Hello everyone! Sorry this is much later than it usually is (again), but I’ve been keeping myself quite busy!

I’m just starting a week off from the day job, which you think would mean I have lots of time to spare… but I’ve set most of the time aside for getting well ahead of schedule on video series and articles, and as such I’ve spent the majority of today researching material for upcoming Atari A to Z videos!

That doesn’t mean there’s no time for the usual fun and games around here, mind, so let’s have a look at what you might have missed in the last week.

MoeGamer

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 28 – Best of Bosses – Was it really only a week ago we recorded and published this? It feels like longer. Anyway, here’s Chris and me waxing lyrical about some of our favourite boss fights from over the years… plus the usual news and “what we’ve been playing” talk.

Pokémon Masters: Friendly Free-to-Play – If you’re someone who gets put off by mobile games constantly being in-your-face about premium currency, energy bars and suchlike… give Pokémon Masters a go. While in gameplay terms it still suffers from long-term repetitiveness just like any other mobile game, the whole thing is a lot more “friendly” than any other mobile game I’ve played in that it never once hassles you. More of that, please.

Warriors Wednesday: Do Not NTR Lu Bu – There are many things you should not do to Lu Bu. I’d argue cucking him is probably right near the top of the list. Cao Pi and friends are lucky to escape with their lives.

Waifu Wednesday: Hikage – A popular waifu from the Senran Kagura series, Hikage may not have any emotions — or so she says, anyway — but she most certainly has a personality, and can rap with the best of ’em. Thank you, baby.

Nintendo Switch: Modern Console, Gateway to Retro – Interested in retro gaming but finding the prospect of collecting old shit prohibitively expensive? Buy a Switch. It’s a great way to start getting to know some all-time classics without breaking the bank… or resorting to methods of questionable morality!

Final Fantasy Marathon: Navigation Issues – Just because they’re the goddamn Warriors of Light doesn’t mean they can’t get lost once in a while, particularly when confronted with a labyrinth of rivers. Cut the poor souls some slack after last week’s ordeal!

Stunt Race FX: A Last Hurrah – The new Super NES app on Nintendo Switch has brought with it the first rerelease of underappreciated Super FX title Stunt Race FX in over a decade. Does it hold up? Erm… yes and no. It’s definitely worth a look, either way!

Atari A to Z

This week we’ve got a modern shoot ’em up for Atari 8-bit, the official sequel to Tetris by Alexey Pajitnov himself, and the juddering hellscape that is Adventure II, a game that pushes the poor old 2600 just a little harder than it’s comfortable with!

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 YouTube and podcast goodness from several of this lot:

And from around the WordPress reader this week:

My Favourite Anime Protagonists and Why! (Alchemist of Blogging) – Logy is a newcomer to anime blogging, but this post gets her off to a cracking start. Please be kind and welcome her to the community!

Hyper! Burning Rangers, Wow! (Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster) – Ahh, Burning Rangers. Kimimi has many words with which to extol the virtues of this strange and wonderful Sega title!

The Legal Grey Zone of Scanlations (I drink and watch anime) – Irina hosts a thought-provoking discussion on scanlations, fansubs, piracy and how the anime-loving community can best support their favourite works under difficult circumstances.

SNES Online vs. Virtual Console: Innovation or Disappointment? (The Well-Red Mage) – Red ponders the new SNES service for Nintendo Switch and considers whether we’re better off with something like this, or with the old way of doing things.

1 vs 100: 10 Years Later and the Void Remains (Game Time) – Fitzy reminisces over good times spent with the online Xbox Live game show 1 vs 100 — a game that was a cracking good time with friends, and dead before its time. (It was probably alive before its time, too, which I guess is where the problem was!)

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All right, that’ll do for now. I’ve got videos to make, things to write, dinner to have and cats to pet, so I’ll get on with at least some of those things right now.

Thank you as ever for your support, and don’t forget you can help me out by buying me a coffee or pledging ongoing support via Patreon. I’ve just started experimenting with a new weekly reward for all Patrons; just $1 a month will get you in on that exciting action!

Anyway. Have a lovely week. I certainly will!

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.

It’s understandable that some people approached Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash with a certain amount of trepidation prior to its initial release.

After all, here was a series that was supposedly about ninja girls fighting an unseen battle against the otherworldly youma forces, and yet their next game seemed to have them all clad in bikinis having water pistol fights with one another. Sure, the fanservice angle had always been part of the series… but surely, surely we were going a bit off-piste now, right?

Two things. Firstly: Bon Appétit would like a word about going “off-piste”. And secondly: Peach Beach Splash is absolutely a worthy sequel to Estival Versus that sets the series up for what will hopefully be an apocalyptic, climactic finale. In the meantime, though, yes, water guns.

The narrative of Peach Beach Splash once again concerns the series’ four main groups of ninja students — the “good” shinobi of Hanzou National Academy and Gessen Girls’ Academy, the “evil” shinobi of Hebijo Clandestine Academy and the renegade shinobi of Homura’s Crimson Squad.

The four groups have been brought against their will over a rainbow bridge to a tropical island; it’s not as if they were doing anything particularly useful before they were spirited away — indeed, several of them note how they had been craving some excitement in these days of peace (and the unseasonably warm weather) — but still, nobody kidnaps a ninja girl and gets away with it. Once said ninja girls figure out what the hell is going on, of course. And perhaps take just a bit of time to enjoy the amenities of what appears to be a thoroughly pleasant tropical getaway.

By this point in the series overall storyline, everyone involved is well and truly aware of the true reason for the divide between “good” and “evil” shinobi — the energy released in conflicts between the two “sides” attracts youma, which can then be slain to keep the world safe from these otherworldly visitors — and as such, all past differences have been pretty much set aside, and as a result everyone is able to be honest about the fact that they all like one another very much indeed. Some more than others.

You might think that this is not an optimal setup for a narrative; if there’s no conflict between the main characters to be had, what’s the whole thing going to be about?

Well, several things, in fact; there are a number of different narrative arcs to complete over the course of Peach Beach Splash’s entirety, each of which explores a different aspect of the overall narrative, gives different characters time in the spotlight and even introduces a few individuals who have, so far, been exclusively confined to the Japan-only mobile game Senran Kagura New Wave.

The game’s main story mode concerns an event called the “P-1 Grand Prix”, a tournament in the watergun event known as “Peach Beach Splash”. The girls are invited to participate in the event with the promise of a prize at the conclusion allowing them “anything they want” — and while the whole situation seems sketchy as hell, they are reassured by the presence of their teachers Kiriya and Rin, both of whom are trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to operate incognito in the form of “Mr. K” and “Miss R”, hosts of the P-1 Grand Prix.

Upon diving into the story mode, you’re given the opportunity to pick any of the four groups to follow their narrative arc. Over the course of ten episodes, each arc gives us some insight into how the group is getting on in the modern world: how they’re adjusting to getting older, the prospect of great change coming to both their personal circumstances and the world at large, and how they can take advantage of changes in the world around them to better live their lives.

Along the way, each of them start to unravel some of the mysteries behind the P-1 Grand Prix and the reason they’ve been brought to the island. After all four arcs have been completed, a new 14-episode arc involving everyone unlocks, leading them towards the truth and the “Final Splash” encounter that wraps everything up.

That’s 55 episodes in total, and that’s just the main story mode. If you were in any way concerned that this might be a multiplayer-centric title by virtue of it being a third-person shooter… rest easy.

While the initial four arcs do provide some interesting teasers about the nature of the P-1 Grand Prix, they’re mostly more personal affairs about the girls’ relationships with one another. Each has a somewhat different focus, but they’re all about change in one way or another.

Hanzou’s arc, for example, sees change coming from two directions. At one end, we have Ayame, a character introduced in New Wave, but who was both the shopkeeper and a DLC character in Estival Versus. Ayame isn’t yet a member of the elite class that the main Hanzou group belong to, but she’s an eminently capable trainee shinobi in her own right, and it’s looking likely that she will enter the elite class very soon. Consequently, she is very keen to impress the existing members with her competence — particularly Katsuragi, who she has a major crush on.

At the other end, we have Ikaruga, typically the most polite, reserved and sensible of the group, breaking down in tears in both private and public because she knows her graduation is coming up and that means she won’t be able to spend time with these girls that have become so important to her any more. Having had something of a turbulent life prior to her time at Hanzou, Ikaruga is understandably reluctant to accept a change as big as this; she doesn’t want to be alone in the world, as she’s come to think of the Hanzou girls as her real family.

Gessen’s arc, meanwhile, sees a similar but different change looming on the horizon: Shiki has received an offer from an overseas school who would like her to go and study with them. Consequently, much of the Gessen arc concerns her processing her feelings about the situation, and whether she thinks that it’s something she “should” do. She’s hesitant to leave behind her friends — who, much like in the case of the Hanzou girls, have become her family — but is also keenly aware of the promise she made to their former master Kurokage. Of all the girls in Gessen, Kurokage had the most faith that Shiki would be a truly “international” shinobi; she demonstrates a knack for learning languages, a respect for other cultures and a deep spirituality beneath her sometimes brash gyaru exterior, making her an ideal candidate for study overseas.

But she doesn’t feel like it’s just her decision. She knows that she’s an important part of the Gessen family, so she can’t just drop everything and leave them like that. Likewise, her friends in Gessen are torn between not wanting their precious friend to leave, and wanting the very best for her.

Homura’s Crimson Squad has probably the most “modern” of the stories, which is appropriate because as a renegade group — neither “good” nor “evil” by the strict definitions of the shinobi world — they’re the least steeped in tradition. Their story concerns how they are going to make the transition from effectively still being shinobi students — despite no longer attending school — to the world of professional shinobi. And, in the process, moving out from the cave they’ve called their hideout for some time now!

They’re offered a new opportunity as part of the P-1 Grand Prix festivities: the shinobi-exclusive video streaming site NewTube, which is broadcasting both the tournament itself and behind-the-scenes footage. Consequently, they figure that a good way to get themselves noticed will be to clickbait themselves into the good graces of potential clients, and so much of their narrative revolves around their increasingly ridiculous attempts to show some of their… less obvious talents.

Finally, Hebijo’s story is primarily a family matter, and concerns the changing dynamics between the various members of this group. While Estival Versus’ narrative was primarily about Ryoubi and Ryouna and how they dealt with a sudden encounter with the spirit of their dead sister, the Hebijo narrative in Peach Beach Splash places the focus primarily on the sisters Murasaki and Imu, with the conflict stemming from Imu’s obsession with Hebijo leader Miyabi.

