Over the years, numerous classic arcade games have been remade, recycled and reimagined in various different ways. Some get this treatment more than others.

While Taito’s line-drawing action puzzler Qix has been by no means immune to this phenomenon — indeed, on more than one occasion by Taito themselves — it’s not a formula we see experimented with quite as much as, say, the classic space shooters of yore — or the twin-stick blasting of Robotron 2084 in particular.

It’s even rarer that we see a reimagining quite as inventive as what we have in Laughing Jackal’s Cubixx, a game that began its life as a PlayStation Mini in 2009, subsequently got HD-ified in 2011, and which has now been resurrected once again for everyone’s favourite “I wish every game was on this platform” console, the Nintendo Switch. Let’s take a look.

Cubixx is a pretty literal translation of the Qix format from a flat single plane to the six sides of a cube. You control a marker that can draw white lines and cut off parts of each cube face; you get combo bonuses to your score if you cut off bits from multiple faces in one single “motion”; your perpetual foe is an indestructible thing that idly bounces around each face; and your sole aim is to slice off a particular proportion of the cube (like a fine ham) while trying not to die.

And there are many ways to die, which vary from level to level. The aforementioned perpetual foe is the titular Cubixx itself, which will cause you to explode if it hits either you or your line while you are drawing. It also determines which part of the cube gets “cut off” when you complete a line; the side of the line that contains the Cubixx is always the side that survives, so if you plan accordingly you can cut large chunks off in one go.

There’s a slight twist on the usual Qix formula due to the cube format; while in the original Qix you could shrink the available play area down on all sides and end up with a small region in the middle, in Cubixx you always need access to the sides of the cube so you can transfer from one face to another. Thus, if you cut off parts of the cube in such a way that you create a “stranded” region in the middle of a face, it will slide across until it hits an edge rather than leaving you trapped. They thought of everything, huh?

As you progress through the levels of the game’s main Arcade mode, it introduces more and more ways in which it will try to kill you. This includes smaller, purple-coloured Cubixxes (if that’s the correct plural) that can be killed by trapping them in a different region to the main Cubixx; glowy things that travel around the lines you have drawn; a flaming tail that chases you while you’re drawing a line; sinister black clouds that slow down your movement if they spot you until you leave the face they’re guarding and meteors that impact the surface of the cube after a clearly visible (and panic-inducing) telegraph.

The game works on a ten-level cycle, with each ten-level block of stages generally cycling around various combinations of these foes: first just the Cubixx, then the Cubixx and its smaller ones, then perhaps the glowy things, then perhaps the smaller Cubixxes and the glowy things together, and so on. The tenth level of each block is always significantly more challenging, usually by requiring you to claim a much larger proportion of the cube than in its immediate precursors, and thus acts as a good means of gatekeeping your way to the next difficulty tier.

You’re essentially doing the same thing over and over in Cubixx, but this level structure keeps things feeling fresh and interesting, and the difficulty curve is well-paced; with each new block of ten levels, things get tougher by enemies moving faster, more complex combinations of foes to deal with and simply more things to think about — including, as you progress, power-ups and power-downs.

There’s a wonderful bit of risk and reward at work with the latter in particular; deliberately grabbing a power-down by cutting off the bit of the cube it’s on will reward you with a significant score bonus, multiplied by your current combo. So if surviving an epic six-face combo wasn’t already tense enough, you can make your palms even more sweaty by deliberately triggering a particularly heavy meteor storm right over your head just before finishing your cut. The very essence of arcade pleasure.

There are plenty of other secret bonuses to seek out, too, most of which are worth significant amounts of points. Cutting off more than 50% of a face in a single slice awards you a “Divide and Conquer” bonus, for example, while claiming the vast majority of a face in total rewards you with the delightfully named “Big Face” bonus. And there are plenty more to discover in the pursuit of high scores.

The nice thing about Cubixx, though, is that if you’re not in the mood for chasing high scores, you don’t have to play it that way. Arcade Mode is primarily about clearing levels rather than scores, and provides the main long-term interest in the game, while several dedicated “attack” modes challenge you to score the most points with limited lives, a limited amount of time or just using a limited number of lines. You can also play the game cooperatively in local split-screen or in a dedicated Death Match mode where you try to screw each other over as much as possible; the simple, abstract gameplay here makes this a great pick-up and play competitive game which — you knew it was coming — makes it absolutely perfect for the Switch.

The whole thing is tied together with a really simple but effective aesthetic. The game uses clear, readable fonts and relatively minimal use of colours and textures, and complements the whole thing with an enormously varied throbbing electronic dance music soundtrack with an admirably large number of tracks; while I did hear a few repeats on my Arcade mode playthrough, I didn’t notice them until I’d got a long way through the levels, and the fact they’re tied to specific levels rather than randomly selected helps give each level a feeling of unique identity — no mean feat considering they’re all cubes!

In terms of both presentation and how it builds on a classic title, Cubixx actually reminds me rather strongly of Sidhe Interactive’s marvellous 2009 reimagining of the Breakout formula, Shatter. Like that game, Cubixx knows that the basic structure of what it’s riffing on is already solid, and knows not to go too crazy with its additions. Instead, what we have here is a game that feels authentic and respectful to its source material while providing its own unique (and well-presented) twist.

It’s a great addition to the lineup of quick-hit, easy-to-pick-up-hard-to-put-down arcade titles on Switch, and at just £5.99, it’s an eminently worthy, great value addition to anyone’s library.

More about Cubixx

Thanks to Ross at Laughing Jackal for the review copy.

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

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

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

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi or PayPal.

With a few exceptions, Mattel’s “M Network” label was established to port a number of well-received Intellivision titles to Atari’s 2600 platform.

Due to the disparity in capabilities between the two platforms, however, this porting process wasn’t necessarily completely straightforward. The Atari controller had considerably fewer buttons than the Intellivision’s weird monstrosity, for one thing — and the system itself was much less powerful.

Still, while technically inferior to its Intellivision counterpart, Armor Ambush for Atari 2600 (known as Armor Battle in its original incarnation) is an enjoyable take on the two-player tank battle genre — and offers a few interesting twists not seen in Atari’s classic Combat.

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

Hello everyone! It’s the end of another week, so time for another one of them thar roundup type posts.

I’ve been ill this week, but I’ve been doing what I can to keep things ticking along. I think I’ve mostly mended now; a particularly fiery portion of noodles yesterday and a Chinese takeaway this evening have helped a great deal. Back on the straight and narrow with the diet tomorrow!

All right, enough about me, let’s check out what you might have missed this week.

MoeGamer

Delving into Kirby’s Adventure #1 – I thought I’d get back to exploring the Kirby series, and where better to head next than his first NES adventure?

Warriors Wednesday: Just a Quickie – The 58th episode of Warriors Orochi actually goes remarkably smoothly for once, as Cao Pi and friends battle their way through Nan Zhong to scout out some new allies.

Waifu Wednesday: Haruka – Senran Kagura has a seemingly bottomless supply of wonderful female characters, and Haruka is a favourite of many.

Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal: Within the Depths of Shadow – We take another look at Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal, this time focusing on the Hebijo campaign and the two DLC scenarios featuring Yumi and Miyabi.

Final Fantasy Marathon: Proof of Courage – The 14th episode of the Final Fantasy Marathon sees us heading into the Citadel of Trials to track down a “proof of courage” that will satisfy his Lordship Bahamut.

Cubixx: White Lines Blowin’ Through My Mind – Like Qix? Fancy playing it in 3D with a throbbing electronic soundtrack? Then check out this great game from Laughing Jacak, new to Switch. An excellent arcade experience to take with you on the go!

Atari A to Z

This week we have one of my favourite Atari 8-bit games — and one of the progenitors of the action RPG genre — along with a two-player stealth ’em up for ST, and an Intellivision port for 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, as always, we close out our recap with a look around some of the stuff I’ve particularly enjoyed in my WordPress Reader this week. Don’t forget, if you have a blog you think I should be following — or know one you think I’d like — you can feel free to let me know about it!

Gaming After Dark: Katawa Shoujo (A Geeky Gal) – Megan’s got a great, sex-positive attitude towards adult games, which is something I’m absolutely 100% all about. And her first “Gaming After Dark” article is on an all-time favourite visual novel of mine, too. Looking forward to more in this series!

