capable of holding their own in battle, too, so there’s no real need for a 5-star — it’s just nice to have them! And plus, remember that there are ways of upgrading the star ratings on lower-tier characters anyway.

If you draw a duplicate Sync Pair, this powers up the Sync Move of the pair in question rather than simply allowing you multiple copies of the same characters. This means that your inventory will never be overflowing with thousands of characters you’re not sure whether it’s safe to get rid of or not; instead, every character in your “party” is a unique individual, and you’re provided with some incentive to spend some time with them both through their varied types and moves, and via their unique story episodes that unlock when you first recruit them.

All in all, Pokémon Masters is the most friendly free-to-play mobile game I’ve ever played, and it does all this by making an experience that is just pleasant for the player rather than feeling like a front-end for a cutthroat business model. It doesn’t overwhelm you with information, it doesn’t feature a play-throttling energy system and it doesn’t even keep your premium currency on screen at all times as a constant reminder to Get More Gems (Best Offer!!). Plus it looks and sounds great — the orchestral versions of classic Pokémon themes are a delight to listen to — and is an entertaining bit of fanservice for people who have followed the series for a long time.

For those who are somewhat newer to Pokémon, like me, on the other hand… well, need I remind you that Pokégirls are some of the cutest cuties on the planet… and this is a game where you get to meet, like all of them. And make your monsters fight, too, I guess.

I’ll be following this one with interest. It’s a mobile game I don’t feel in any way bad about playing, and perhaps the purest reflection of Nintendo’s apparent desire not to overmonetise or exploit its mobile audience. That sounds like something which we should be encouraging!

More about Pokémon Masters

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Of all the things you should not do to Lu Bu — and there are many — I’d say that cuckolding him is pretty high up the list, perhaps just underneath pursuing him.

Still, Diao Chan doesn’t seem to be particularly enamoured with his attitude fighting in Orochi’s forces, and so she decides to defect to the Coalition. Naturally, Cao Pi is more than happy to welcome a new ally to the fold.

Of course, as you might expect, a betrayal of one of the most legendarily powerful warriors in existence is not something one can expect to go all that smoothly…

One wouldn’t think that a character seemingly devoid of emotions would be a popular choice. But Senran Kagura’s resident snek wife would like a quiet word to educate you.

As one of the more longstanding members of the Senran Kagura cast — she’s been in there since the very beginning — it’s understandable that Hikage has plenty of fans. She’s unique, she’s interesting and she has excellent chemistry with the other cast members.

And she can rap. Yo. Yo. Yo. Yo. Thank you, baby.

Hikage grew up as an orphan, with no idea who her parents were. This obviously isn’t the best start to one’s childhood, but her problems were further compounded by the bullying she suffered due to her seemingly expressionless face. Having never really grown up under normal circumstances, she had never developed the same sort of emotional literacy that most children do, and as she grew older it’s clear that she started to use this aspect of her personality as something of a defence mechanism.

Hikage learned to defend herself before she was ten years old, when she escaped the orphanage and took to the streets. She was taken into the care of a gang leader named Hinata, who acted almost as a surrogate mother to the young “cicada husk”, as she sometimes calls herself. Hinata was instrumental in Hikage learning to accept herself for who she was, and that she shouldn’t consider herself “abnormal” simply because she lacked the ability to outwardly display emotions that those around her did.

Hikage isn’t completely devoid of emotions, despite appearances; she just doesn’t really understand them or know how to express them, but it’s obvious that they’re there. It’s clear that she loved Hinata dearly, for example; after a gang-on-gang incident left Hinata dead, Hikage was the one who found her mutilated body, and she mourned the passing of this young woman who had come to mean so much to her. In an effort never to forget, she took up Hinata’s knife, which had fallen by her side as she passed on, and still wields it to this day as a reminder of where she came from.

Hikage’s connection to the “underworld” is likely why she was recruited by Hebijo rather than one of the “good shinobi” schools such as Hanzou or Gessen. A key part of Senran Kagura’s philosophy is that while “good” tends to have a minimum bar of “goodness” to clear before you’re allowed in, “evil” accepts anyone and everyone, regardless of where they came from and what they’ve done in the past.