Murasaki perceives Imu’s infatuation with Miyabi as her sister no longer caring for her, and as such becomes even more withdrawn and depressed than she usually is. She finds herself somewhat backed into a corner when her self-enforced isolation from the rest of the group sees her uncovering some interesting pieces of information about the truth behind the P-1 Grand Prix… but how can she bring this up when she’s suffering such bitter feelings towards her sister?

All of the narrative arcs are fascinating and feel distinct in their own right; the common theme of “change” and how we each deal with it is explored in a variety of different ways and from a number of different angles, and by the end of each of these stories, we have a much better understanding about how all these girls feel as they face down a seemingly uncertain, dangerous future. (For those who have been confused about the whole “two timelines” thing in the series, too, Peach Beach Splash goes a long way to explaining what that is all about.)

What’s interesting about the game as a whole is that the player themselves is also asked to deal with that core concept of change in terms of how they engage with the game. Not only is Peach Beach Splash no longer a brawler like its mainline predecessors in the series (Bon Appétit aside), but its progression mechanics are also completely different from what we’ve seen in prior Senran Kagura games.

Let’s look at that core gameplay, first, because it’s a really interesting twist on the usual third-person shooter formula that works exceptionally well when played on a console or on PC with a gamepad.

Throughout the story mode, each narrative episode will feature a mission. These tend to take one of several forms: horde-style affairs where you have to defeat a large group of weaker enemies; conflicts against another individual or group, where you have to defeat other playable characters; missions where you have to track down specific targets (usually burning objects) while being bombarded with waves of weak enemies; and boss fights at the conclusion of each of the main arcs.

Prior to each mission, you’ll be given a rough idea of what is expected of you, and presented with a team lineup. The first time you play a mission, this cannot be changed; after you’ve cleared it once, you can replace any of the participants with any of the playable characters.

You can pick any of the team members to be the character you control in the mission; the others, if any, will become computer-controlled. There don’t seem to be any obvious differences between the characters aside from their models and soundbites, and each can be fully customised with a deck of cards. Yes, cards; not only is Peach Beach Splash a third person shooter, it’s also a collectible card game.

Each character’s loadout consists of their character card, a weapon card, three pet cards and six skill cards. Their character card determines their level (and, by extension, their maximum life); their weapon card can be switched out according to your preference without penalty, so if you prefer, say, Yomi wielding a rocket launcher to her usual Gatling gun, you can make that happen; the pet cards represent summonable allies that stick around for a little while with various benefits; and the skill cards represent immediate abilities, both offensive and defensive in nature.

During the mission itself, you’ll be equipped with the weapon card right from the start and immediately draw three cards from a shuffled deck that consists of the pet and skill cards. These will then gradually charge up at a rate according to their “cost” value; the higher the cost, the longer a card takes to charge. Once a card is fully charged, it can be used by tapping a direction on the directional pad, at which point it will either summon a pet or trigger the skill in question. A used card is immediately discarded and replaced with a new one from your deck, and once you’ve cycled around your whole deck it’ll get shuffled and you’ll start seeing the same ones again.

This system might seem initially confusing, since you need to learn what all the various effects are. However, it’s not as complex as it might initially seem.

The skill cards are all based on characters from the series — and indeed their provocative artwork is drawn directly from mobile game New Wave. Different cards depicting the same character will have the same effect, with the power of the effect increasing in accordance with how rare the specific card is. For example, a one-star card depicting Minori from Gessen allows you to heal yourself by about 10% of your maximum life; a three-star Minori, meanwhile, allows you to heal about 30% instead.

There are also some minor variations between character cards, but the overall effect is the same. For example, Kafuru cards allow you to increase the speed at which you reload your weapon; lower rarity Kafurus just apply this effect to yourself, while higher rarity ones apply the buff to your whole team.

The AI makes use of cards just like you do, so when assembling your team lineup for a mission it’s important not to focus solely on your own character. Instead, it’s best to take the time to build a deck for each character that allows the team as a whole to play both offensively and defensively. There’s a pleasing amount of strategy to this; while there’s nothing stopping you just giving everyone the same deck — you can load and save favourite decks to make this easier — it’s a lot of fun trying to figure out how to set up a combination of cards from what you have available that will see your team operating at peak efficiency.

We’ll come back to the cards in a moment; let’s take a moment to talk about the actual third-person shooter gameplay. In short, this is designed to be a high-speed, very arcadey-feeling shooter that is less about accurate shooting and more about clever positioning, strategy and being able to get out of trouble when you need to.

A generous (albeit optional) auto-aim system means that with most weapons you just need to point vaguely in the direction of an enemy to be able to hit them, and a lock-on system allows you to focus your fire on a specific target if you so desire.

Despite all the guns technically being water guns of some description, they all handle very differently and have a pleasing sense of impact to them — especially the more powerful ones such as the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher and the grenade launcher. Each weapon has two fire modes, too, typically affecting things like range, damage output, maximum ammunition before needing to reload and all manner of other factors.

There are some unusual weapons in there, too; besides the relatively conventional pistols, shotguns, assault rifles and launchers, there’s a spray gun that either drenches anything in close range or allows you to lay traps; a hosepipe and shower combo that sprays a concentrated jet over two different ranges according to firing mode; and a few hidden special weapons along the way, too.

There’s a really admirable amount of feedback on the screen that is very helpful when determining if you’re actually pulling your weight in the teamwork stakes. Your aiming reticle highlights when an enemy is in range; a big arcadey “HIT” icon that Sega would be proud of appears when your shots are on target; big red RPG-style damage numbers erupt from enemies so you can see how much of an effect your attacks are having; your ammo meter pulses red and makes a noise when you need to reload.

At no point do you ever feel like something that happens is a surprise or “not your fault” — particularly as there’s no way you can be obliterated in a single barrage thanks to a system where losing half your health knocks you back and provides you with a temporary shield for a short period, allowing you time to regroup, prepare some cards, reload and rejoin the fray.

Movement is speedy and further adds to the “arcadey” feel. Your standard run is quick and agile, but things get really interesting when you make use of the water jet belt that each girl has on her waist. This can be used either for a Jet Dash or a Jet Jump move. Jet Dashes can either be a quick dodge or a sustained stream for rapid movement across long distances, while the exact form of a Jet Jump varies according to which weapon you’re using.

Some allow you to fly high in the air for a short period, while others simply allow you to do a particularly large jump. Making good use of the Jet Jump adds a pleasing amount of that much-beloved buzzword “verticality” to the game rather than keeping everything on a flat plane, and all of the stages are designed with this in mind, with some having multiple levels of corridors and rooms, while others feature high-up platforms ideal for sniping or just getting an overview of the battlefield.

The immediate, arcadey nature of the gunplay makes Peach Beach Splash a pleasure to play, but the variety of stages, the different stage types and the huge range of tactical possibilities that the card decks provide gives the game longevity and depth, even if you never touch the online multiplayer modes. There’s a ton to enjoy here as a solo player — besides the main story mode, there are also a series of “Paradise Episodes that supposedly unfold “off-camera” while the rest of the narrative is unfolding, and a set of four “V-Road” leagues where you can take a customised team of five into battle against a series of themed, computer-controlled teams of gradually increasing difficulty in multiplayer-style timed point-based matches.

The other main aspect of Peach Beach Splash’s longevity comes from those damn cards. There are over 800 of them to collect altogether, though thankfully for trophy hunters there’s no trophy requiring you to nab all of them.

Card packs are awarded after each successful mission, and can be purchased from the in-game shop using the currency you earn as rewards. (While there is a bunch of DLC available for the game, it’s worth noting that this is not a microtransaction-based game at all — it’s easy to earn currency, and by completing harder missions you can effectively guarantee yourself at least one card of a particular rarity.)

You can only have one copy of each card in your collection. Any duplicates you get will be added to a pool that can be used to level up your collection. The rarer a card is that you get a duplicate for, the more experience it will be worth if you use it to level something up. Standard one-star cards are worth just 1XP, for example, while five-star “ultra rare” cards are worth a mighty 100.

Each and every card can be levelled up. That includes the character cards and the weapon cards as well as the pets and skills; rather delightfully, the weapons actually change significantly in appearance every few levels besides growing noticeably stronger, so there’s definite incentive to advance these at the very least.

Levelling a card up increases its effectiveness in some way. Characters get more health, weapons do more damage or are more efficient, pets stick around for longer or do their job more effectively, and skill cards have a stronger or more enduring effect. While most of the initial arcs can probably be cleared with level 1 characters and decks, for later challenges in the Paradise Episodes and particularly the V-Road Challenges, you’ll need to engage with this system for not just yourself but your teammates too; it’s no good having a super-buff favourite character if the rest of your group gets flattened in a few seconds, because five-against-one tends to end badly.

Thankfully, the very structure of the game encourages you to level up a variety of characters a bit at a time. Each story mission places a different character in the spotlight, presenting them as the “default” playable character for you to take control of by putting them at the top of the list. You don’t have to follow this advice, of course, but in doing so and ensuring that everyone is well-equipped, you’ll naturally build a selection of good decks for a wide selection of characters over the course of the game as a whole, putting you in a good position for later, more significant challenges.

Those accustomed to mobile games will probably want to unlearn a few things, too; this is a game about gradual progression a bit at a time rather than spooging all your progression materials in one go. Progression requires quite a lot of experience (and thus duplicate cards) at higher levels, so it’s not always best to focus on levelling up a single card such as the character; it’s best to spread things out a bit an evenly level up your whole deck rather than hoard. It’s not as if cards are hard to come by, anyway, and the V-Road Challenge scenarios provide a good income of in-game currency with which to purchase new packs if you so desire.

You can hopefully see by now that this is all very different from the standard Senran Kagura fare of grinding XP by hammering out huge combos in battle, and levelling up Yin, Yang and Flash by fighting in different styles. Much as the girls themselves are having to deal with change in their own lives, so too are you having to deal with change in the way you approach and play their game.

Thankfully, it’s a fun and satisfying change that keeps Peach Beach Splash interesting and fresh over the long term, even if you never set a single sun-kissed bare foot online to test your skills against other fans. This is most certainly an excellent Senran Kagura game… and, hell, just an excellent arcadey shooter in its own right.

That teaser for Senran Kagura 7even in the ending, though… man. Way to blueball your audience!

More about Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash
More about the Senran Kagura series

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 the success of Diamonds, programmer Simon Hunt decided that he wanted to make a sequel using the characters he’d established.

Inspired by the vertical scrolling of Firefleet, another game from English Software, he decided he wanted to expand beyond the original game’s single-screen gameplay, and thus Dan Strikes Back was born.