Realms of the Haunting (Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster) – Kimimi takes a look at a vastly underappreciated title from the FMV/CD-ROM era, which blends first-person shooting with survival horror and story-heavy adventure gaming.

Retro World 2019 Expo Recap (Comma Eight Comma One) – The Deviot shares his experiences from the Retro World expo. One day I might make it to an event like this… or indeed, one of these events might make it somewhere vaguely near where I live!

Waifu of the Week: Saotomi Tachibana (Ecchi Hunter) – Lynn has fine taste in waifus, and Saotomi Tachibana from How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? is a particularly fine choice as a final farewell to this wonderful series. Sensei daisuki!

Well, this is just ridiculous. (Baud Attitude) – I’ve never really seen the appeal of an “ultrawide” setup — largely because I tend to game on a TV rather than at a PC desk — but Baud here provides a solid argument in favour of them!

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That’s your lot! I know it’s been a bit quiet this week, but that can mainly be attributed to my ongoing plague issues. Thankfully that seems to have mostly left me behind now, so I should be on peak form this week, all being well. Expect the final Senran Kagura feature, along with a bunch of other fun times.

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

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 or PayPal.

I’ll level with you, dear reader: as a heterosexual man, I’ve never really made checking out boys’ love (BL) media a particular priority — though I must also admit that I’ve been curious for quite a while to see what it’s like.

My past experiences with otome games aimed at heterosexual women have been universally positive, after all (play Sweet Fuse, it’s amazing!) so there’s absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t be able to enjoy a BL title, too. As I’ve discovered since leaving the mainstream side of gaming behind, keeping an open mind and stepping outside of what you might typically think of as your “comfort zone” pretty much always pays off with some memorable experiences.

And thus, when independent developer Studio Senpai reached out and asked me to take a look at their work-in-progress visual novel The Secrets We Keep, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take my first steps into a brave new world. Also, the concept of the novel sounded highly intriguing, too, so that definitely helped! So let’s explore together.

The Secrets We Keep is a visual novel that focuses on the life of Finn, a gay man in his early twenties who, through circumstances that aren’t made entirely apparent in the currently available demo version of the game, has a daughter not quite two years of age.

As a single father in the modern world, Finn is presented with constant struggles: how to make enough money to keep him and his daughter fed, clothed and safe, and how to ensure that the process of making that money doesn’t completely estrange him from his daughter.

That’s not all that Finn has on his plate, either. He and his parents are on bad terms for two reasons: firstly, Finn had no desire to follow his father’s intentions for him, which was to attend Yale and become a high-flying politician, instead desiring to become a concert pianist; and secondly, Finn’s father was emphatically not cool with the whole gay thing.

While understandably holding a grudge for the way his parents all but disowned him, Finn has been trying to make the best of a difficult life. He works two jobs and spends what little free time he has left with with his daughter, who means everything to him. He struggles, but he survives.

Finn is also autistic, with everything that entails. This means that there are a lot of things he is uncomfortable with, including people invading his personal space, people touching him unexpectedly, people not following the “routines” he expects them to follow and unstructured interpersonal interactions in general. It also means that he’s keenly observant, passionate and absolutely dedicated to the things that are important to him.

One of the great things about The Secrets We Keep is that while it is an excellent example of a truly inclusive game, bringing some laudable representation to marginalised groups such as those “on the spectrum”, it doesn’t make a big deal about any of the characters’ traits; it never feels like a “diversity checklist”.

The fact that Finn is autistic isn’t actually mentioned directly in the game’s narration, but it’s something you can deduce quite easily, particularly if you have any experience interacting with autistic people — or indeed if you are one. (Hello. I have Asperger’s, if you didn’t know.)

His measured, polite, precise way of talking that rarely uses contractions; the fact he perceives fine details in his environment and in the people around him; his swinging moods and constant sense of unease; his desire for life to follow neat, predictable routines and patterns — all of these things combine to create a sensitive, understanding depiction of someone for whom autism is a daily part of existence without making a big deal about it. And in doing this, The Secrets We Keep also challenges some common misconceptions and prejudices about autistic people, such as the condition being related to learning difficulties; while there are things Finn clearly struggles with, it’s obvious that, for the most part, he’s a fully functional adult.

The core of the narrative concerns Finn, amid the exhausting chaos of his daily life, meeting and getting to know a man named Koloa. Depending on the choices you make in the game, the circumstances under which Finn meets Koloa change, but in each case, it’s clear that there’s some sort of mutual attraction there — attraction which Finn is understandably hesitant to act upon, particularly as it’s clear that even leaving the stuff with his father aside, he’s not had good previous luck with relationships.

The early encounters between Finn and Koloa are an excellent representation of what it can be like getting to know someone new as an autistic person; it can be initially exciting and thrilling to have someone show an interest in you, but as soon as you find yourself reaching “saturation point” in terms of social interactions, you just want to get away and take some time for your mind to recover in peace and quiet. And if you can’t do that for one reason or another, it can really sour the atmosphere as the “fight or flight” response kicks in and you start looking for increasingly desperate means to escape what, to neurotypical people, would probably be a fairly unremarkable situation.

This actually also brings up another particularly laudable aspect of how The Secrets We Keep depicts its characters: neither Finn nor Koloa mention that they are gay at any point — and in fact in one of the narrative paths Finn initially assumes that Koloa’s pretty sister Nina is his girlfriend — but the pair just naturally recognise that there’s a “spark” between them, regardless of their respective genders. (Of course, the fact that at least one of Finn’s interactions with Koloa is at the gay bar where he works helps, too.) This helps the way the relationship develops feel natural and believable — even when the way Finn’s mind works throws a few bumps in the road along the way.

Technically, The Secrets We Keep is very interesting. While narrated from a third-person perspective, one can present a convincing theory that said narration is nonetheless coming from Finn himself rather than an actual non-participant, omniscient narrator. The narration frequently makes quips about Finn’s behaviour which one can easily imagine being self-deprecating (or self-hating in a few instances) comments he would make about himself, and there is more than one example of the narrator pointing out how Finn is “definitely not” doing something when he absolutely is.

On top of that, a second playthrough reveals an interesting additional wrinkle: at certain key moments, the dialogue box changes colour from its usual pink to blue, and additional narration from Koloa’s perspective appears. These sequences are infrequent in the current demo and it’d be great to see some more in the final game, but the few times this technique is used, it’s immediately intriguing and surprising — plus it’s a great way of providing replay value for a type of game that isn’t particularly well-known for it!

At present, there are a few textual errors in the game, with the most obvious being that both Finn and Koloa’s ages change slightly several times throughout the text (Koloa in particular describes himself as thirty-one in the early scenes and thirty-six in the final scene of the demo) — but these are nothing a good proofread can’t fix, and the text is otherwise extremely well written and highly evocative, particularly when it comes to Finn’s passive observations of what is going on around him.

As for the game’s release status, Studio Senpai indicates that the game is presently in its “bare minimum” state to be ready for release, consisting of around 180,000 words and several alternative (quite different!) narrative paths to follow. Development has been challenging, however; a recent blog post indicated that trouble with the project’s original artist necessitated all the art assets for the game being completely replaced.

Thankfully, this appears to have all been taken care of now, and the project has taken to Kickstarter to expand the team’s vision with additional graphics, music and perhaps even voice acting and mobile ports depending on how much money is raised. The game is presently slated for its final release in the summer of 2020, and in the meantime you can check out the demo on itch.io or support the team’s work on an ongoing basis via Patreon.

This is a highly intriguing, deeply relatable visual novel about living life and finding love in the modern Western world. While I’m aware some readers baulk at the idea of English-first visual novels due to the number of self-referential “ironic” VNs out there that don’t take themselves at all seriously, what we have here is something that is well-written, clearly well-researched, and which very obviously comes from the heart.

In other words, if you’re tired of the stereotype of English-first visual novels being wacky, silly, meme-tastic high jinks, then this is the sort of thing you should be supporting. I wish Studio Senpai the very best of luck with their Kickstarter, and I very much look forward to seeing the finished product next year.

More about The Secrets We Keep

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 or PayPal.

We’ve come across English Software a few times previously on this series; they were a real mainstay of the Atari 8-bit scene throughout the ’80s.