She was one of the first members to join Hebijo’s elite class after Haruka, and did so in her first year at the school. At the time most of the Senran Kagura series unfolds, she is a third-year, and has developed her skills considerably by this point — though she still finds the art of self-expression somewhat elusive.

Each character in Senran Kagura tends to have a counterpart on the “opposing” side to them; in Hikage’s case, it’s Katsuragi, who is able to express herself to a fault. Hikage notes after their first battle that the encounter left her feeling more “alive” than she’d ever felt before, and the pair strike up something of a friendship and rivalry as a result. Despite Katsuragi’s less than wholesome intentions when interacting with pretty much anyone, it’s clear that she has genuine affection for Hikage, and Hikage, in the meantime, appreciates Kat’s openness and honesty, learning a lot from her over the course of the series’ various stories.

Hikage is someone who is content to go along with what everyone else is doing at the best of times. Her somewhat lazy-sounding, languid-nature can lead her to be perceived as apathetic, but she’s more than capable of stepping up to the plate when needed. Her various Ninja Arts animations back up her assertion to Kat that she is at her most “alive” during battle; it’s when she’s about to unleash one of her most powerful moves that she appears to be at her most expressive.

There are a variety of reasons Hikage might appeal to people. Her fashionable yet deliberately unkempt “street” outfit in her Shinobi Transformation form is a look that a lot of people find appealing, and the snake-themed tattoos down one side of her body provide something of a sense of danger — perhaps a reminder of her gangland days.

Personality-wise, she’s very much become a distinctive character in her own right, often providing deadpan commentary on the increasingly ridiculous situations the girls of Senran Kagura habitually find themselves in with each passing installment. Some of the lessons she learned from Katsuragi she’s taken to heart a little too much, some might say; she’s developed a habit of speaking with rather blunt honesty and explaining what she thinks her feelings are in lieu of being able to demonstrate them in more subtle and traditional manners.

In some ways, this aspect of her personality might make her feel a little intimidating and difficult to approach. In others, it makes her one of the most easy to read people out there; when dealing with Hikage, you might have to deal with all manner of unexpected happenings, but you’ll never have to worry about her lying to you.

Plus, as previously mentioned, get her to rap for you and you can just watch those view counts skyrocket. Because she’s Hikage, and she’s gotta say she got no heart, but her creepy little laugh’ll rip your guts apart. But the team’s got a dream to redeem on the stream, so just email those females and see they’re supreme. Yours to command for a couple of grand.

Sounds like a fair deal to me.

More about Senran Kagura

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Tetris is a timeless classic that remains relevant today. Its various sequels and spinoffs, on the other hand, have varied somewhat in how well they’ve persisted over the years.

One such title that has been largely forgotten today is Alexey Pajitnov’s official follow-up to the original Tetris, known as Welltris. Developed in Soviet Russia, ported to a variety of platforms and published by Spectrum Holobyte and Infogrames around the world, Welltris takes Tetris into the third dimension.

It’s a solid game… but you have to approach it very differently to Pajitnov’s more enduring classic!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Retro gaming has been growing increasingly popular over the course of the last few years; as we move further and further away from gaming’s earliest days, it seems people are becoming more and more keen to know the medium’s roots.

This is absolutely great, as there are lots of different aspects you can explore the history of through retro gaming. You can see how storytelling has developed over the course of numerous generations of RPGs and adventure games. You can see the rise and fall of numerous mechanical genres. You can even see how now-famous creators got started!

There’s a growing problem, however; as retro gaming — and by this I mean “officially sanctioned” retro gaming, rather than the legal grey area that is emulation and ROM downloads — becomes more popular, it also becomes more difficult and more expensive to get involved with.

That is, unless you have a Nintendo Switch.

One of the biggest reasons I was excited to pick up a Nintendo Switch in the first place was down to it being an immensely appealing retro platform. Its hybrid nature means you can enjoy old classics both at home on the big TV or on the go, and numerous retro-centric companies have seemingly been queueing up to favour the Nintendo platform for their rereleases.

The excellent SNK 40th Anniversary Collection first appeared on Switch, for example, and the bumper value Atari Flashback Classics collection for Switch features 150 games in a single volume rather than being split across three discs like its PS4 and Xbox One counterparts.