Digger Dan’s most precious of treasures has been stolen away by the evil Brian the Blob! Can Dan make his way through the many perilous layers of Brian’s vault to reclaim his prize? Probably not, given that I’m in charge, but it’s fun having a go anyway…

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

At the time of writing, the world is gearing up for a fourth official installment in the Bubble Bobble series.

Wait a minute, I hear you ask, fourth? What happened to the third? I don’t judge you too harshly for asking this question; I know some people who weren’t even aware that Rainbow Islands was the second Bubble Bobble game, so for you to be unaware that there had already been a third one is entirely understandable.

It doesn’t stop it being a huge shame, however, because 1991’s Parasol Stars: The Story of Bubble Bobble III is a wonderful game; one of my all-time favourite single-screen “kill ’em all” platformers, in fact, beaten only by Rod-Land. And yet, for various reasons, very few people either know it exists or remember it.

Part of the reason for this is the fact that unlike the original Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands, which originated in the arcades and were subsequently ported to every platform under the sun, Parasol Stars began its life as a PC Engine exclusive. And as most PC Engine enthusiasts will tell you, the PC Engine was a wonderful system, but it was woefully overlooked and underappreciated back in the day, and remains a system that doesn’t get a ton of attention even today.

This isn’t to say Parasol Stars didn’t get any ports, however. Working Designs localised the PC Engine original for the North American Turbografx-16, but this was only available in very limited quantities. Ocean Software ported the game to NES and Game Boy later in 1991, and developed Atari ST and Amiga versions a year later in 1992. The ST version is actually where I first encountered the game; a demo was on a cover disk of an ST magazine, and I was immediately smitten with it, though sadly I’ve never owned my own full copy of it on any platform.

Enough sob stories, though; if you’re one of those people who didn’t know this game existed, you probably want to know what it’s all about. Well, functionally it’s pretty similar to Bubble Bobble in particular in that it’s a game about killing everything on screen. This time around, however, rather than blowing bubbles to trap enemies, you’re armed with an umbrella that you can unfurl either in front of you or directly above you.

The umbrella is both offensive and defensive in nature. Opening it protects you from enemies and things they might happen to fling at you, and it also stuns enemies. Once an enemy is stunned, they can be grabbed atop your umbrella, then flung out in front of you to dispatch further enemies, and when they eventually hit a wall, they’ll turn into the obligatory point-scoring fruits and desserts typically seen in a game of this type. As always, taking out more enemies in one go results in more significant point bonuses from the collectible items, and many stages feature hidden bonus items that can be uncovered by flinging enemies through particular parts of the level.

There are a few additional twists on the formula besides just whacking enemies and flinging them at others. For starters, many stages feature water droplets dribbling from the top of the screen. These can be collected similarly to stunned enemies and flung, or if you collect five atop your umbrella, you’ll create a large droplet which bursts and becomes a flowing torrent of water when you throw it. This can be used to clear large areas in one go — or in the case of some stages, reach enemies that otherwise seem impossible to get to.

Certain stages feature elemental water droplets with specific functions; once again, collecting five of these allows you a special ability that varies according to the elemental type. Lightning droplets, for example, toss out a large lightning bolt that passes through enemies and walls, allowing for a full line of carnage if you aim it correctly.

The game is broken up into visually themed worlds with a thematically appropriate boss at the end of each; the first world is themed around music, for example, which means all the enemies are musical instruments, and the boss is a “one man band” type of arrangement that, inexplicably (and delightfully), plays Lambada at you.

Bosses often feature unique mechanics; the first, for example, allows you to collect a “lightning in a bottle” power-up that means whenever you unfurl your umbrella above you, lightning droplets will gradually gather ready for you to fling at the boss. The game doesn’t tell you exactly what these power-ups do; it’s up to you to experiment and figure things out for yourself. Or read the manual, if you have it. Which, let’s face it, these days you probably don’t.

Mechanically and structurally, Parasol Stars isn’t doing anything particularly new or massively special in its own right, but the whole thing is executed with such glorious slickness that it’s just a consistent pleasure to play, whether you’re challenging it alone or with a friend in the simultaneous two-player mode.

And for those without access to a PC Engine or Turbografx, the Atari ST and Amiga versions are extremely solid ports that are remarkably true to the console originals. There were originally supposed to be ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 ports added to the mix, too, but the former was cancelled, and the latter’s code was lost when the freelance developer’s wife got hammered and angry, destroying both his computer and all his backups in the process. She sounds nice.

That’s pretty much your lot for opportunities to play this hidden gem at the time of writing; the Bubble Bobble Featuring Rainbow Islands release for PlayStation and Saturn was originally set to include Parasol Stars as well but ended up… not doing so for some reason. It was available for the Wii Virtual Console platform in Japan, but since Nintendo took down the whole Wii Shop Channel, that’s no longer available.

There is hope, however; the original (and best) version of Parasol Stars will be making a triumphant return as part of the PC Engine/Turbografx-16/CoreGrafx Mini console that Konami is set to release in March of 2020, making this wonderful game readily available for the whole world to play once again. And I for one cannot wait!

More about Parasol Stars

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.

By popular request, I present Nene! All right, one person asked if I could unlock Nene and play as her for a bit, but on a channel as small as mine that counts as “by popular request”.

Turns out the suggestion was a good one, mind, as Nene is a ton of fun to play, and manages to make herself useful to Cao Pi’s cause even though she’s considerably lower level than everyone else. But I shouldn’t be surprised really; ninja girls are the best girls, after all.

Having successfully captured Da Ji in a previous sortie, Cao Pi declares Wei’s independence from Orochi and continues growing his army in preparation for the final assault. Today he sets his sights on Nagamasa Azai, who is hanging out in the Chen Cang area… so this seems like as good an opportunity as any to throw Nene in at the deep end and see what she’s made of!

It would probably be remiss of me to ignore one of the most consistently popular characters in the Senran Kagura series while we’re smack dab in the middle of a detailed exploration of it, huh?

Yes, it is absolutely time to acknowledge Yumi’s popularity among fans of the series worldwide — and also to address a few common matters that tend to come up in discussion any time she’s mentioned.

It is also time to remember that cuteneth ith juthtithe. Puri.

Yumi was first introduced in Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus on PlayStation Vita. She’s the leader of the Gessen Girls Academy group of “good” shinobi, and is strongly associated with the ice element. She has an extremely distinctive voice, courtesy of actress Yumi Hara, and, over time, her initially presented stern-faced seriousness has given way to a playful, occasionally obsessive interest in being “cute” — though she tends to know when are the best and worst times to break out this particular part of her personality.

Yumi and the Gessen girls in particular are something of a contrast with their “good” counterparts in the Hanzou academy in terms of how they handle the concept of “justice”.

Some describe the Hanzou girls — particularly Asuka — as embodying the concept of “sun justice”, or the kind of justice you typically see the protagonist of a shounen manga or anime personifying. You know the stuff: power of friendship, understanding one another through punching each other in the face, that sort of thing. Ideally, everything should be resolved nicely without anyone getting permanently hurt or, worst of all, killed.

By contrast, Yumi in particular embodies the idea of “moon justice” whereby “good” is done through any means necessary, regardless of any obstacles that might be in the way. Yumi, appropriately enough for her association with the ice element, is capable of being stony cold when absolutely necessary, and in her early days in the series’ narrative in particular, puts across the impression that she would have absolutely no hesitation putting down someone who stands in her way.

Like most of the rest of the cast, however, she softens over time as she develops friendships with the other groups of shinobi students — even the ones supposedly on “the other side”. Once the group as a whole has determined that the conflict between “good” and “evil” shinobi is a construct that ties in with the battle against the otherworldly youma, they realise once and for all that there’s really no need for them to dislike one another despite the fact they’re supposed to be rivals and opponents.

Yumi’s cute side was first explored in her Shinobi Girl’s Heart side story in Shinovi Versus, where she wished to understand the very concept of being cute, and eventually determined that it was best expressed through speaking in a cute way. In the original Japanese script, this makes use of a vocal tic that doesn’t really have a direct translation — she adds “puri” to the end of all her sentences.

The exact origin of “puri” is not entirely clear and these cutesy sentence-ending particles aren’t always intended to make actual sense, but at a guess “puri” stems from the Japanese onomatopoeia puri puri, which describes the extremely specific feeling you get when you bite into a shrimp and there’s a bit of resistance but also some pleasingly bouncy squishiness to it all. That would certainly be in keeping with Senran Kagura’s love of ladies’ wibbly-wobbly squishy bits, after all — though please don’t go around biting anyone’s life or hometown without getting explicit permission first.

Obviously there’s not really a way of incorporating the unique mouthfeel of biting into a piece of cooked shrimp in the English language, and so the localisers were presented with an important and difficult decision to make: how to get across Yumi’s exaggerated cuteness in a way that would make sense? They eventually settled on baby-talk and lisping; whenever Yumi is twying to be cute in the Englith thcwipt, she dwopth hew R’th and babbleth on like a baby.

Much of the humour in these sequences comes from Yumi proudly talking about things that don’t really work in this exaggerated vernacular such as having a stwong senthe of juthtithe, and several of her side stories also feature humorous depictions of other characters attempting to out-cute her. Daidouji’s attempts in Bon Appétit are particularly memorable.

So at this point let’s address a common criticism of Yumi: that she’s stolen the spotlight from the series’ supposed original protagonist Asuka.

The first thing to be aware of with regard to this is that Yumi has come consistently top in character popularity polls of the Senran Kagura fanbase (as reported by Kagurapedia) ever since she first appeared in Shinovi Versus. As such, it’s not altogether surprising that when promotional materials or crossovers with other franchises happen to come along, Yumi is the one most likely to be picked for them.

The second (and much more important) thing to be aware of is that where it actually counts — in the case of the actual games’ narratives — Yumi is no more or less important than any of the other cast members. In fact, post-Shinovi Versus, the series has made a point of putting characters other than the faction leaders in the limelight — Estival Versus was very much Ryoubi’s story, for example; Bon Appétit gives every individual character their own story; and Peach Beach Splash spotlights a variety of different characters in its discrete arcs: Ikaruga for Hanzou, Murasaki for Hebijo, Shiki for Gessen and the whole crew for Homura’s Crimson Squad.

In other words, the concept of Yumi “stealing” Asuka’s role is mostly a fan thing rather than an actual issue with the series itself. One of the most consistently admirable things about the Senran Kagura series as a whole is how it manages to sustain such an enormous ensemble cast without anyone really feeling “left out” of important development, and without any of the characters feeling like they’re “filler”.

It’s abundantly clear that the whole team behind Senran Kagura adores these characters; that much is clear from the stories they’ve been a part of since their creation. Yumi, it seems, just happens to be the one that a lot of fans adore too!