Over their lifetime, they released a wide variety of games — some of which, like Elektra Glide, have an enduring legacy of being well-regarded, even if their flaws are all the more apparent from a modern perspective.

And then they also released stuff like Hijack!, which isn’t a bad game so much as it’s a relatively unremarkable one. It’s still fun for five or ten minutes at a time, though, so let’s take to the skies and rescue some VIPs!

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

There’s a convincing argument to be made that a long-running video game franchise has only seen true success when it’s had a video pinball spinoff on a Nintendo platform.

I jest, obviously, but there are a number of fun examples from over the years — primarily direct from Nintendo, it has to be said, what with Metroid, Kirby, Pokémon and Super Mario all getting the bouncing balls treatment.

Senran Kagura is a series about ninja girls, though, so how on Earth could that possibly… oh, you know they’ll find a way. Let’s take a closer look.

The concept behind Senran Kagura Peach Ball is that Haruka has been messing around with dangerous chemicals during downtime at her part-time job in the local arcade — a Crimson Squad has to support itself, you know — and accidentally invented a concoction that turns people into animals. And oh no! Asuka, Yumi, Yomi, Murasaki and Ryouna have all become exposed to it during a fighting game tournament at the arcade.

Thankfully, the transformation is a gradual rather than immediate process; any victims of Beastall, as the drug is known, initially take on animal-like characteristics while remaining in human form but, if left untreated for too long, will become completely bestial.

Fortunately, as it happens, Haruka also has a suitable antidote to the effects of Beastall. Rather inconveniently, this comes in the form of the titular Peach Ball, a spherical object that is only able to release its powerful healing properties when it has absorbed sufficient vibratory force. And what better way to generate such force than with a nice game of pinball?

It’s obviously a completely ridiculous setup, but much like the similarly comedic Senran Kagura Bon Appétit before it, Peach Ball plays itself admirably straight throughout. In fact, the story is rather touching over the course of its five discrete narrative routes; a key part of turning all the girls back to their original forms is triggering important memories for them, a task which the various characters accomplish in very different ways.

In some ways, Peach Ball’s story can be regarded as an exploration of instant gratification versus being true to yourself, even if the latter is harder, more long-term work. All of the characters find themselves very much enjoying the animal they’re transforming into, since the animal in question is a reflection and natural extension of their personality traits.

Asuka’s rabbit transformation, for example, is born from her constant energy and enthusiasm, while Yumi becoming a cat is a natural extension of her beauty and grace. Ryouna turning into a dog needs little explanation when you consider her naturally submissive, masochistic nature, while the legend of tanuki being masters of disguise is entirely appropriate for Yomi, a young woman who looks and talks like a princess, but was born into poverty and remains a keen supporter of those struggling to live their lives in the slums.

Meanwhile, the rather shy and retiring Murasaki turning into a bear might seem a little odd until you remember that bears spend an awful lot of their time eating enough food to last the winter and then sleeping for months at a time — and, when she’s not forced to do shinobi things, Murasaki tends to subsist on delivery pizza in the darkness of her room. She’s also shown in the various other games in the series to have a particularly fiery temper if angered — though this doesn’t happen often — and this is reflected in the bear’s ferocious, intimidating nature.

Much like the previous Senran Kagura release on Switch, Senran Kagura Reflexions, Peach Ball is very clearly intended to be taken as a “fandisc” rather than part of the mainline narrative. This is probably most clearly seen in the way that the narrative is delivered. Rather than us passively observing events through the eyes of various characters and taking on the role of them when necessary, in Peach Ball the player is treated as a character in their own right. You are regarded as someone who happened to be in the arcade while the fighting game tournament was going on and while this whole debacle kicked off, and when the game’s pinball sequences get underway, you are the one who is actually playing the machine in order to get the Peach Ball up to speed.

It’s also implied that you already know who all these girls are — including the fact that they are shinobi, since none of them make any attempt to hide this fact — along with some of the key events that have happened (or, indeed, not happened, in the case of Yomi’s lie-filled route) along the way.

This can be regarded as another means of more abstractly exploring that core theme I mentioned earlier; sure, you can come straight to Peach Ball as your first Senran Kagura game and get some instant gratification from the cute girls, the ridiculous situation in which they find themselves and the fun pinball gameplay, but you’ll get much more out of it if you’ve been true to yourself — and, more importantly, true to these girls.

It’s a much more significant time and energy investment to experience the many weird and wonderful stories the Senran Kagura cast has been involved in to date, but in doing so the story of Peach Ball carries much greater meaning. You understand how their friendships developed over time — from initial animosity in some cases — and became as deep as they clearly are today; you understand how important these girls’ shared experiences are, and how they are able to make use of those memories to bring one another back from the brink of losing their humanity completely.

Let’s not forget that this is a pinball game, though; as such, I’ll leave the finer details of the stories for you to discover for yourselves. Suffice to say for now that if you enjoyed Bon Appétit’s lightweight, character-centric stories, Peach Ball treats its narrative in a very similar way: ultimately fairly unimportant, but pleasant to witness and, in this case, to actually be a part of. And with that, let’s take a closer look at the actual mechanical side of things.

The relationship between pinball and video games is a long and interesting one. The two tend to be associated quite closely with one another due to the fact that they are — or were, rather — frequently seen together in arcades, and later pinball games featured significant electronic components akin to simple video games. It’s worth noting that pinball itself — or games like it, anyway — can actually be traced all the way back to the late 18th century, so it predates video games by a long way.

As a physical, mechanical device with a formidable physical presence, a pinball table provides a discrete experience from a video game. In the early days of video gaming, attempts to recreate the experience on the small screen often fell somewhat short of authenticity, but managed to create their own distinct feel in their own right.

As technology improved and video games were more able to accurately simulate the physics that underpinned a real pinball table, we started to see a noticeable split between games aiming to be an authentic pinball simulation, and games that used pinball as the basis for their experience while adding a uniquely “video game” twist to things. Peach Ball, as you might expect, falls mostly into the latter category — though that’s not to say enthusiasts of “the real thing” won’t find anything to like here.

Peach Ball’s distinctly “video pinball” approach is to provide the player with an experience that would be physically impossible in reality, somewhat similarly to SCEI’s Flipnic on PlayStation 2. We have a playfield that is big enough to fit a full-size human woman on it as part of the table furniture; we have interactive table elements that would be extremely difficult to recreate with physical mechanisms; and, well, we have “Sexy Challenges”.

That latter point probably bears a bit of explaining. It’s actually core to the main game structure, particularly when playing through the game’s Story mode, but before we get there let’s consider the tables themselves first.

Peach Ball comes with two different tables, which might seem a bit stingy when compared to more sim-like affairs such as the excellent Pinball FX series or The Pinball Arcade, the latter of which takes great pride in its accurate recreations of real pinball tables from throughout history. It’s a fair point, but it’s also worth noting that these two tables are packed with mechanics and details, and their limited number encourages you to practice and achieve mastery over their unique features rather than hopping back and forth between a variety of brightly coloured playfields, never really getting to know any of them properly.

Although simple in concept, pinball can be challenging to engage with at times, particularly on more complex tables. Many pinball tables — and simulations thereof — don’t make a point of explaining their various mechanics in detail, instead leaving it up to the player to experiment and discover things for themselves. There’s a certain appeal to this approach, of course, though it can get expensive if you’re playing a coin-operated game, and frustrating if you can’t figure out exactly what is happening when you shoot the ball into that particular hole over there that makes the big red light come on or whatever.

Peach Ball assumes that its players aren’t necessarily pinball wizards when they start playing. While it lacks a tutorial quite as exhaustively comprehensive as the one the aforementioned Flipnic offers, it does at least offer helpful pop-up tips on the two tables’ various features when your ball hits them for the first time. Not only that, as part of these mini-manuals, the game offers helpful suggestions as to which part of the flippers you should use in order to hit that target again in the future — something that I, as a cack-handed twat, was immeasurably grateful for.

It offered advice without being either patronising or overly daunting about it; before long, I could feel myself improving as my shots became more accurate and the ball started to go where I wanted it to more often, and I was able to trigger many of the tables’ various features reasonably reliably.