On top of that, we have excellent support from Hamster, whose Arcade Archives series brings a variety of lesser-known classics and Neo Geo hits to modern audiences; former Jaleco partner City Connection — who now owns the rights to the defunct developer’s back catalogue and assets — has been both rereleasing and reimagining a variety of retro titles; Sega’s resurrected Sega Ages series provides a fine selection of subtle but tangible improvements on their most beloved arcade and console titles; and even Konami has finally realised that people might still want to play the old Castlevania and Contra titles.

It’s Nintendo themselves who have taken an interesting and bold step in a brave new direction, however, with the inclusion of both NES and Super NES games as part of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. And not just first-party Nintendo games, either; since the NES component of the service kicked off in September of 2018, the company has demonstrated an admirable commitment to highlighting not just the predictable games that everyone has heard of, but also some lesser-known titles from a variety of developers and publishers.

I’m not generally a big fan of subscription-based services for gaming, because I’m one of those people who likes to collect the games he plays. However, with retro gaming having exploded in popularity since the advent of gaming YouTubers in particular, the price to get involved with original hardware has been gradually creeping up. This means that in the case of many platforms, you can’t really afford to make too many “impulse purchases” — unless you’re just blindly aiming for a “complete collection”, which is usually a fool’s errand in my experience! — without being sure that the titles in question are something you really want.

Enter Nintendo’s offering, then, which provides you with a gradually expanding collection of NES and Super NES games to play on your Switch, with no additional cost on top of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription. What we’re gradually going to end up with is a “Netflix of retro gaming”, where you can browse through a variety of classic titles, pick one according to your mood and enjoy it to your heart’s content. We’re not quite there yet, but Nintendo certainly seems committed to both the Switch as a platform and this idea for distributing retro titles for the immediate future. And we’re not just seeing domestic releases, either; already we’ve seen some formerly Japan-only titles (including several Famicom Disk System games) come West in an official capacity, for the first time in some cases.

The benefit of this model is that although you don’t “own” anything provided as part of the subscription — and indeed you lose access to it all once your subscription lapses — it provides a great way to get to know these games without any sort of limitation on your experience or, crucially, any additional expense.

You might boot up Wrecking Crew once just to see what it’s like, discover that it’s a puzzle game you want to spend a lot more time with and decide to seek out an actual NES cart to play on real hardware. Conversely, you might fire up Pro Wrestling out of curiosity, feel like its simplistic mechanics don’t have much to offer you and decide that you don’t really need that particular title in your collection. Or you might feel the opposite way about either of these titles. The point is, there’s absolutely no risk in trying these games this way — and none of the associated murky legal waters associated with emulation.

There are modern conveniences built in to these versions, too. Save states allow you to pick up where you left off, even in games with no native save function. (Or you can use them to cheese your way through a difficult bit, but MoeGamer by no means endorses this practice.) A rewind function allows you to practice a particularly challenging sequence until you nail it every time — or just undo a mistake that you don’t feel was your fault. (Yes, yes, you were “pressing the buttons but it wasn’t doing anything”.) “SP” variations of certain games allow you to see later stages without having to “git gud” first. And online play allows you to enjoy co-op and competitive games without having to drag your friends kicking and screaming out of their houses — something which I’ve found increasingly challenging to accomplish as we’ve all got older!

Okay, you lack the pleasingly tactile aspect of slamming one of those satisfyingly clunky cartridges into a slot… but you also lack the increasingly frequent technical issues that these ageing pieces of hardware sometimes find themselves stricken with. No more worrying if the battery in your Zelda cartridge still has enough juice to record your perfect no-death run for all eternity!

There are a few improvements Nintendo could stand to make. Slightly more frequent releases would be nice — though in principle I agree with the decision to drip-feed new titles rather than overwhelm people with a massive amount of choice right from the get-go.

The way things are currently done, Nintendo makes a point of showcasing the new titles when they are released, both via social channels such as YouTube, and on the Switch dashboard itself via the News feature. The NES and SNES apps themselves even make a big deal of new titles appearing, with sound and graphical effects accompanying new games being added to the library. This side of things is good; those new releases could just stand to be a bit more frequent to keep momentum and interest going. It’s not as if either the NES or SNES are short of titles to release, after all!