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.

Do you like dungeon crawling? Do you like shooting things? Do you like games that begin with the letter “X”, which are in unsurprisingly short supply? Then do I have a treat for you!

Atari Games’ Xybots — originally envisioned as a sequel to Gauntlet but reskinned to sci-fi because someone in a suit figured that a sequel to one of the company’s most popular games of all time would not, in itself, be popular — is an interesting game. And, moreover, one that was probably ahead of its time; turns out that making it sci-fi didn’t make it popular either!

It also features one of my least favourite mechanics from Atari Games releases of this era, but it’s not quite enough to spoil the rest of the experience. This ST port is remarkably true to the arcade version, warts and all…

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

I remember coming across Assault Android Cactus for the first time: it was back in 2013, when I was still working on USgamer, and I was headed for EGX, or the Eurogamer Expo as it used to be known.

My boss Jaz Rignall suggested that I might want to check out this game he’d heard a bit about, and put me in contact with the developer. I wasn’t sure what to expect going into it; if I’m perfectly honest, I was expecting some sort of fairly forgettable indie fare, but I trusted Jaz’s judgement. He’d been around in the games industry even longer than me, after all, so he knew his stuff.

I was right to trust his judgement. Assault Android Cactus ended up being my favourite thing I saw at EGX that year, and it’s remained a consistent favourite of mine ever since.

The version I saw back at EGX in 2013 was an early access version. The developers at Witch Beam Games were keen to implement all manner of interesting features, but at the time I saw it just the base game was in place. Said interesting features continued to be implemented over the course of the next two years, until the game finally launched out of Early Access in 2015, at which point it also came to PS4 and Xbox One.

In early 2019, the game got a surprise port to Nintendo Switch — an ideal platform for an arcadey blaster like this if ever there was one — along with a swathe of upgrades that rebranded it Assault Android Cactus+. Said enhancements for the Switch port also made their way back to the PC version of the game as a free update, which is a nice way to reward longtime supporters.

But back up a moment: what the hell is this game? Well, quite simply, it’s a twin-stick shooter. Yawn, you might say, but don’t fall asleep just yet: this is absolutely one of the best refinements of the twin-stick blasting concept since Bizarre Creations’ seminal Geometry Wars series. And it provides a markedly distinct experience from those games, at that.

Assault Android Cactus was deliberately developed as a blend between two distinct styles of shoot ’em up: the Japanese-style danmaku shooter with its screen-filling bullet patterns and intricate dodging gameplay; and the Western-style twin-stick gameplay where you were confronted with hordes of enemies and had to try and keep your cool under increasingly unreasonable circumstances.

Developer Sanatana Mishra — a former Sega employee — told me that the game had been particularly inspired by games such as Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun as well as the overall distinctive look and feel of Dreamcast-era Sega games. It’s a joyous, colourful, arcadey affair with a strong emphasis on proving your skills and chasing high scores — though for those who enjoy a bit of narrative context to what they’re doing, there is some entertaining dialogue throughout the campaign too.

In each stage of Assault Android Cactus, you pick one of several different cute android girls, all of whom have a loadout of a basic weapon and a special weapon. You are then thrown into an arena and tasked with defeating all of the enemies before your battery depletes. There are no lives in Assault Android Cactus; everything is about managing that battery level.

Clearing a distinct “wave” of enemies will spawn a battery pickup that allows you to survive a little longer — and eventually to the end of the complete stage — while getting knocked down by losing all your health causes you to lose 10% of your score. Along the way pickups that increase your firepower, freeze all the enemies for a few seconds or accelerate your movement speed occasionally spawn; all of these also cause battery pickups to be attracted to you, so they’re worth grabbing whenever you see them.

This structure keeps things nicely accessible and means that even less skilled shoot ’em up enthusiasts have an opportunity to get to know some of the enemy attack patterns that they’ll have to deal with rather than being unceremoniously greeted with a Game Over screen within about ten seconds. The newer Plus versions of the game even incorporate a “single stick” mode that allows you to concentrate on moving, with aiming being an automatic process; this is ideal for those who find it difficult to concentrate on both aiming and dodging at the same time.

This accessibility doesn’t come at the expense of depth and challenge for grizzled veterans, however. On the contrary, the game has a strong emphasis on pursuing perfection. It’s possible to attain a coveted “S+” rank on each and every stage — including the boss stages — by chaining together every single kill in the stage into a single combo. This is surprisingly challenging to accomplish, even in the early stages, not because it’s difficult to clear the actual stages, but because the game occasionally drops cheeky spanners in the works such as enemies that take just too long to kill to maintain your combo, requiring you to make use of your special weapon rather than relying on your standard shots.

That special weapon is worth getting a feel for anyway, since the twirling animation your character does while switching to it also carries with it some valuable invincibility frames, allowing you to pirouette your way right through the middle of seemingly unavoidable bullet patterns. Plus they’re just plain fun to use; each character has their own unique weapon loadout, and they’re not just variations on “spraying bullets ahead”.

The eponymous Cactus is probably the most conventional to use, making use of a rapid-fire machine gun as her regular shot and a shorter range flamethrower as her special shot. At the other end of the spectrum, we have Aubergine, who completely lacks a conventional shot altogether, and instead commands an independently controlled drone with deadly spinning rotor blades for slicing through enemies as her basic weapon, and the ability to summon gravitational singularities as her special weapon.

Mishra told me back in 2013 that this aspect of the game had been particularly inspired by a lot of Cave shooters that featured distinctive playable characters, each with their own unique abilities; they cater to different play styles and provide additional challenges for those who feel they have mastered the more conventional ways to play.

Where Assault Android Cactus really shines is in its variety. While each level is based around the same fundamental concept of defeating all enemies, the dynamic, gradually evolving nature of the levels means that things are kept constantly interesting. The first level, for example, is set on a descending elevator with enemies crawling up over the sides; as you progress through the incoming waves, the elevator eventually reaches the bottom, causing the arena to open up considerably. Later in the game, you’ll encounter many interesting environmental hazards; a particular highlight is a set of platforms floating in space that are constantly shifting, completely altering the layout of the level at regular intervals.

Its bosses are extremely cool. Explicitly phase-based — you can see where each phase begins and ends on the boss’ health bar — they are distinctly learnable encounters that you can practice, perfect and master. It’s a significant challenge to get an S+ rank on these stages due to the immaculate timing required, but it is possible with judicious application of special weapons and perfect dodging skills.

The nice thing, though, is that there’s no need to pursue perfection if you don’t want to; the game is substantial enough that it’ll take you quite a while to clear even if you’re just trying to survive each stage. And even once you’ve cleared the main campaign, you can try it again with the other characters. Or the Plus version features a harder “Campaign+” mode with new enemy patterns and dynamic stage elements. And all versions feature an endless “Infinity Drive” mode, a boss rush mode and a “Daily Drive” mode where everyone competes on the same stage for a day. Plus you can play any mode in up to four-player local co-op.

And this isn’t even getting into the unlockable Sega-style “EX Options” that allow you to play in first-person mode, from a fixed isometric perspective, with AI partners, solo against co-op enemy counts or with special “mega weapons”.

There is so much game here, and it should be testament to this game’s quality that I’ve been constantly coming back to it and continually enjoying it ever since I played that first Early Access version. The newest Plus version makes it even better than it already was, and an absolutely essential purchase for anyone who enjoys some highly addictive, extremely creative twin-stick shooter action. It’s a game that has clearly been a labour of love for its developers for the last six years, and that sort of passion and dedication really deserves to be rewarded.

I salute you, Assault Android Cactus; you truly deserve to go down as an all-time classic. Now how about you have a quiet word with Limited Run Games and sort out a packaged release of that Switch version, hmmm…?

More about Assault Android Cactus

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 a bit of farting around getting lost, the Warriors of Light finally find themselves in front of their next dungeoneering challenge.

Okay, it’s the wrong dungeon, but they’re there now, so they might as well dive in and have a bit of an explore. What could possibly go wrong, after all?

Mindflayers, dear reader; mindflayers are what could possibly go wrong.

Besides being a cracking series of games that are a lot of fun to enjoy in their own right, a very appealing aspect of the Senran Kagura series for a lot of players is how it encourages creativity.

This has taken a number of different forms over the years, beginning with the simple option to dress the various characters up as you see fit — with these custom appearances being reflected in real-time cutscenes during the game — and gradually evolving into a fully-formed “Diorama” feature where you can arrange and pose characters as you see fit.

Let’s take a look at how Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal, the next game we’ll be covering here on MoeGamer, handles this side of things.

Kicking off a session in the Dressing Room in Burst Re:Newal, you’re presented with these options. In the Japanese original and PC version, there’s also an “Intimacy” option where you can poke and prod the girls in various ways; this was stripped out of the Western PS4 release due to Sony’s bizarre behaviour with regard to sexualised content in recent months at the time of writing. It’s still present in the PS4 versions of earlier games such as Peach Beach Splash, though — you can even do it in VR with that particular game!

Let’s explore the Change option first. This allows you to pick one of the five characters loaded in at any one time — you can switch any of them out to any you have unlocked and/or purchased DLC for — and customise their costumes, lingerie, hairstyle, accessories and skin tone.

The skin tone option is pretty self-explanatory; you can choose between the character’s default skin tone, particularly pale (Yumi-style), “normal” (i.e. that which the majority of the cast has), tanned or tanned with tan lines. So if Homura’s tanned skin does it for you, you can give the whole cast some time in the sun if you so desire.

The first thing you’ll probably want to fiddle around with is the base costume. There are a bunch of these unlocked from the get-go, more unlock throughout the game and others are purchasable from the in-game shop. Pre-orders of the game came with some additional costume DLC, more costumes are available as paid DLC and certain pieces of paid DLC from previous games on the same platform are cross-compatible with Burst Re:Newal, which is nice.

You can shift the camera around while browsing costumes to see how all the different parts look. You can pan it around the character, zoom in and out and spin the character around to see their front and back. No peeking up their skirts though; that’s what Diorama mode is for, among other much more interesting things.

Each costume has several colour variants. In a lot of cases, there are five different colours to choose from, meaning if you want everyone in one of the “sub-casts” to be coordinated but unique in some way, you can put them in the same uniform but give them a different colour.

The different costumes aren’t just retextures of the same model, either. There are a variety of different meshes allowing you to create various different looks according to your preferences. Here’s Asuka wearing a variation on Hebijo’s uniform with an extremely large skirt, for example.