Those features tie in with a central system of the game known as “Peach Missions”. These line up in a list at the side of the screen and range from the simple (hit the slingshot bumpers near the flippers a few times) to the more demanding (trigger the “Lukahole Slot” by dropping the ball into a small pool of water twice in a row) or time-sensitive (obliterate the mechanical “fairies” parading around on the table before they disappear again), with “Peach Points” on offer for their completion.

Attaining Peach Points adds to a meter. When the meter reaches one of three milestones, a Sexy Challenge becomes available, and can be triggered by hitting the girl on the table with your ball. Said Challenge drags you, the girl and the ball into a strange room “inside” the pinball table for a minigame that usually involves hitting some sort of target or targets repeatedly against a tight time limit, after which the things you’ve been battering your balls against will do something amusing that results in the girl’s clothing being torn (this is Senran Kagura, after all) and you getting a little closer to fully charging the Peach Ball.

The Sexy Challenges can be a mixed blessing. While completing three of them is necessary to clear a stage in Story mode, triggering them too early can prevent you from obtaining a high score — and if you want to unlock all the game’s content on offer, you need to clear the various Story mode stages while meeting various increasingly challenging conditions, many of which involve reaching a particular score milestone.

Thankfully there are a few ways you can delay the inevitable, usually involving knocking the girl down and “stunning” her temporarily. This can be achieved in various ways according to the table, and is the main means through which the two tables distinguish themselves from one another.

The Peach Park table, which is fairground-themed, features a number of mechanical “rides” around the table, each of which can be triggered by hitting your ball into the appropriate holes or lanes. A ferris wheel can be reached by using the upper flipper on the table, for example; a “freefall” ride requires you to accurately shoot a ball into its “seats” three times in succession while a barrier is open; and a teacups ride acts as a set of bumpers, gradually filling a meter with each impact.

In each case, “completing” the conditions for a particular ride on Peach Park causes an amusing animation to occur, which inevitably results in the girl getting knocked down and stunned, a condition known as After Break status. While in After Break, a Sexy Challenge won’t go off, so you’re free to concentrate on scoring points as much as possible; you can get some particularly substantial points by bouncing your ball off the girls’ respective wobbly bits, but it’s also a good time to pursue other table features without worrying about accidentally creeping closer to the stage’s conclusion.

The Spooky Shinobi Park table, meanwhile, is structured rather differently. Here, rather than directly firing the ball into features, bumpers on the table release collectible coins. Hitting these with the ball sends them into one of three treasure chests, and when a chest is full, it will release a special glowing token that will take you into a minigame when struck.

These minigames take place on their own separate tables and include a challenge where you have to hit fans while they’re open, another where you have to hit moving targets, and a particularly challenging one where you’re returning a shuttlecock to a rather aggressive geisha doll. In all cases, five successful instances of doing what you’re supposed to do triggers an entertaining animation that results in After Break at which point you can, once again, take aim for some high scores by bopping the girl’s boobies — or just try and collect some more coins to trigger even more minigames.

On both tables, various conditions trigger Fever Time, Super Fever Time or Hustle Time conditions, which provide combinations of substantial score bonuses, multiball situations and special table features while active. Learning exactly what sets these off is essential to pursuing high scores, whether it’s in the Story mode in an attempt to clear the missions, or in the pure score attack Free mode. You’re also able to obtain items that provide a temporary score multiplier, provide a Ball Return facility in the drain, replenish used kickers or even provide a “psychic ball” that is particularly strongly affected if you nudge the table in a specific direction using the analogue stick.

Peach Ball is enormously satisfying to play. This can be attributed to a number of things. The pinball physics work well and feel convincing, particularly if played using a controller that features HD Rumble. The different types of ball you’re able to use don’t affect the actual mechanics, but they do “feel” different as you play, and the physical sensation of playing Peach Ball is as much a part of the experience as the graphics and sound.

Visually, the game looks good, and is an excellent showcase for the Senran Kagura series’ consistently wonderful character animation. The girls are packed with personality and react convincingly to various things going on around them on the table, as well as flinching appropriately when struck by the Peach Ball. Their animal personas are well-represented through their various behaviours, too; each of the girls react noticeably differently on the table both when they’re alert and when they’re in After Break status, often requiring a different strategy to reach certain table features if they end up blocking a crucial lane!

As should be expected from the series by this point, there’s a substantial and extremely high-quality soundtrack, too, with each table having numerous musical tracks on offer according to which particular variation you’re playing, what is happening at any given moment and how well you’re doing. The music is consistently memorable and catchy; I defy you not to be whistling the ragtime-style piece from Peach Park’s night-time variation after hearing it once or twice!

And the whole thing is further evidence that series creator Kenichiro Takaki and friends really wish they were making early ’00s Sega games, since the game’s over-the-top user interface is constantly exploding with colour, particle effects, score bonuses bursting out of things, gigantic numbers keeping track of hits and tracking time limits to a hundredth of a second’s accuracy. It’s building on what Peach Beach Splash in particular was doing with its overall presentation, and it’s like the Dreamcast never died. I love it.

Like Reflexions and to a lesser extent Bon Appétit, Peach Ball is best thought of as a fandisc for the series rather than a mainline installment. As noted, there’s enough solid pinball gameplay here to keep non-fans entertained for a while — particularly considering the amount of stuff to unlock — but the true attraction of Peach Ball as a whole is to enjoy a thoroughly charming story involving these wonderful girls that just happens to involve some enjoyable pinball along the way. As such, the people who are going to enjoy this the most are the people who have been following these girls on their journey since those initial clashes between Hanzou and Hebijo… and who are anxiously awaiting whatever is in store for them if and when Senran Kagura 7even ever decides to show its face.

Even shinobi students need a break now and then, you know?

More about Senran Kagura Peach Ball
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.

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

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

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi or PayPal.

This is it! Almost, anyway. The forces of Wei (and friends) are finally ready to take the battle to Orochi.

Each of the final battles in the four Warriors Orochi campaigns unfold similarly, but with various differences in the small events that occur during the battle itself. Ultimately, though, the goal is always the same: open the way to Orochi, then beat his ass down once and for all. Or at least until the next game, anyway.

Will the power of Wei prevail? Of course it will, but humour me, at least… next time around it’s the grand finale!

It occurs to me that in previous installments of this column, I have given some time and attention to three of the four main “faction” leaders in Senran Kagura — Homura, Asuka and Yumi — so it probably behooves me to devote today to Miyabi.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge her a moment in the spotlight, of course, but of all the Senran Kagura girls, she’s one that doesn’t seem to get a ton of fan attention. Which is a shame, because she’s a fascinating character with some cool backstory. Actual backstory, not… you know what I mean.

So let’s rectify that and give Miyabi some love, shall we?

Miyabi was introduced alongside Yumi in 2013’s Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, in which she took on the role of the leader of the “new Hebijo” faction — the class of Elite students that took the place of Homura and friends, who had become renegades at the conclusion of their route in Senran Kagura Burst (and, indeed, Burst Re:Newal).

The new Hebijo girls initially provided a notably dark tone to the narrative whenever they showed up. While Homura and her gang were formidable opponents in the Hanzou route of Burst and Burst Re:Newal, it didn’t take long for the clashes between the two schools to come across as good-natured rivalry more than “light versus dark”. When Miyabi and company showed up, however, there was real darkness there… and a significant source of that was Miyabi herself.

Over the course of numerous games, we learn bits and pieces about Miyabi’s background. We learn that her mother was killed by a youma, and that she sought to become a shinobi at all costs in order to exact revenge on these otherworldly beasts that tore her family apart. With revenge not exactly being the sort of motivation that would get “good” shinobi schools on your side, she enrolled in Hebijo — “where good favours few, evil accepts all” and all that — and took aim for the Elite class.

We don’t see exactly how this unfolded — or indeed exactly how she was involved in the death of Ryoubi and Ryouna’s sister Ryouki — until her “Abyssal” DLC campaign for Burst Re:Newal, though we learn a few second-hand details long after the fact throughout the Versus games, which are enough for both Ryoubi and Ryouna to forgive Miyabi.

Her Abyssal campaign reveals that she sought to unleash a particularly powerful Ninja Art known as Blood Riot; this is one of the forbidden Anathematic Ninja Arts that puts the user — and everyone around them — at great risk, but Miyabi saw it as the only way she was ever going to get strong enough quickly enough to be able to take down the youma.