It’d also be nice to see more platforms. The SNES side of the service was a long time coming, but hopefully now that Nintendo has seen it’s a viable part of their online offering that people enjoy, it’ll take less time for us to see a wider variety of games and platforms to get our retro indulgences from. It’d be great to ultimately see all the platforms originally represented on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console storefronts — including stuff like the Turbografx/PC Engine, Commodore 64 (yes, really, that was a thing for a brief period), Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.

The reason we’re probably not yet seeing stuff like Gamecube games is likely a matter of practicality: while NES and SNES games fit into a few kilobytes in most cases — a few megabytes at most in the case of SNES titles — and can thus be downloaded in bulk as simple update packages, the optical disc-based Gamecube games are much larger, and so those with smaller SD cards in their Switch (or those relying purely on the built-in storage) wouldn’t be able to have a complete library available at all times. This could, of course, be solved with some sort of “download on demand” service, but that lacks the pleasing immediacy that the current NES and SNES services have, and is likely something Nintendo wants to think carefully about the implementation of before unleashing it on the world.

The least likely thing I see happening, but one which would be really nice, particularly once the Switch starts getting close to the end of its life, would be an option for some sort of one-time payment for permanent, offline access to the complete libraries of the older systems at the very least, perhaps with a discount for the amount of time the purchaser had kept an active Nintendo Switch Online subscription. This would give the Switch incredible long-term value even after Nintendo has moved on to its next generation of hardware; can you imagine having a device fully-loaded with a ton of retro classics — ones that you didn’t have to trawl the grottier end of the Internet to acquire — that you can take anywhere? That’d be pretty great but, as I say, I also see this as unlikely to actually happen.

As it stands, for me the expanding retro libraries make Nintendo Switch Online worth the price of admission by itself — even though I don’t play many multiplayer games. Of course there are things that could be done better and of course you can always do all this for “free” through emulation — but in terms of a modern, retro-gaming solution that doesn’t break the bank or your conscience, what the Switch offers right now is pretty hard to beat.

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

After last week’s unfortunate adventure in the Earthgift Shrine, the Warriors of Light do their best to get back on track.

However, it’s not quite that simple! Their next destination is concealed in the heart of a complicated labyrinth of rivers and streams… and it turns out that they perhaps weren’t even heading in the right direction in the first place.

Oh well. Those are the perils you sign up for when you take on a less linear RPG!

Stunt Race FX — or Wild Trax, as it was known in Japan — is not a game that gets talked about nearly as much as many of its contemporaries.

There are a number of reasons for this, chief among which was that it released in 1994, at pretty much the tail end of the Super NES’ lifespan; indeed, Sony’s PlayStation — originally intended to be a CD-ROM-based add-on for the Super NES, lest we forget — would release later that very year, wowing everyone with its smooth, texture-mapped polygonal graphics, high-quality audio and impressive arcade ports.

As with many things that got overshadowed at their time of original release, however, Stunt Race FX remains a fascinating piece of Nintendo history that remains worth exploring.

Stunt Race FX was the second game to make use of the Super FX coprocessor in its cartridge and, like its predecessor Star Fox, was noteworthy at the time of its original release for being a 3D polygonal game on a home console rather than a home computer.

Polygonal console games had been seen a few times previously, of course, to varying degrees of success, but Star Fox and Stunt Race FX’s use of the custom processor was supposed to make them considerably more impressive than anything else on the market at the time thanks to the use of texture mapping, the combining of 2D and 3D visuals and complex polygonal objects.

After Star Fox had proven the Super FX was well-suited to powering fast-action arcadey shoot ’em ups, investigating its possibilities for driving games was a natural progression — though back in 1994 the truly three-dimensional driving game was still a genre that was trying to define itself after many years of “vanishing point” racers. Sure, they’d been a thing on home computers for a while at that point and had even been seen in arcades thanks to Atari’s Hard Drivin’ and Sega’s Virtua Racing… but on home consoles there were still conventions to be established.

One thing about early ’90s polygonal 3D that was a little at odds with the image Nintendo had cultivated for itself up until that point was that the low level of detail made it quite difficult to give the graphics a sense of “personality”.

The company got around this with the babbling audio and pixel-art portraits of the Star Fox team in their eponymous adventure, and in Stunt Race FX they took a remarkably simple but effective approach: they put big googly sprite-based eyes on all the cars and decided that all the cars were sentient. This was a good 12 years before the first Cars movie… though Herbie had been doing the “sentient car” thing after a fashion since 1968, albeit without googly eyes.