Since there’s a fair chance you’ll spend at least some of your time in Senran Kagura running around in your skivvies, it’s important to pick something you’re happy with. Each character has their own iconic underwear style, but you can mix and match as much as you like. Burst Re:Newal also features the characters’ iconic designs in a variety of different panty styles, too, so if you prefer a high-leg look, borderline indecent low-rise pantsu or a butt-flattering thong, go nuts.

You can also pick each character’s hairstyle here; you can give the characters each other’s haircuts, or make use of some unique ones that don’t normally appear in the game. It always feels a little bit “wrong” doing this; for me, these characters’ hairstyles are an important part of their identity. However, you can have a bit of fun with them by, say, allowing them to change their hairstyle in between their normal form and their Shinobi Transformation incarnation.

Or you could just change their hair colour. Again, each haircut has several different colour variations you can pick from.

Accessories are divided into several different categories according to how they’ll be used. Head accessories, for example, include caps, headdresses and even floating emote markers.

Some accessories are pretty subtle and can only be seen close-up such as these cherries dangling tantalisingly from Asuka’s lips here.

Every accessory can be customised in terms of its position, rotation and size, so if you think this balloon sticking out of Asuka’s back looks a bit weird, you can move it to her hand.

Just like this! You can precisely move things by a single degree or “centimetre” at a time, or you can hold down a button to move things by larger steps. That looks much better, doesn’t it? She looks like she’s at a party.

But oh no, what’s this? She moved her hand and the balloon stayed where it was! Disaster! What will we do?

This is an easy fix. By default, the balloon counts as a “body” accessory, so it’s attached to her back. Moving it to look like it’s in her hand means that it’s still invisibly attached to her back, so it doesn’t move with her hand. We can alter this by specifically choosing to attach it to her hand instead, and tweaking the position and rotation accordingly.

And there we go — one balloon that stays attached to her hand, whatever that hand might be doing at the time. I’m sure you can think of some creative applications of this sort of thing.

Once you have the characters dressed to your satisfaction, the Diorama mode is where you can play with them. They begin as a complete group assembled together like this in front of a default background.

The first thing you’ll want to do is put them in a suitable environment for whatever you’re planning your scene to be. There are two types of backgrounds: static 2D images from the game’s visual novel sequences like this forest scene…

…and fully three-dimensional environments pulled from the game’s levels. You can freely explore these with the camera and look at all the neat little details that are around the place.

You can tweak the environment a little with settings such as effects overlays, fog and ambient lighting. Here we’re adding a sun rays overlay effect to make this tropical beach look even brighter and more pleasant than it does already.

The first thing you’ll want to do is roughly position where you want your models to be. There are a few ways you can do this, the easiest of which is the “big blue arrow” approach, where you simply pick them up and plonk them down where you want them. You can do these either for the characters individually, or move the whole group at once.

The next thing you’ll want to work on is posing them. Asuka is here on a sun lounger, so it’s only natural we’d want her to be able to lie down and sun herself a bit. But hmm, that’s not quite right; Asuka, that isn’t how you use one of those things!

Much like adjusting the accessories in the Dressing Room, you can adjust the characters’ positions in the Diorama. You can move them in three dimensions and rotate them about three different axes to get the exact position you want. You can also switch the characters’ outfits between various states including pre- and post-transformation outfits in varying levels of disrepair, and their respective lingerie for each state.

It’s worth moving the camera around a bit because what looks good from one angle might not necessarily be correct from another. Don’t be afraid to experiment and fudge things if you need to; careful composition can hide things such as Asuka’s hair going right through the sun lounger here!

Let’s bring in our next model Katsuragi. Moving her via the big blue arrow plonked her here where she’s technically on the ground, but it doesn’t look quite right. So, again, let’s adjust her accordingly.

There we go, that’s better; again, a bit of position tweaking and well-chosen camera angles can create a much more convincing effect. We can then add some more subtle touches such as facial expressions, which can be set independently for eyes and mouth. You can also move the eyes to have the character look in a particular direction, too.

Here’s our finished Kat, looking as pleased with herself as ever. Asuka remains blissfully oblivious as to what is probably about to happen.

Next up is Ikaruga. She’s feeling sensible, so we can keep her in her uniform rather than strip her down to her undies. The class representative needs to remain decent and ready for action at all times, after all.

And the folded arms pose is perfect for her. Not much else we need to do there, really. It’s worth noting at this point that if you find a camera angle you particularly like, you can store it, copy it and paste it; your scene can have several different predefined camera angles, so it’s a good idea to set one up for your final composition, then use another if you need to move around and look at characters up close for fine adjustments.

We’ll bring Yagyuu in next; she’s hiding behind the menu, but she’s totally there. Yagyuu’s irrepressible love for Hibari seems like an ideal opportunity to try out some of the “couples” poses that came with the pre-order DLC for Burst Re:Newal.

But first, we can tweak her expression to being embarrassed, because despite the fact she’s clearly as gay as a window, she would never, ever admit that out loud.

Bring on Hibari, and the companion partner pose to Yagyuu’s… wait, what happened here? This isn’t right at all!

Hmm, better, but the positioning still isn’t quite right; Yagyuu’s arm is clipping through Hibari’s stomach.

That’s better, but there’s still something missing.

Ah yes, a suitably joyful expression on Hibari’s face. But maybe we can add one extra little thing…

Perfect. Each of the characters can have animated emotes added to them based on the ones in the game’s dialogue sequences. Clearly there is only one suitable one for these circumstances, as Ikaruga tries her best to maintain her composure.

And here’s our finished scene. Or perhaps we can tweak it just slightly…

Yep, a bit of depth-of-field effect and a subtle tilt on the camera works wonders. It gives the scene a bit of life and dynamism.

When you’re happy with a Diorama creation, you can save it so you can recall it any time, either as a starting point for a new creation or simply to admire your work all over again.

The other backgrounds on offer are pretty varied. There are a number of these “TV interview” style backdrops with various sponsors ranging from the game’s developers to Japanese publications…

…and the environments based on the game’s levels are actually pretty expansive, allowing for a wide variety of different creations within the same area.

One more? One more. Why not. Let’s hit the gym! The school gym, that is. I can smell the sweaty feet from here.

Here’s the group move tool at work. You can shift all five characters around at once. It’s best to do this at the start of your session, otherwise you might end up accidentally moving characters you’d spent ages carefully positioning!

We can then use the individual character positioning to get each of them into place. It’s worth noting that the big blue arrow can only get characters so close to a wall or other obstacle, so it’s best used for simply putting them roughly in position. Use the fine-tuning controls to finish the pose.

I dunno, you train your girls as ninjas and they just get cocky by sitting on top of the basketball hoops. Katsuragi is looking up with a big grin on her face right now.

There are actually a decent variety of poses included in the base game, including numerous simple sitting poses as well as standing. This allows you to give each character a unique look that befits their personality.

Now, Kat… I think you need to do something silly as punishment for ogling Asuka from beneath. Let’s start with the silliest pose I can find, which is probably this “idol jump”.

We can then carefully insert her into the basket and tweak her facial expression so it looks like she’s somehow tripping over something that is at least eight feet off the ground.

Add a suitable emote and yep, that looks good. Hibari would be proud of that tripping action.

Talking of Hibari, let’s get her seated to enjoy the fun. This pose looks eminently suitable. Now perhaps we can grant Yagyuu’s wish for her…

Hmm. Yagyuu’s ridiculously massive hair makes this a little more impractical than I had hoped. Maybe the pair of them should switch places.

There we go, that’s cute. Not quite right, though; Hibari’s arm is currently embedded in Yagyuu’s chest. Unfortunately, there are no inverse kinematics features in the Diorama, so you can’t just move Hibari’s arm to a better spot. You need to find a different pose or use camera angles creatively.

Ah, that one works better. This is another half of a “couples” pose, but it actually works well by itself when combined with Yagyuu’s seated pose here. Let’s apply a few tweaks.

It wasn’t obvious from the front, but both of them were a bit far forward. Let’s move them back to get them seated a bit more securely on the beam.

A little bit of “tilt” on Hibari finishes the pose off nicely, but wasn’t there something else we need…?

Oh right, yeah, Yagyuu’s powerful gay energy seeping out of her ears. Can’t forget that!

And there we go. Another fine piece of work.

If you’re feeling particularly spicy, there’s even a “dialogue box” overlay effect for each of the characters in the scene, allowing you to make use of your favourite image manipulation program to make them say silly things.

I rest my case. Thank you for your time, ladies, your cooperation was much appreciated. Especially you, Kat.

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.

Let’s check out what is regarded by some as one of the best flight simulators on the Atari 2600!

To be fair, this isn’t a particularly high bar to clear or anything, but Air Raiders is a solid, enjoyable enough game, so long as you pay attention to its unusual structure and mechanics. It’s also historically noteworthy as one of the only “M Network” Atari 2600 releases from Mattel that wasn’t a port of an Intellivision title.

It’s also nowhere near as well-known as some of the more established classics of the Atari 2600 canon, so that’s as good a reason as any to give it a bit of time and attention, hmm?

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

Another week has passed us by! It’s been a pretty good week for me; I’ve been on holiday from the day job, and I’ve been using the time to get ahead of schedule on a bunch of projects.

Specifically, I’ve managed to get ahead of schedule on pretty much all of my video series, providing me with ample time to focus on written stuff in the meantime. I’ve got a Senran Kagura feature to finish, and then we’ll be moving on to something a little unusual that I’ve been looking forward to tackling for a while.

In the meantime, though, there is of course plenty that you might have missed in the last week — so let’s take a look at that!

MoeGamer

Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash: No Shirt, No Shoes, All Shinobi Shooting – An in-depth look at how Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash is a worthy installment in the mainline series, despite being… quite different from what has come before!

Parasol Stars: The Bubble Bobble Everyone Forgets – An all-time favourite single-screen “kill ’em up” for me, Parasol Stars is much less well-known than its brethren in the Bubble Bobble series for the fact it only had a relatively limited release here in the west.

Warriors Wednesday: Watch Me Whip, Watch Me Nene – We present Nene, by popular request! She immediately proves herself to be a very worthy addition to the Wei forces in our Warriors Orochi playthrough, so she will be a fixture from this point onwards, rest assured!

Waifu Wednesday: Yumi – Love her or hate her, it wouldn’t be a Senran Kagura feature without acknowledging the series’ most consistently popular character.

Assault Android Cactus: Shooting for the S+ – A triumph of both the indie game scene and the Early Access development model, Assault Android Cactus remains one of the greatest shoot ’em ups I’ve ever played.

Final Fantasy Marathon: The Wrong Dungeon – The Warriors of Light find themselves in the Cavern of Ice. Okay, they were intending to end up in the Cavern of Fire, but what’s a little diametrical opposition in terms of elemental affinity among friends? Also mindflayers.