It was during a chance encounter with Ryouki that tragedy struck; a youma attacked, leaving Ryouki injured and vulnerable to “infection”, leaving Miyabi no choice but to strike her down. Miyabi’s actions were ultimately the merciful thing to do; had she left Ryouki be, there would have been nothing left of the girl’s spirit as the youma took over.

The use of Blood Riot carried a heavy price, however; it left Miyabi comatose and vulnerable to the youma’s influence, and much of her story concerns her inner struggle to fight off the primal urges it stirs within her, and her attempts to maintain her humanity while gaining new power.

Elsewhere in the series, Miyabi is used as a means of exploring the concept of gender identity. While obviously feminine — particularly in the way she dresses — she has many more stereotypically masculine characteristics than other members of the cast: most notably short hair, a deep voice and a rather mature, detached personality that seems constantly serious. This leads to many regarding her as “boyish”, and not in a playful, tomboyish way; the behaviour of the “fan club” she gradually amasses (without her doing anything in particular to do so, much to her chagrin) suggests that at least some of the people who fall for her practically believe that she really is a man.

Thus, a number of Miyabi’s personal stories, be they in the Shinobi Girl’s Heart sequences in the Versus games or her overall narrative in Bon Appétit, concern how Miyabi feels about this, and how she responds to the situation. She clearly has a complex miasma of emotions swirling around in her head; we learn in her Abyssal story that she was genuinely in love with her fellow Hebijo student Imu prior to the Blood Riot incident, but that her traumatic ordeal left her with significant gaps in her memory, including this particular aspect of her interpersonal relationships.

Imu, meanwhile, maintains her memories and is absolutely devoted to Miyabi — to a fault at times, as seen in the Hebijo arc of Peach Beach Splash, where her borderline obsession causes tension between her and her sister Murasaki — as she believes unconditionally that the pair of them will one day rediscover what they once had together.

It’s not just about matters of the heart, though; Miyabi finds herself somewhat torn over her whole identity at times. On occasions where she has the opportunity to be more feminine, she finds herself worrying if doing so is not actually being true to herself — or if it is letting down the people who love her for who she is under normal circumstances — and in Estival Versus, there is a memorable sequence where she is absolutely mortified to accidentally reveal the fact she used to call her mother “mama”.

Although clearly mature and responsible — much more so than many other members of the cast — it’s clear she’s a deeply conflicted character with a lot going on and an occasional desire to enjoy her youth more than she’s had the opportunity to in the past… and a unique, distinctive addition to the complete Senran Kagura ensemble.

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 or PayPal.

“Sam, you’re a dead man.” And how; Activision’s Borrowed Time, an “illustrated text adventure” from 1985, really, really, really wants you dead.

An early game from Interplay with involvement from Brian “Wasteland” Fargo, Borrowed Time is an early attempt to break out of the pure text format of adventure games with a graphical, mouse-driven interface. It’s not quite a full-on point and click adventure just yet, but it’s a first step in that direction.

It’s also a monstrously difficult game, fond of murdering its protagonist at regular intervals right from the very outset. You’re doing well if you manage to survive just leaving your office for the day…

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

Every now and then, I like to trawl through Nintendo’s various digital marketplaces to see if anything interesting catches my eye.

The most bounteous sources of unusual and cheap Nintendo- based entertainment to date have been the 3DS eShop, which brought us games such as the highly unusual but thoroughly compelling Puzzle Labyrinth, and the Switch’s eShop, which is awash with small-scale indie projects from all over the world.

One that grabbed my attention recently — primarily due to it being on sale for less than what you’d pay for breakfast at Starbucks — was Yōdanji, a game originally released by Kemco for PC, mobile and Switch in 2017, and a self-described “coffee-break roguelike themed after Japanese folklore tales”. I’m in! Let’s take a look.

Yōdanji’s concept — not that it really matters once you start playing — is based around a fictional smartphone application that allows people to capture yōkai, the many varied and wonderful creatures and spiritual entities from Japanese folklore. This isn’t a Yōkai Watch or Pokémon ripoff, mind you; here, you actually take on the role of the yōkai you acquire in an attempt to… well, acquire more of them.

You begin the game with a semi-random selection of three yōkai, and four ways to play. A simple, short tutorial walks you through the basic controls and gets you up and running within a couple of minutes; the main Yōkai Hunt mode tasks you with retrieving three scrolls and taking them to the tenth level of the dungeon; the Picnic mode is the same but easier; and an Endless mode provides the longevity after you’ve unlocked all the available yōkai.

Each yōkai has four different skills, each of which has a cost to unleash both in terms of your “SP” meter and the hidden “hunger” statistic. Each skill also has four tiers of effectiveness, and you get to upgrade (or unlock) one of these skills each time you level up.

Yōdanji has an unconventional levelling system. Rather than earning experience by defeating enemies, you instead gain levels by hunting down a hitodama (a ball of blue flame representing a human soul) that is lurking in each of the ten levels. You start each run directly in front of one of these so you can always immediately unlock a skill, but others have to be sought out — and sometimes enemies have captured them, requiring you to defeat the enemy before you can absorb the hitodama’s power and level up.

What this means in practice is that there’s no need to grind in Yōdanji; instead, the only real “requirement” for each level is to find the hitodama and, on levels 4, 6 and 9, one of the three scrolls you require to reveal the boss and unlock a new yōkai. However, it’s still worth exploring each level to try and track down other items, the most useful of which are magical talismans which confer some sort of passive bonus on you while they are held.

There’s a twist, though; your inventory can only hold five items. And that includes the three scrolls you need to unlock the boss and any talismans you stumble across. That, as you might expect, doesn’t leave a lot of room for food and healing items.

Fortunately, you have a few options available to you. Unusually for a modern roguelike, you are able to return to previous levels via staircases up, allowing you the opportunity to “dump” items you don’t need immediately on an earlier level and then come back to retrieve them later. This is especially useful with the scrolls; using this system, you can put two of the scrolls in place to unlock the boss then go back and retrieve the third from an earlier level, allowing you more inventory space to store healing or buff items. This also means that you can’t really “miss” anything, since you can always return to a previous level to pick up something you left behind.

On top of that, you’re able to use items you find on the floor immediately without adding them to your inventory. This is particularly useful when it comes to food, which can be immediately consumed; since you’re playing a yōkai, not a humanoid character, you can have no qualms whatsoever about devouring the corpses and bones of your enemies if there is nothing more palatable lying around, too.

The various yōkai are all very different to one another. Some are better suited to direct, up-close melee combat, while others have skills that allow them to attack from a range. Nekomata has a delightful necromancy skill that allows it to raise corpses and bone piles into skeletal servants, while karakasa can turn into an umbrella for rapid healing and reduced hunger, or lick its enemies to paralyse them.

The subject matter is treated with a great deal of respect. Each yōkai you unlock has an illustration and a well-written short story explaining its origins, and the scrolls you acquire during a run through the main game mode contain fragments of this story, providing you a teaser of what you’ll unlock if you’re actually successful. The pixel art sprites that represent the different yōkai are distinct from one another, recognisable as the different creatures and spirits if you’re familiar with the original legends… and kind of adorable, too. They’re cool little critters that it’s a pleasure to collect… and with the high challenge factor of the game, it’ll take a while for you to catch ’em all, too.

The only real area where Yōdanji lets itself down is in its background music; the menus and the gameplay each have a short music loop that is no more than about 10 seconds in length, and they just cycle round and round and round and round forever, with no variation as you progress through the several different visual tilesets of the dungeon on your way to the tenth floor. Thankfully, you can turn the music off altogether if you desire (and you almost certainly will), and the actual sound effects during gameplay are both entertaining and amusing as well as providing helpful feedback on your situation.

Yōdanji isn’t a complicated game, but it’s not trying to be — that’s what is meant by “coffee-break roguelike”, after all. What it does provide is a straightforward but varied and very addictive dungeon crawling experience with some interesting and unusual mechanics — and play sessions that are eminently friendly to handheld play, thanks to lasting no more than about ten to twenty minutes even for a successful clear. (And you absolutely will not clear this on your first attempt!)