(Fun fact: all the cars are male, unless you’re playing the Japanese version, in which case the Coupé is canonically female. This does not matter in the slightest, of course, but you can guarantee someone out there is picky about their Stunt Race FX lore.)

Anyway. The game itself is split into several discrete components: Speed Trax, Stunt Trax, Battle Trax and Free Trax.

Let’s get the simple ones out of the way first: Battle Trax is a split-screen two-player mode, and Free Trax is a time trial mode where any of the courses you have unlocked in Speed Trax can be practised against the clock. There’s also a unique motorcycle-style “2WD” vehicle that can initially only be used in Free Trax mode, but which can subsequently be unlocked for use in other styles of play.

The meat of the single-player game is spread across the Speed Trax and Stunt Trax modes, each of which offer a distinct way of playing the game.

Speed Trax tasks you with completing conventional races on three sets of four tracks, with each set increasing markedly in difficulty and the third set only unlocking after the first two have been beaten. After two of the four tracks in a set, there’s a bonus round in which you have to drive an extremely cumbersome truck around a fairly simple track in order to either complete laps to earn bonus retries, or pass through slalom-style gates to earn bonus time for subsequent events.

Each race places you in a pack of four cars which can be freely selected (along with your own) from the three that are initially available to use. There’s a 4WD which has a low top speed but good acceleration and strong armour; there’s the aforementioned Coupé, which is thoroughly average in all regards; and there’s the F-type, a dinky little racer that is very weak and slow to accelerate, but which has the highest top speed of the lot.

The actual racing in Stunt Race FX is kept relatively uncomplicated — a sensible decision at the time, since racing in polygonal environments would have still been new to many players. There are no weapons to worry about and the only pickups on the track either restore your boost power or repair your car; the only thing slightly out of the norm is that you have the questionably useful ability to jump and honk your horn at the same time.

Actually, that’s not quite true; one of the most unusual things about Stunt Race FX when compared to both its contemporaries and the things we take for granted in racing games today is its steering control system. Rather than simply using a digital control scheme as in most home console racers we’d seen up until that point, Stunt Race FX features steering with three different degrees of severity.

Push the D-pad left or right and you’ll make a fairly gentle turn; slow down a bit before a corner and this will be a bit tighter. Use the shoulder buttons and you’ll make a tighter turn, but might skid in the process. And use both and you’ll make a very tight turn that allows you to really power around corners, but which can sometimes be tricky to recover from.

In the initial Novice races, you can get away with using nothing but the D-pad for the most part — indeed, I didn’t even know that the shoulder buttons did anything until I actually looked up the game’s questionably translated manual after my first win — but once you progress onto Expert and beyond, you’ll need to start using the different methods effectively.

This setup is interesting from a modern perspective because it’s an acknowledgement that a game like this would really benefit from an analogue control scheme, and also an attempt to implement something along those lines without requiring players to invest in new hardware. Once you get your head around it, it actually works quite well — in practice, it’s somewhat similar to F-Zero’s use of directional air brakes and Super Mario Kart’s power-slide function, both of which used the shoulder buttons — but it’s definitely something that takes a bit of adjusting to.

This raises quite an interesting point, actually; Stunt Race FX feels like a brave and experimental game. Nintendo perhaps felt emboldened by the fact it was releasing so late in the Super NES’ lifespan and decided to try a bunch of new things — and indeed, if you look at Nintendo’s subsequent racers in both the F-Zero and Mario Kart series in particular, you can trace quite a lot of ideas back to Stunt Race FX. Things like uneven, bumpy tracks; incorporating large jumps into course design; unconventional road styles such as half-pipes; and moving through different environments over the course of a complete track.

Oh yes, the tracks; considering the relatively limited hardware we’re dealing with here, Stunt Race FX’s tracks are actually rather impressive and full of character. Each has its own distinct atmosphere created through a combination of colour palette, music and environmental elements, and there are a lot of impressive touches along the way that hadn’t really been seen in many racers before — especially not those with polygonal visuals.