Senran Kagura: Shinobi Creativity – An important aspect of the Senran Kagura series for many people is how it allows you to indulge your creativity by dressing up the various characters and then posing them in a “diorama”. We take a pictorial look at Burst Re:Newal’s implementation of these features.

Atari A to Z

This week on Atari A to Z, we have a direct sequel to an English Software classic, a reasonable ST port of an adventurous but flawed Atari Games blaster, and arguably the best flight sim on Atari 2600.

Patreon

Don’t forget that over on Patreon I post a daily behind-the scenes personal blog that is, effectively, a resurrection of my old #oneaday blog I used to host over at angryjedi.wordpress.com. At the present time, this also includes exclusive patrons-only weekly vlogs on Saturdays! If you’d like to get to know me a bit better, be sure to sign up; just $1 a month (about 80p) can get you in the club, and it also provides you with access to the MoeGamer Discord as well as helping to fund and support the things I do here on the site.

Find out more and sign up here!

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 YouTube and podcast goodness from several of this lot:

And from around the WordPress Reader this week:

Doki Doki Literature Club: The Box Trap (Shallow Dives in Anime) – Dewbond may be late to the Doki Doki Literature Club party, but he most certainly Gets It.

Finding Happiness in Majora’s Mask (Lethargic Ramblings) – Leth explores one of his favourite Zelda games, and contemplates how, while the game is regarded as one of the “darkest” Zeldas, it’s also one with a lot of happiness to be found.

How Ring Fit Adventure Addresses the Mistakes of Wii Fit (In Third Person) – Jett has some interesting thoughts on Nintendo’s newly announced Ring Fit Adventure, a new and intriguing-looking take on the “fitness game” genre.

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (1993) [SNES] (The Well-Red Mage) – The ABXY Mage takes another look at the much-maligned Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest and contemplates whether it’s actually that bad, or if you guys are just mean.

Ports, Ports and more Ports, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Switch (Baud Attitude) – Baud takes a look at what the Switch has to offer in terms of ports… and probably not the ones you’re thinking of, either!

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That’s that for another week, then! Hope you’ve had a lovely week; I certainly have. Back to the daily grind tomorrow, though; boo, hiss, etc.

Thank you as always for all your support, and I’ll see you in the week!

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.

“Which Mario Kart is best?” is one of those questions that can start bitter, terrible arguments. Or at the very least, send you into an endless cycle of analysis paralysis as you contemplate which one actually is the “best”.

Do you prefer Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s “best of everything” approach, blending brand new tracks with classics from yesteryear with a twist? How about Double Dash’s team-based mechanics? 64’s early attempts to move the series into true 3D?

For everyone, the answer is different, and I can’t even give you a definitive answer on my own preferences. But one thing we can hopefully all agree on is that even if Super Mario Kart for Super NES isn’t your favourite Mario Kart, it’s probably the most important.

Super Mario Kart was designed from the very beginning to be a game built with two-player racing in mind, but there were challenges to overcome.

Super NES launch title F-Zero had already shown the value of the platform’s “Mode 7” graphics mode, which was capable of taking a flat image and applying a perspective effect to it to create a convincing illusion of 3D. Imagine that you’re looking at a top-down map of a racetrack on a wall in front of you; now imagine that wall collapsing away from you, and the map now being laid flat on the ground — that’s effectively what Mode 7 did for racing games.

The advantage of using Mode 7 for a racing game in this way is that you could move beyond the “horizon-chasing” gameplay of many prior racers; because you were moving the “camera” around a flat image and could spin it in any direction, we were looking at a new age for console racers where you could actually turn around and go the other way, and where the mechanics involved actually turning around corners rather than just sliding left and right across a never-ending conveyor belt of a road.

The tricky part is that although this was a key selling point of the Super NES — its main rival, Sega’s Mega Drive, wouldn’t get similar capabilities until the release of its CD-ROM addon — it was still quite demanding on the hardware. F-Zero ran like a dream and was a gobsmacking launch title, but the size and complexity of its courses and the challenges this then-new graphical technique placed on the humble Super NES made the two-player split-screen gameplay that many fans were clamouring for out of the question.

Producer Shigeru Miyamoto and directors Tadashi Sugiyama and Hideki Konno were unwilling to compromise, however; the new game — which wasn’t initially Mario-themed — was to be a multiplayer-centric title, and as such they had to find a way to make split-screen, two-player Mode 7 graphics work.

The solution was relatively straightforward in theory: scale down the tracks and lower the speed of the vehicles. Instead of futuristic hovercraft hooning around space-age cityscapes at supersonic speeds, now we had the rather more sedate sport of kart racing. And just to make sure the console was truly up to the task, also whack a custom Digital Signal Processor chip in the cartridge to handle the heavy maths required for intensive Mode 7 visuals and 3D calculations.

Super Mario Kart is an elegantly simple and straightforward game in structural terms. In single-player mode, you can either race a complete five-round grand prix or take on a time trial for a single track. In two-player mode, you can play a grand prix together, play a single one-on-one race against each other or take on the game’s “Battle Mode”, in which the objective was not to win a race, but instead to use the game’s various items to defeat your opponent by dealing damage to them three times.

The only unlockables in the game are the Special Cup, which becomes available after you beat the first three five-race grand prix challenges, and the relatively high-speed 150CC difficulty mode, which appears after you beat the Special Cup at the moderate 100CC difficulty/speed setting. After that, the game becomes something to purely play for fun — or competition.

Mario Kart games over the years have often drawn criticism for having rather bare-bones single-player modes, and as you can see, this has been the case for the series since its very first installment. Somehow, it doesn’t seem like as much of an issue here, however; perhaps it’s because, at the time of its original release in 1992, this amount of content was pretty normal. Many games in the 8- and 16-bit eras got their longevity not from seemingly endless content, but rather from raw playability and addictiveness. And Super Mario Kart has both in spades.

After choosing how you want to play — and a difficulty level if you’re playing the grand prix mode; all other modes use the 100CC performance — you get to pick one of eight characters. These are divided into pairs according to their performance, so that in a two-player game both players are able to pick the same “type” of character if they so desire.

Mario and Luigi are thoroughly average at everything, and their cars sound like chainsaws. The princess (this was well before she was referred to as “Peach” in the localised versions, though she had always had that name in the Japanese originals since Super Mario Bros.) and Yoshi have high acceleration but a poor top speed and quite slippery handling. Bowser and Donkey Kong Jr have terrible acceleration but the best top speed and extremely heavy handling. And Koopa Troopa and Toad have moderate acceleration and top speed, but are the least likely to skid out when cornering.

Each cup in the grand prix has five separate tracks, each of which is themed after a particular environment. The different environments are primarily distinguished by how slippery they are, with the icy Vanilla Lake being the slipperiest and the tarmac of Mario Circuit being the easiest to maintain your grip on.

Each environment also has its own unique features, presentation and theme music. Donut Plains, for example, features rather rugged, wild-looking dirt tracks with water hazards, rickety wooden bridges and slippery gravel-covered corners. Ghost House stages, meanwhile, take place entirely atop rotting wooden boardwalks apparently suspended above a bottomless abyss, with lots of opportunities to drive off and fall to your apparent doom.

Not only do you need to master each environment’s unique hazards, but across the 20 different tracks in the game, most of the settings are used more than once — often in different and creative ways. The first Mario Circuit level is a straightforward racetrack, for example — the sort of place you might go on a “team building” kart-racing day from your soul-destroying day job — while the second features a more fantastic “crossover” section where you take a boost-powered jump over the back markers passing beneath you.

The creativity in these tracks is what makes Super Mario Kart special; from a modern perspective, once you adjust to the dated visuals — that Mode 7 effect, although impressive in theory, was super-flickery even back in the day and it hasn’t got any better since — you soon forget that you’re effectively racing around a flat 2D map and find yourself immersed in these weird and wonderful circuits.

And of course, the gameplay is solid, too. The single-player in particular is markedly different from more recent installments in the series in one important mechanical sense: you are the only one who is able to pick up items from the boxes on the track, while all the other racers instead have unique, character-appropriate special abilities that they can trigger at will when you are nearby.

This side of things sometimes makes grand prix races in Super Mario Kart feel like a series of “duels” as you struggle to pull far enough ahead of, say, Toad while he’s flinging poisonous mushrooms that shrink you to half your normal size (and speed) from behind you. It gives you, the player, a sense of power over your opponents, but there’s also a sense of danger; most of the abilities your opponents use do not have a direct analogue in terms of the items you can pick up.

There’s a distinctly arcadey feel to grand prix races, in fact; computer-controlled racers follow a fairly strict, predictable racing line — though they do make mistakes now and then — and the playable character you chose determines the lineup your opponents are almost guaranteed to finish in, barring any particularly exceptional circumstances. Pleasingly, these arrangements are subtly character-appropriate; Mario’s biggest rival is Donkey Kong, for example, since Donkey Kong was the portly plumber’s original rival long before Bowser came along; the Princess, meanwhile, has Bowser hot on her tail, because Bowser is always hot on her tail!

The combination of the asymmetrical abilities and the predictable behaviour of the AI opponents gives the single-player races quite an “artificial” feel; unlike more recent installments in the series, you never really feel like you’re racing seven other “people”. Once again, though, that works in the game’s original context; in 1992, we were accustomed to battling against distinctly artificial-feeling, predictable, manipulable opponents, so it didn’t feel out of place. This game isn’t trying to simulate the feel of an eight-player multiplayer race; it’s you (and perhaps a friend) against the might of “the computer”.

It’s a game that is unashamed to be a video game, in other words — and while this can absolutely be said for pretty much Nintendo’s entire output (particularly in the Mario series) from the 8-bit era right up until today, it feels particularly pronounced when it comes to Super Mario Kart.

And now that Super NES games have hit the Nintendo Switch, you have no excuse not to enjoy this genre-defining piece of gaming history if, somehow, you’re yet to experience it. Give ’em hell, and I’ll see you on the podium.

More about Super Mario Kart

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.

Video games don’t always have to be about blasting aliens and/or terrorists.

The idea of games that are based around fairly mundane activities and professions is something that is associated with the creativity of today’s indie scene, but developers were experimenting with this idea back in the early ’80s too.

And so it was that we got David Bunch’s Electrician from Synapse Software — a surprisingly enjoyable game about rewiring a bunch of houses.

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

Whenever any creative person sits down to compose something, they inevitably do so with a particular audience in mind.

Sometimes that audience is as simple as the creator themselves; they want to write something that simply expresses themselves, and if it happens to resonate with anyone else, that’s a happy bonus. Sometimes a creator makes an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible — though it’s very difficult to please everyone. And sometimes that audience is a specific group of people.