It’s a great example of a game having simple, clear and easy to understand mechanics, and then applying those mechanics in varied and interesting ways to keep things entertaining over the long term. It’ll take you a good long while to unlock all the yōkai, and after that you’ll have a variety of different ways to play and enjoy the Endless mode to your heart’s content.

Yōdanji, much like any coffee-break roguelike, will probably never be anyone’s “main game” that they have on the go at any given time. But it’s a great title to have in your library — particularly in its Switch incarnation — ready for when you just fancy a bit of quick dungeon crawling that you don’t have to think about too much.

Or indeed to indulge those fantasies you’ve always had about stabbing sentient umbrellas as a dual-wielding weasel. We’ve all been there.

More about Yōdanji

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 or PayPal.

Freshly minted as full-on heroes after Bahamut’s ministrations, the powered-up Warriors of Light resume their quest to illuminate the four crystals and save the world from the Four Fiends.

But the path onwards isn’t terribly clear; some investigation is obviously required, beginning with a strange town on the northern continent that appears to play host to people who are very excited about having legs.

Hmm! What could it all mean?

I admire pretty much anyone capable of making a game. I know there are lots of tools out there that make it much more accessible than it once was, but for me, game makers still work a certain form of magic.

I particularly admire those who have been making games since the early days of home computing, in many cases directly programming the computer’s hardware using machine code in order to wring as much power out of those poor beasts as possible.

And I especially admire Jeff Minter, who was doing this back in the days of the 8-bit Atari, and is still going strong today.

For the unfamiliar, Jeff Minter is an English game designer who has remained fiercely independent and committed to doing things his own way ever since the early 8-bit home microcomputer era. His games were typically technically impressive twists on popular arcade formulae rather than being completely original, but the fact they were always infused with a massive amount of personality made them enormously memorable for anyone who experienced them.

And what a personality. Minter has long been obsessed with and kept a variety of weird and wonderful creatures ranging from the humble sheep (whom he livestreams feeding Digestive biscuits to every morning on Twitter’s Periscope service) to llamas, camels and goats. Indeed, this love of animals typically plays a key role in his creative works, and since the very beginning he has released his games under the label “Llamasoft”.

Over the years, Minter developed something of a habit for attaching himself to “underdog” hardware that he found fascinating but which was, in most cases, doomed to failure. His most intriguing projects in this regard were his work on the never-launched Konix Multisystem — which, had it ever come to fruition, would have been the only home console available with an arcade-style moving seat as well as a controller that could transform between flight yoke, steering wheel and handlebars — and the spectacular failure that was the Atari Jaguar, where he made Tempest 2000, an update of the classic arcade game and one of the few Jaguar games that was actually good.

In more recent years, Minter was responsible for the music visualiser on the Xbox 360 — a natural evolution of his “light synthesiser” software packages that he began experimenting with on the 8- and 16-bit home computer platforms — as well as the visualisation aspects of Taito’s Space Invaders Extreme, but he longed for a return to the good old days when he had complete control over his own creative projects and was able to release them at his own pace.

He decided to explore the then-budding smartphone game market on iOS, and planned a loosely linked set of games known as the Minotaur Project. The common thread between all these games would be that their mechanics would be designed in a similar way to classic games from the 8-bit and early arcade era, but they would be unconstrained by the technology of the time. Ultimately the project yielded six games in total, but Minter became frustrated with the rise of free-to-play games, increasingly obtrusive monetisation models and nigh-impossible discoverability on mobile, and eventually decided to pull out of that market, describing it on Twitter as being like “the scene of a mugging”.

For a while, the Minotaur Project games were all but lost, since Minter did not update them for 64-bit versions of iOS, and as a result they were pulled from the App Store for no longer meeting Apple’s requirements. Fortunately, Minter had planned ahead and made the code for the games suitably portable, making future Mac, PC and console versions a distinct possibility, even if he never wanted to touch mobile with a barge pole ever again.

With the rise of new and exciting but niche-interest technology such as VR, Minter found himself once against intrigued by the possibilities of doing something a bit different from the norm. In 2017, he and his partner Giles Zorzin released Polybius — named after the legendary “game that doesn’t exist” — for PlayStation 4 with extensive PlayStation VR support, and it caught the attention of Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor, who asked to use its distinctive, stylised visuals as the basis for the music video for Less Than.

In 2018, the Minotaur Project made a comeback on Steam, featuring enhanced versions of Gridrunner — the game Minter has ported and remade more times than anything else from his back catalogue — and GoatUp, a platform game based on the ZX Spectrum and its contemporaries. Rather than straight ports from iOS, however, this first “volume” of what was now known as Minotaur Arcade adopted some rather peculiar visual effects — and, like Polybius, was clearly intended to be experienced in VR.

Now, that first volume of Minotaur Arcade is available to PlayStation 4 players, making these unusual and highly addictive VR arcade games available to a much wider audience.

The version of Gridrunner in Minotaur Arcade vol. 1 is a solid adaptation of the iOS version, featuring early ’80s arcade-style visuals and sounds. In Gridrunner, you control a spaceship that is tasked with destroying the titular creatures, which proceed down the screen much like the eponymous foe from Atari’s Centipede series. All you have to worry about in this version is avoiding getting hit by things; firing is taken care of for you.

Gridrunner isn’t a simple shooter, however; there are some mechanics to learn and familiarise yourself with. Probably the most important of these to get your head round are the “X-Y zappers”, which move along their respective axes of the grid and, at regular intervals, shoot something. The one which moves across the X axis at the top of the screen occasionally fires a beam that, after a brief telegraph, engulfs the full height of the grid, while the one on the Y axis fires out glowy things that, if left unattended for too long, hatch into bombs, giving you even more things to avoid than you had already.

There are a variety of power-ups to collect in Gridrunner, most of which provide your ship with more firepower in different directions. One allows you to shoot in front of and behind yourself, for example, while the most sought-after turns you into a nigh-invincible star of death, firing in pretty much every direction and ripping through enemies; just don’t get too overconfident, because those X-Y Zappers can still get you!

The original Gridrunner on 8-bit platforms had fairly abstract graphics, but subsequent ports brought plenty of that distinctive Minter personality to the fore. Minter has never been a provocateur per se, but he has always held strong opinions that he hasn’t been afraid to express through his work. He always does this in an entertaining, non-obtrusive manner, however; the second level of Gridrunner is called “Cameron’s Huge Mistake”, for example, and sees you shooting down Union Flags emblazoned with slogans, presumably an expression of his frustration with the interminable “Brexit” situation — something which I’m sure pretty much everyone can get on board with at this point.

More recent Minter games — including those found in Minotaur Arcade vol. 1 — typically incorporate a wide variety of cultural references, usually in the form of sampled sound effects drawn from a wide variety of sources. In Gridrunner’s case, these range from classic arcade game bleeps and burbles to Fluttershy’s “Yay” from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic; somehow Minter has always managed to get away with this sort of thing in his games without running into any copyright issues, and playing “spot the audible reference” becomes an extremely compelling metagame in its own right after a while!

This sort of thing is taken to a whole other level in Gridrunner’s companion in Minotaur Arcade vol. 1: GoatUp.

In concept, GoatUp is a fairly simple platform game. You control a goat, and you need to go up — in this case, up a cylindrical tower. You achieve this by moving along platforms and jumping. As soon as you start moving, the screen starts scrolling, and you need to keep heading upwards in order to avoid being swallowed by the void.

As you move along platforms, you will score points for them. Initially this is presented as the goat eating grass, but as the game progresses and you proceed through a variety of environments — more on that in a moment — you’ll also be doing things like painting floors, breaking bricks and all manner of other things.

As you move around, you’ll reveal various items, and these are where the majority of your points come from. There are 40 different items in total to collect, many of which are cultural references of varying descriptions — although the first is just a ham sandwich from Tywyn Wharf station. As you progress through the game, you’ll be picking up ZX Spectrums, dragons from Adventure, lumps of cake (specifically, that delicious-looking strawberry shortcake that is in every anime ever), British road signs, 3.5″ floppy disks, rhinos “in the wrong colour palette” and all manner of other things. Just seeing what weird and wonderful items you’ll be able to grab next is a big driving force in GoatUp.