Most notably, many tracks incorporate elements of dynamic scenery. The opening “Easy Ride” track, for example, features a large truck screaming across your path towards the end of your first lap, while the “Night Owl” track that closes out the Novice championship features passenger jets flying perilously low over the city streets you’re racing on.

Several tracks also incorporate shifts between “outdoor” and “indoor” (well, tunnel) areas, too, though these are handled a little less elegantly than we might be accustomed to in modern games. Rather than a seamless transition, passing from outside to inside (or vice versa) involves driving through a completely opaque black “wall”, after which you’ll be in the new area. This is presumably to minimise the amount of depth clipping the 3D engine would have to do, since this was still a somewhat intensive task that not many developers had mastered; indeed, there are several points in Stunt Race FX where you can see other objects “through” the scenery — you might be able to see a tree “through” a hill you’re ascending, for example — because the depth priority is either wrong or simply not calculated!

Technical issues aside, those indoor areas are cool, though, particularly in the “Aqua Tunnel” track, which sees you racing through an undersea glass tunnel with marine life floating around the periphery of your vision. Other tracks feature more mundane features like road tunnels, but even these bother to shift the colour palette to simulate the glow of fluorescent orange lighting in contrast to the bright primary colours of daylight.

Meanwhile, the Stunt Trax provide a markedly different, more low-speed experience with the feel of racing in an arena. Here, you’re challenged to complete a lap against the clock while attempting to collect as many stars as possible.

The Stunt Trax are a distinct experience from the Speed Trax in that they’re much more abstract in their design. Objects are placed around just to present you with a variety of driving challenges rather than in an attempt to create some sort of vaguely realistic environment, and on your initial attempts you’ll find it difficult to balance keeping your speed up and being able to tag the stars.

They’re a rewarding experience, though, and this side of the game is arguably where Stunt Race FX really distinguishes itself from other arcade racers that have come before — and indeed, many arcade racers that followed. Rather than a simple flat-out run to the finish, these courses demand genuine skill and experimentation to make progress in. In some respects, they feel less like an attempt to build on classic 3D-style racers and more like an evolution of the technical, side-on stunt racing games we saw on 8-bit platforms: games like Kikstart for the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64 and Spectrum, or even Nintendo’s own Excitebike.

On paper, Stunt Race FX might not sound like it offers all that much — twelve Speed Trax, a bonus round and four Stunt Trax — but this is a game that will keep you busy for a surprisingly long time. It’s tough.

At least part of its difficulty is down to having to get used to the unconventional control system, but track design also plays a part, as does the increasing aggressiveness of your opponents with each of the three championships. There’s a strong “arcade” feel to the game as a whole; a real sense that this is a game that keeps its amount of content deliberately limited and expects you to practice, practice, practice in an attempt to obtain mastery.

That’s no bad thing from a modern perspective, particularly as these days your average racing game features a career mode on par with an RPG in terms of length; it’s quite refreshing to fire up Stunt Race FX and know that playing through a complete championship is going to take maybe ten to fifteen minutes, tops. Ideal for the modern attention-deficit gamer — but there’s also depth and challenge to discover for those willing to put the time in.

And, surprisingly, the game actually performs reasonably well. Okay, it’s no 60fps masterpiece and the readout on the speedometer feels unreasonably high for what you’re actually seeing… but it’s still perfectly playable; at no point did I ever feel like I was crashing into walls or opponents as a result of a low frame rate. Again, it’s one of those things you might have to adjust to if you’re more used to modern titles — but you might be surprised how easy it is to get on board with what this game has to offer.

With all these things in mind, Stunt Race FX is well worth giving a shot for yourself today. It may not be Nintendo’s finest hour by any means, but it’s an interesting, bold, experimental title whose development doubtless played a key role in creating many of the company’s most beloved subsequent racers. And thus it deserves your respect.

More about Stunt Race FX

The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

—

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

One of the most interesting things about the retro scene is how these old, supposedly defunct platforms still have plenty of people developing for them.

In some cases, these projects that began as homebrew affairs end up being official follow-ups to established classics, thirty or more years later! Such is the case with Adventure II, which was first released in 2005 as part of the Atari Flashback 2 console.

Mechanically, there’s not much new in Adventure II, but the interesting new map design and cranked up difficulty makes it a distinct experience in its own right!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.