Whatever a creator decides to create, we should respect their intentions. And, by extension, we should respect the audience it ends up attracting — even if we find ourselves outside that group.

I write this primarily as a response to a particularly obnoxious review of the Shade-developed, PQube-published Gun Gun Pixies, but really it’s something that we all need to think about a bit more generally. As such, I’m not going to link directly to the article because the current trend for “hatesharing” sucks; you can probably track it down if you’re curious, but don’t expect them to get any traffic from me; I’d rather you focused on what I’ve got to say right now.

Gun Gun Pixies, if you’re unfamiliar, is a third-person shooter-cum-platformer in which you play a tiny alien girl scampering around a women’s dormitory, attempting to study the (relatively) giant humans around you without getting noticed. There’s a distinctly light-hearted ecchi component to the whole experience as you might expect, but like many modern Japanese games, there’s a deeper message in there too — in this case about health, acceptance and self-awareness.

The trouble with Japanese games that carry the slightest hint of ecchi about them is that they immediately attract the ire of certain types of reviewers, who promptly pan the whole game simply because they do not enjoy that type of content. The writer of the article I’m referring to clearly approached the game assuming they would hate it, and promptly spent the remainder of the review justifying that hatred, seemingly without any attempts to give it a chance.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened, either; we’ve seen numerous previous examples here on MoeGamer, many of which can be found in my previous article on how we need to get better at talking about sex. This is an ongoing problem, not just with regard to talking about sexuality, but also with the simple matter of respecting people who are into things that you don’t like.

“It’s hard to believe anyone would choose to offend themselves with this kind of thing,” writes the author of the Gun Gun Pixies piece. “Gun Gun Pixies is, in reality, a simplistic and repetitive game aimed at people — and these people must exist because this game does — who enjoy roleplaying as tiny little sex pixies who sneak around dorm rooms on all-fours, exposing their asses and thongs at all times whilst they make heavy breathing noises and shoot ‘happy bullets’ at the great big jiggling boobs and butts of teenage anime ladies. Ahem.”

You know what? That sounds pretty great to me; delightfully silly, light-hearted and unashamed of what it is, with a positive message in the middle of all the ridiculousness. I have friends who also thought it sounded enjoyable and interesting enough to pick up, and others who are intrigued by the pedigree of the developer Shade — which the author of the article in question didn’t even bother to mention, by the way. (If you’re curious, Shade is a company that was born from the ashes of Quintet, creators of legendary SNES titles Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma)

Is our existence somehow surprising? That quote certainly seems to think so, but the assumption the author is making is that because they don’t like the idea of Gun Gun Pixies, no-one “normal” would ever like Gun Gun Pixies, and anyone who does like Gun Gun Pixies is some sort of weird “other”.

Note that at no point here am I commenting on the actual quality of Gun Gun Pixies; I haven’t yet played it myself, but I will be covering it in detail alongside its predecessor Bullet Girls Phantasia as soon as we’re done with the currently running Senran Kagura feature. No; instead, I’m simply responding to the author’s assumption that anyone who is even slightly interested in this game is some sort of deviant, whose unconventional tastes are something to be mocked and shamed.

This goes both ways, of course; for every person who doesn’t like ecchi Japanese games, there’s someone who doesn’t like modern narrative-centric indie games such as the oft-derided first-person narrative experiences that have become known as “walking simulators”. And the intolerance that goes in that direction is equally unacceptable, especially since many of these games deal with weighty real-life issues and marginalised groups that are just starting to get good representation in the medium.

The difference here, however — and this doesn’t make either form of intolerance any more acceptable, I hasten to add — is that those deriding things like “walking simulators” are typically just members of the public, while those insulting and shaming fans of ecchi Japanese content are, in many cases, paid, professional writers with an established, large platform and considerable reach. They are in a position to be tastemakers and influence people’s opinions — and to cause considerable harm and distress, both directly via their own words, and indirectly via the actions of their followers.

So what’s the solution? Hard to say, really. The easiest thing to suggest would be simply to say that where a game obviously has a specific target audience, only members of that target audience should really be commenting on it in a professional capacity. But this creates the oft-criticised echo chamber effect — and moreover, there have been numerous cases over the years of a game spilling out beyond its original demographic into other groups.

The Senran Kagura series, for example, has a strong following among women as well as men — particularly gay women, with how positive that series is about female homosexuality and self-expression. Likewise, cosplayers find great inspiration from the elaborate and stylised costumes of heroines in Japanese games — even ecchi and hentai titles. Clearly there’s a place for commentary on niche-interest games that goes beyond seemingly laser-focused target demographics.

Something important to consider and acknowledge, then, is that having that laser-focused target demographic isn’t a bad thing — nor is it a hard and fast, fixed rule. On the contrary, games that are designed with a particular target audience in mind tend to be much clearer on what they want to be and confident in what they’re trying to say — and that, interestingly, can end up broadening their appeal beyond their original intention. Self-confidence can be infectious and inspiring.

Contrast with how frequently modern triple-A games — games that are, by their big-budget nature, obliged to try and attract as broad an audience as possible — are criticised for attempting to hide a lack of depth or take creative risks behind technical proficiency. That attempt to obtain broad appeal leads to them spreading themselves much too thin in many — though not all — cases. And that “broad” appeal frequently ends up being perceived as relatively narrow anyway; while there are plenty of women out there playing and enjoying, say, Call of Duty — and that’s great — the popular perception of the series is still very much that it’s a young man’s game; when was the last time you saw a media representation of a woman playing a game like this that wasn’t framed as “hey look, this woman is playing a game, how unusual!”

There are a few key things that we all — professional press and public alike — need to get better at, then. Firstly, acknowledging that a game isn’t for you shouldn’t be a negative thing, and shouldn’t lead you onto casting aspersions on the people who it is for. I don’t personally like the aforementioned Call of Duty, for example, but that doesn’t mean I judge anyone who does, nor do I think it is “bad”. Rather, I respect it from afar for the thriving multiplayer scene that it’s garnered over the course of the last decade or so — and in how it’s played a huge role into bringing gaming into the lives of many people who might not have considered it before. And I’m happy for the people for whom it, to borrow a phrase, sparks joy.

Surely expecting similar treatment is not too much to ask for when I proudly hold up my hands and say that yes, I absolutely do like the sound of a game where you roleplay as tiny little sex pixies who sneak around dorm rooms on all-fours, exposing their asses and thongs at all times whilst they make heavy breathing noises and shoot “happy bullets” at the great big jiggling boobs and butts of teenage anime ladies.

Because outside of that game and others like it, I live a happy and normal life; I am married, I am a homeowner, I have two pet cats, I have a job. Games like this have not affected my worldview in any way other than teaching me what I know I like, and through bringing me joy with their bright colours, energetic characters, cheerfully silly stories and total confidence in what they are. Those aspects don’t magically go away because you occasionally see panties; nor does the presence of said panties mean that this game is suddenly porn or something I want to masturbate over. There are infinitely better choices for that, after all.

If anything, we should be celebrating games that deviate from the “norm”, because it’s further evidence that the medium as a whole is broader, more diverse and more creative than it’s ever been. By definition, that means that not everything is going to be for everyone.

What it does mean is that everything is for someone, and that’s rather wonderful. Let’s start acknowledging that, rather than reinforcing the divisions between us.

More about Gun Gun Pixies

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.

Following his long-expected rebellion against his Crazy Snake Guy overlord, Cao Pi sets out to rescue his wife Zhen Ji from servitude to the Big O.

We’re getting very close to the absolutely, positively, definitely end of Warriors Orochi now! There are just a few more episodes in the Wei campaign left to go, and then we’re done.

Of course, once you’ve played through all the stories once, there’s still a lot to do, including collecting weapons and unique items, levelling up all the characters, challenging harder difficulties… I think this game will keep me busy for quite some time, even long after this “season” of Warriors Wednesday ends!

Homura, leader of the Crimson Squad and former elite shinobi of Hebijo Clandestine Girls’ Academy, has stood out throughout the whole Senran Kagura series, and she’s also a character that has undergone some of the most interesting and significant development over the course of the various games’ narrative arcs.

Whether it’s her early appearances as a strong and seemingly deadly rival to Asuka or her later incarnations as a comedic “genius” trying her best to keep her ragtag “family” of the Crimson Squad together and safe, Homura is a widely beloved character with good reason.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes her… her.

Although initially set up as the face of the “evil” shinobi in Hebijo, Homura actually originally hailed from a respected clan of good shinobi. She was under a lot of pressure from both her parents and her own expectations, and she was determined to follow in her family’s footsteps.

Although dedicated to her own personal Path of the Shinobi, Homura found existence exhausting at times, and came to think of her time with her personal tutor Komichi as something of an oasis of calm away from the chaos of the rest of her life. Over time, she grew to trust this outsider, even to love him.

“My parents expected nothing short of perfection from me,” she recalls. “My day-to-day life was heavily regimented, and I lived in a constant stress-induced haze. My time with Komichi was like an oasis from all that. He’d listen patiently to all my complaining and took me out to relax when I’d start to get frustrated. It might sound corny now, but in all honesty, he was my rock back then.”

You know what they say about things that seem too good to be true, though. Homura eventually grew to trust Komichi enough to reveal her family’s secret “business” of being shinobi to him, and, having finally fulfilled his purpose, Komichi revealed himself to be an evil shinobi that had been hunting Homura’s family for a long time.

“Torture hurts, but betrayal hurts more,” he told her when she asked why he hadn’t just tortured the information out of her.

“His face had twisted into an ugly snarl,” Homura recalls. “There was no sign of the person I’d trusted. It hurt so much, I couldn’t help but cry. He clapped in what must have been pure joy.”

Homura still doesn’t recall exactly what happened next, other than the fact that it ended with the man she had trusted for so many years — and who had just betrayed her — lying bloodied and near death on the floor.

“He may have been an evil shinobi,” she explains, “but I wasn’t a shinobi at all yet. Just a regular middle school student. Good shinobi schools don’t accept criminals, regardless of the circumstances. I would never be a good shinobi. That path closed to me that day.”

Homura was disowned by her parents after her preemptive attack on Komichi, so she took to the streets. It was there that she came to understand the nature of “evil” as it exists in Senran Kagura’s world — and it’s not what you might think.

“My mentor betrayed me,” Homura remembers. “My parents abandoned me. I thought I was worthless, better off dead. Yet Hebijo still took me in. And so I was reborn as Homura, the evil shinobi. Most don’t bother to recognise the truth. The truth that good discards some people. That evil saves some people.”