Scattered throughout the levels are various other goats. Running into one of these impregnates your goat (who is female, it seems) and, after a short pregnancy, she will start to get a kid following her in a trail, up to 9 kids long if you play particularly promiscuously. These serve two functions: they’re effectively “lives”, since you lose one if you run into an enemy and get knocked off the tower if you don’t have any left, but they can also be used as a means of attacking the various foes.

By “whipping” your trail of kids behind you into an enemy, you can defeat the enemy and score big points. And as you progress up the tower through the various environments, you’ll find additional ways of dealing with enemies, too.

Ah yes, those environments; while things start pretty straightforwardly with grass-covered platforms, the second environment takes you into a cylindrical recreation of Miner 2049’er for Atari 8-bit, complete with authentic sound effects and objects you can collect to defeat the radioactive enemies.

This is followed by a level themed after Manic Miner on ZX Spectrum, and subsequent areas pay homage to everything from Jaleco’s City Connection (complete with irritating music any time you touch a cat — though here, in a display of solidarity in the animal kingdom, they confer invincibility and allow you to defeat the hordes of Honda Cities racing around the platforms rather than killing you) to Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Atari 8-bit classic Montezuma’s Revenge.

GoatUp is a constant journey of discovery, and if you grew up with any of these games, it’s impossible not to play it with a huge smile on your face. The game becomes increasingly frantic and hectic as you progress, but it never feels so chaotic you can’t see what’s going on; the incredibly tight and snappy controls really help with this side of things.

Both Gridrunner and GoatUp work brilliantly in VR, primarily because neither of them are trying to do anything too fancy. Essentially all the VR mode is doing is making for a more immersive experience, since both games simply place you sitting a short distance away from the playfield rather than trying to put you “in” the action. This means you can look around to see what is going on, and the game frequently flings things out of the screen at you in 3D just to emphasise the depth aspect; this never feels overdone or gimmicky, however — it’s just a reminder that yes, you really are playing these ridiculous games in VR, and it’s massively fun.

Gridrunner’s unusually shaped and curved playfields look particularly good in VR, while the scale of the tower you are climbing in GoatUp is emphasised wonderfully when you are able to actually look up to see where you’re going and down to see where you’ve been — before it disappears into the void, that is!

Both games are simple but immensely addictive. They’re a perfect example of Jeff Minter doing what he has always done best: taking straightforward, ’80s style arcade game concepts and providing a unique, modern technological twist on them. They’re also great VR showcase games; since they’re both so easy to learn, they’re games ideally suited for introducing new players to the possibilities of VR without overwhelming them or risking motion sickness.

Oh, and the whole thing fits in about 50MB. How many games can you say that about these days — let alone two-game bundles?

I’m just delighted that not only is Jeff Minter still making games, he’s bringing back some of my absolute favourite works of his. If the rest of the Minotaur Project’s grand resurrection is as good as Minotaur Arcade vol. 1, I am very much on board, and very happy I own a PSVR.

Here’s looking forward to Caverns of Minos and Super Ox Wars!

More about Minotaur Arcade Vol. 1

Screenshots in this article are from the PSVR mode. The games can also be played on a regular TV.

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 or PayPal.

It’s that time again: the time when we strap ourselves into a small triangle and blast some space rocks into increasingly smaller space rocks until they disappear.

Yes, it’s Asteroids again, this time in its Atari 2600 incarnation. This was a well-regarded port at the time of original release, and noteworthy from a historical perspective for being one of the first games to make use of “bank-switching”, allowing for higher-capacity cartridges that made use of more data. Asteroids for 2600 is twice the size of earlier 2600 games at a mighty 8K!

It also offers “66 video games”. Can’t say better value than that, can you? Even if there’s actually only 33 video games, and they’re all very similar to one another…

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

Hello everyone! Hope you’re well. I’m not. I’ve been trying to shake a cold off for what feels like about a month now, and it’s not going away. Hello autumn, I guess.

Still, that hasn’t stopped me from putting a bunch of stuff out for you to enjoy! Next week we’ll be kicking off a brand new Cover Game feature for your enjoyment, so please look forward to that — and in the meantime there’s plenty of other stuff to check out.

So without further ado let’s see what you might have missed in the last week!

MoeGamer

The Secrets We Keep: A Modern Love Story – This is an interesting-looking in-development Boys’ Love (BL) story starring an autistic single father lead. It’s shaping up to be a fascinating tale, if the demo I explored is anything to go by!

Senran Kagura Peach Ball: Bump ‘n’ Bounce – We wrap up our time with Senran Kagura for now — at least until 7even decides to show its face — with its latest release, video pinball title Peach Ball.

Warriors Wednesday: Wei Warriors vs Orochi – Warriors Orochi #59 – It’s the final battle (apart from the actual finale next week!) The Wei Warriors finally take the fight to Orochi in an attempt to prove their worth once and for all.

Waifu Wednesday: Miyabi – To close out the Senran Kagura feature, here’s an in-depth look at “new Hebijo” leader Miyabi, and how her character explores matters of sexuality, gender identity and vengeance.

Yodanji: Stabby Weasels and Licky Umbrellas – A roguelike inspired by Japanese mythology? Sounds good to me. And it is!

Final Fantasy Marathon: I Love Having Legs – Final Fantasy 1 #15 – Freshly minted as their upgraded classes, the Warriors of Light take to the northern continents of the world to continue their investigation into the Four Fiends.

Minotaur Arcade Vol. 1: Minter Classics Return – Jeff Minter is back once again! This time he’s brought some of his mobile classics bang up to date with VR support and some absolutely delightful use of cultural references. If you have a PSVR and a mighty 50MB to spare, this is well worth your time.

Atari A to Z

This week we’ve got train-chasing helicopters and deadly trees, thugs that want nothing more to kill you less than five minutes after your adventure has got underway, and… well, we’ve got Asteroids. Again.

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 onward, dear friends, into the vibrant waters of the WordPress Reader, from which I will pluck some of the posts that caught my eye this week! (WordPress has been “helpfully” unfollowing a bunch of blogs without me realising recently, so if you haven’t seen me around much recently, do please give me a poke so I can re-follow if necessary!)

Wishlist wonders: games I’m looking forward to (Later Levels) – Kim’s been looking forward to some of the things to come later in the year. What has you most hyped for the rest of 2019?

Gloomhaven on PC (GeekOut UK) – terraphi takes a look at the computer adaptation of Gloomhaven, a highly ambitious tabletop game that combines elements of dungeon crawling, cooperative strategy gaming and “legacy” games with permanent changes as the campaign progresses.

Destiny 2: New Light (Impressions) (The Late Night Session) – The Night Owl takes a look at Destiny 2’s new free-to-play incarnation from the perspective of someone new to the game. And with Bungie splitting from Activision Blizzard, now you can try it out without guilt after the recent… happenings!

Running, Jumping and Swimming – The Joys of Movement in Link’s Awakening (Adventure Rules) – Robert Ian Shepard brings us a look at one of the most appealing things about Link’s Awakening and its recent Switch remake: the variety of ways in which you can move around the game world.

Top 5 Reasons I Like the Anime Community (I drink and watch anime) – And let’s end on a bit of positivity from Irina, shall we? I think we all need it!

—

All right, that’s it. I’m off to bed; my day at the day job starts starting an hour earlier from tomorrow so that’s fun. Although that does also mean I get home earlier, which means more time for games and writing.

Anyway. As always, thank you so much for reading, watching and supporting my work, 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 or PayPal.

Ah, the 1980s; a period of shameless attempts to replicate and exceed the success of other people by having a go at doing it yourself.

Well, that was the thinking that drove Sega to create Flicky in 1984, anyway; jealous of Namco’s success with Mappy, the company’s leadership tasked designer Yoji Ishii with creating something that would beat their rival’s game.

Did they succeed? Well, that’s a matter of opinion. Just maybe bring the earplugs if you want to judge for yourself.

Flicky — and Mappy, for that matter — was born from the “dot eater” craze of the early ’80s that was sparked by Namco’s Pac-Man. The original design for Flicky simply involved the player catching dots in a maze, but Ishii and his collaborator, artist Yoshiki Kawasaki, decided to infuse the game with a bit more personality. Technology had moved on to a sufficient degree that arcade games no longer needed to be abstract affairs defined primarily by their mechanics; now they could have real character about them, too.