The Homura we meet at the start of Senran Kagura Burst and its subsequent remake Burst Re:Newal is still an angry young woman, embittered by her past experiences, but much like her compatriots — all of whom came from equally difficult, albeit very different, circumstances — she comes to learn a great deal about herself and about life, both through her interactions with her peers, and through her cohort’s rivalry with the girls from Hanzou.

Although the events of Burst and Burst Re:Newal eventually result in Homura being expelled from Hebijo and placed firmly on the “renegade” path — where both good and evil shinobi alike are supposed to hate you — by this point, the bonds that Homura has formed with the people important to her have become strong, even unbreakable. She accepts her fate and enters into exile — but is still surprised when her friends follow her willingly, without having to.

This event is a turning point for Homura. Although thrown into a very difficult life situation, she feels like she is surrounded by “family” for the first time since her own parents discarded her. And so we see a Homura who starts to loosen up somewhat; she’s still determined and heated in battle, and one doesn’t doubt that she’d be willing to kill if provided with a good reason to do so, but she’s also willing to let her guard down and relax with her friends.

This is perhaps most apparent in her dreadful attempts at “comedy”, whereby she attempts to do impressions of various pieces of seafood by posing with her swords. Her friends are brutally honest with her about this, but it’s clear that she enjoys it regardless of whatever they say — and they recognise this too, so despite their mockery, they never actually try to stop her indulging this particular aspect of her personality when she feels the need to let it out.

Likewise, as time progresses, her relationship with her main rival Asuka develops and deepens until it’s clearly something far more than two people who want to fight one another. Asuka describes Homura as her “strongest friend”, and Homura is unwilling to accept the possibility of anyone else but her defeating Asuka once and for all when the time comes.

Over the course of various events, Homura comes to realise that her own “humanisation” is a result of her relationship with Asuka; she comes to believe that if she had never met Asuka, she would probably have ended up a renegade by herself, since she would never have experienced Asuka’s relentless and infectious enthusiasm and utter devotion to her friends, and that, in turn, would never have drawn her to become closer to her comrades and classmates when they were all at Hebijo together.

Homura is a troubled young woman with a bleak past that it will probably be difficult for her to ever get away from completely, but it’s hard not to like her. Her growth into a strong young woman who gradually becomes more and more confident in herself — her true self, not the facade of exaggerated bravado she puts up early in Burst — is inspirational, and one can only hope that if and when the Senran Kagura series ever comes to an end, that she is able to once and for all find true happiness.

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.

Licensed games have been around for a long time… and they’ve gotten quite a bit better over the years. For the most part!

Back in the 16-bit home computer era, publisher Hi-Tec had the license to produce video games based on Hanna Barbera cartoons, including properties such as Hong Kong Phooey and Yogi Bear.

Today’s game is one of several Yogi Bear games that Hi-Tec put out at a budget price point. It’s a competent, if fairly unremarkable platformer — which, not coincidentally, is a descriptor that can be applied to 90% of licensed games on the Atari ST!

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

“You should see this. It’s just like having an arcade machine connected to your television.”

Those were the words my brother, ten years my senior, said to me one time he came home from his job on a ’90s gaming magazine, pulling a Super Famicom out of his bag.

While the system didn’t quite live up to those lofty expectations in some regards — particularly as it got a bit older — there were certain games that, once I had my own Super NES and some games for it, reminded a younger me very much of those words. And Star Fox was one of them.

In the early to mid ’90s, young Pete was mildly obsessed with the idea of recreating an authentic-feeling arcade experience at home. I knew that it wasn’t possible to truly have a home arcade, because the generalised or consumer-grade hardware we had at home was a fraction of the cost and capability of specialised arcade hardware at the time. But I still appreciated when games felt like they were arcade games.

The reason for this is that visiting an arcade was a rare treat for me. Unlike in the US, where arcades were pretty widespread in the ’90s, here in the UK, if you wanted to play arcade games, you generally had to go to the seaside. And I lived near Cambridge, which is a long way from the seaside. So I wanted to find the next best thing at home and enjoy it whenever possible.

It was often small, subtle things that made me feel a game was “arcadey” rather than grander aspects of game design: an interesting attract mode; a flashing “Press Start” on the title screen; a satisfying electronic-sounding “biddly-boop” noise when you eventually pressed Start; some sort of pre-game sequence where you could imagine strapping yourself into one of those big hydraulic cabinets that used to host games like After Burner and G-LOC.

Star Fox provided me with all those things and more. While I was aware that its Super FX-powered polygonal 3D graphics paled in comparison to its rough contemporary in the arcades, Starblade from Namco — which I had been thrilled and delighted by on our last family trip to the seaside — this was the kind of experience I’d been looking for.

So simple to pick up and play that you didn’t need to read the manual in order to have a good time with it, yet providing sufficient depth and challenge to maintain interest, Star Fox was a delight to play. And I played it a lot.

Star Fox’s development came about through Nintendo working alongside British software house Argonaut Software throughout the NES and SNES era. Argonaut had developed a solid reputation for being able to fling 3D graphics around on home computers thanks to their Starglider series, and Nintendo were clearly interested in trying to make their techniques work on their own hardware.

Argonaut’s initial project was a prototype for NES that roughly followed the mould of Starglider. The group subsequently ported this prototype — known as NesGlider at the time — to pre-release Super Famicom hardware in an attempt to improve its performance, but Argonaut lead Jez San came to the conclusion that they weren’t going to get it running any better without some custom hardware. Although the Super Famicom had its Mode 7 capabilities for creating 3D-like effects from flat 2D images — as seen in games such as F-Zero and Super Mario Kart to great effect — it was a bit lacking in the areas that made true polygonal 3D graphics work effectively and smoothly.

The resultant Super FX chip made continued development of the project practical, so while Argonaut worked on the technological side of things, Nintendo worked to provide the game some character. Designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Katsuya Eguchi decided that they didn’t want to make a conventional science fiction story and so, inspired by various Japanese folklore legends, came up with the animal characters.

Protagonist Fox was inspired by Fushimi Inari-taisha, the head shrine of Shinto kami Inari, which was close to the Nintendo offices. Inari is the kami for foxes, fertility, rice, tea, sake, agriculture, industry and general prosperity, and is often represented as having pure white foxes known as kitsune serving them. Hares and birds also appear frequently throughout Japanese folklore, so Peppy and Falco followed quickly. And Slippy came about as the result of a Nintendo employee who had a toad as a personal mascot.

The Japanese inspirations run even deeper than that, though; the Cornerian forces are made up of dogs and are locked in perpetual combat with the monkey-like Andross because of the Japanese expression 犬猿の仲 (ken’en no naka) which literally translates as “dog-monkey” and is used to describe a bad relationship, in a similar way to how we might describe diametrically opposed viewpoints in English as being akin to the relationship between cats and dogs.

Keeping a worldwide audience in mind, though, Miyamoto decided that he would keep the word “fox” in English rather than using the Japanese kitsune. While kitsune carry particular, specific associations for Japanese people, these would not translate to the potential Western audience, so the name Star Fox stuck worldwide. Except in Europe, of course, where trademark issues with a German company named StarVox caused it to end up renamed Starwing.

Star Fox is simple in mechanical concept. You, as Fox McCloud, leader of the titular four-ship wing of spacefaring anthropomorphic animal mercenaries, are tasked with saving the planet Corneria from the forces of Andross. You do this by flying in a straight line, trying not to crash into anything, blasting anything that flashes when you hit it until it explodes, and flying through rings for bonuses.

In its purest sense, it is a total adaptation of the scrolling shoot ’em up formula into a three-dimensional environment. Rather than constantly moving horizontally or vertically as in a Thunder Force or a Raiden, here your movement is constant in the Z-axis, into the screen, and your control is limited to your X and Y positions. Somehow this never truly feels limiting, however; the game has been designed so that you never feel like you want or need to deviate from the path set out ahead of you. You have an important mission to fulfil, and it’s straight ahead.

Even with the game’s technical limitations, the levels are enormously varied, with gorgeous bitmapped backgrounds that pitch and roll with your ship’s attitude, and a variety of weird and wonderful low-polygon shapes to get in your way and blast into satisfying sprite-based explosions. The first level on Corneria sees you flying through an abstract cityscape; later levels see you navigating asteroid fields in space, whizzing through the middle of enemy capital ships, fending off sea life and enemy robots alike a few metres above a planet’s ocean, and trying not to anger space stingrays while shaking off pulsating electric amoebae. It all concludes with a dramatic, spiralling descent to the enemy’s home planet, all in perfect sync with the dramatic (synthesised) orchestral soundtrack.

That soundtrack played a big part in my appreciation of Star Fox as being “arcadey”. It was quite unlike anything I’d ever heard the Super NES produce. It was energetic, it was bassy, it was filled with surprisingly convincing (for the time) recreations of various instruments, including howling electric guitars. It felt like the sort of soundtrack you’d just be able to hear bassy hints of above the blaring ambient noise of a busy arcade, but being able to appreciate the detail and craft that had gone into each and every composition while playing it in the peace of one’s home made it truly special. There are boss themes from Star Fox I still hear in my head to this day any time I have a significant or challenging activity to accomplish.

Where Star Fox perhaps falls down a bit from a modern perspective is its replayability — or rather, its incentive to replay. There is a scoring system, which is based entirely on a “percentage” grade you attain at the end of a level rather than the later games’ emphasis on stylish combos and multi-kills, but no means of saving or tracking high scores. There are, however, three completely different routes through the game that roughly correspond to difficulty levels, as well as two very strange secret levels and lots of smaller hidden secrets throughout the main stages.

Rather than score attack, the main incentive to replay Star Fox comes from the simple spectacle of it all. While its visuals may look laughably simple to a modern audience, if you allow the game to truly immerse you in its low-poly world, it’s a thrilling and enjoyable experience that can be enjoyed time and time again like a good movie — even if you know everything that’s coming.

And, indeed, that’s exactly what I’ve done every so often over the years since its original release. The technology that drives it all may be incredibly dated now, but the game still holds that arcadey magic for me — arguably even more so than its more impressive successors.

And now I can play it on my lunch break thanks to the Switch! Hooray!

More about Star Fox

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.

In today’s episode of Final Fantasy, the Warriors of Light finally get back on track and delve into the fiery depths of Mt. Gulg.

Marilith, one of the Four Fiends, is waiting for them far beneath the surface, but first they have lots of exploring to do. And the floor is literally lava. It’s a good job they packed plenty of potions, but you’d think they’d have brought more sensible shoes for such an excursion.

Of course, before they even get to Marilith, they have to face one of their biggest challenges yet: the seemingly endless Big Rooms of Nothing!