Kawasaki took inspiration from a Japanese song called デンセンマンの電線音頭 (Densenman no densen ondo) which is a song about sparrows sitting on electric wires that was popular on Japanese television in the 1970s. He decided to make the main character of the game a sparrow, and the “maze” would consist of electrical wires. However, after finding this theme a little too constraining, he subsequently decided to situate the game in an apartment block instead, running with the theme of protecting children from the outside world and taking them home safely.

In Flicky, you take on the role of Flicky, a blue sparrow with a simple goal: rescue all the yellow chicks known as “Chirps” (or piyopiyos in the Japanese original) and get them safely to the exit. Attempting to stop Flicky are a number of ginger cats and, later, some iguanas, natural enemy of the sparrow.

The eponymous heroine of the game is not, according to the official lore, the mother of the young Chirps she is tasked with rescuing. Rather, she is simply their “friend”, according to an interview with Kawasaki published by Sega in 2002 — though he also notes that “if the person who is playing thinks that Flicky is a mother bird, that’s fine”, so go with your headcanon, I guess.

Flicky’s gameplay differs from your average “dot-eater” of the time in that just collecting the “dots” is not the end of it. Rather, collecting one of the Chirps causes it to start following Flicky in a trail (rather like the goat kids in GoatUp, it now occurs to me) until it either collides with a cat, at which point it will start wandering aimlessly until Flicky grabs it again, or until Flicky takes it to the exit, at which point the player scores points.

As with most arcade games of the era, you score more points for doing things in rapid succession, so rescuing all the Chirps in the level in a single “train” scores you a lot more points than taking them to the exit one at a time.

The cats can either be avoided by jumping over them using Flicky’s rather floaty jump, or they can be temporarily defeated by throwing objects at them. This is achieved by running into an object to collect it, then jumping to “shoot” it in the direction Flicky is facing. This makes for some interesting strategic decisions; since you can’t jump without firing an object you’re carrying, sometimes you’ll deliberately want to avoid the objects in order to make use of them when you really need them.

There are a few twists on the formula along the way. Firstly, some of the Chirps wear sunglasses because they are “bad” Chirps. This doesn’t mean they’ll hurt you, mind; it simply means they will behave more unpredictably (or “badly”) if they get knocked off the trail behind Flicky. In practice this doesn’t matter all that much, but it’s a nice little additional touch of personality to the game.

Every few levels, Flicky will be confronted with a bonus stage where she has to catch Chirps being flung into the air by cats using seesaws. Exactly why the cats aren’t just eating the Chirps isn’t entirely clear, but, well, it’s an arcade game; we’re not here for things that make logical sense. We’re here to score points!

And Flicky really nails that addictive arcade feeling, balancing feelings of risk and reward really nicely to produce a game that is easy to pick up and start having fun with, but tricky to master — particularly given that there are a hundred unique levels, and after you complete them all, the whole thing just loops around again.

There’s one little aspect of Flicky that’s a little hard to deal with, however, and that’s the sound. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty horrific, consisting of a screechy melody that accompanies the action (and doesn’t change from level to level) plus some incredibly piercing sound effects. Thankfully, most people playing Flicky today will be doing so on home hardware thanks to packages such as the Sega Mega Drive Classics collection, which includes its 1991 Mega Drive port, and as such it’s a simple matter to turn the sound down; if that version still offends your ears, however, the easily emulated arcade version is marginally less piercing, though still not exactly pleasant to listen to!

Don’t let the horrible noises it makes put you off, however; Flicky gave us one of Sega’s earliest video game mascots, and as such it is historically significant. Sega thinks so, too; over the years, Flicky and others of her species have put in guest appearances in a number of other games, beginning with Teddy Boy Blues in 1985 and continuing through Bloxeed, SDI, Flash Point, Super Monaco GP, Shenmue, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games and numerous installments of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Indeed, Sonic’s inaugural “3D” (kind of) outing was known as Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island in Europe, putting the blue sparrow and her friends very much at the forefront of that game.

Compared to some of Sega’s later games, Flicky might seem like lightweight fluff. But taken on its own merits, it’s a great example of early ’80s arcade addictiveness, and a game that provides an interesting and creative twist on an established formula from the period rather than just trying to clone another game outright.

Even if the only reason the game exists in the first place is because Sega wanted to beat Namco’s latest success story at the time…

More about Flicky

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 or PayPal.

Bit of a personal one today, but I think it’s worth saying.

Calling someone an “anime avatar” is not an argument. Referring to “the anime avatars in my mentions” does not automatically cause your ill-advised social media post to suddenly become correct. Attempting to make the term “anime avatar” a slur does not make you look progressive, woke or smart.

If you judge someone by anything other than their behaviour and conduct, you are bigoted by the very strictest definition of the word. Let’s ponder this in a bit more detail.

My specific reason for posting about this right now stems from some interactions I witnessed on Twitter yesterday. Popular retro gaming YouTuber Kim Justice was frustrated at one of her friends being “monstered” as a result of some three-year old auto-tweets that showed them “Liking” provocative, seemingly right-wing content on YouTube. The person in question had shown no indication that they actually agreed with the content in question — particularly recently — but these automatic, context- and commentary-free tweets from 2016 were seemingly enough to publicly shame them for “supporting hate speech”.

I don’t want to get too hung up on these specifics because there’s a broader point to talk about here, but there are a couple of things to consider in this particular situation.

Firstly, I have known multiple people to be unaware that YouTube had the option to automatically share anything you clicked “Like” on to your other social media platforms. Google actually removed this feature in January of 2019, but prior to that it was all too easy to accidentally activate it and inadvertently share everything you did on YouTube to Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Secondly, clicking “Like” on a video does not necessarily mean you condone it. It may just mean you want to come back to it. Clicking “Like” on YouTube automatically and quickly adds the video to a playlist that you can return to at any time. Clicking “Dislike” does not do the same thing. Yes, YouTube also has other features that fulfil the same function, but for many people, a quick “Like” is the fastest way to be able to refer back to something.

With that in mind, judging someone for “supporting hate speech” based on automatic tweets is nonsense. I don’t know the poster in question so I can’t comment further on their political beliefs, but Kim noted that she knew him well, raised her own concerns over those tweets when she originally saw them a few years back, and actually had a discussion with him that revealed how he actually felt. That’s how things should be.

This situation is just one of many examples of “cancel culture”, where certain portions of the Internet collectively decide that someone is a “bad” person for whatever reason, and then systematically proceed to try and ruin that person’s online reputation, interpersonal relationships and life. The ultimate goal? To run them off the Internet at best; to make them kill themselves at worst. And yes, the latter happens; the most recent high-profile example of this happening was the death of Aquaria and Night in the Woods developer Alec Holowka after some very public allegations of sexual harassment that, to date, do not appear to have been proven and probably never will be at this point.

I happened to witness the tail end of this as Kim made a public tweet about her frustration over the situation, and I empathised, posting a reply about how much I disliked “cancel culture”. The first reply I got was from someone not involved with the conversation, who responded “don’t be a bigot, Anime Avatar, and you won’t get ‘cancelled'”.

A few things here. My avatar on Twitter is Midori, the site mascot; not technically “anime”, but I can understand the misconception. My real name and the website address is prominently displayed as my account handle. My bio explains what I do and gives no indication that I am in any way “bigoted”. There is plenty of information you can quickly and easily look at to understand who I am, what I do and how I feel about various things.

While this site is written from the perspective of a Western heterosexual male — I can’t change who I am! — I make a point of exploring a variety of viewpoints and media types to be as inclusive as possible. Over the last few years, I’ve written about games that are particularly suitable for a young female audience, games that feature homosexual female couples, games that feature homosexual male couples, games with openly bisexual characters and plenty of other tickboxes on the “diversity checklist” besides.

But no. I’m “Anime Avatar”.

This needs to stop. It is not an argument.

I mention this specific situation because it’s just the most recent example of this happening, but it’s a constant occurrence on the Internet in general, and social media in particular. Remember the discussion over respecting one another after the Gun Gun Pixies review a few weeks back? The writer of the piece I was responding to immediately complained about “anime avatars in his mentions” rather than attempting to engage with anyone. Remember how I talked about how we need to get better at talking about sex? Critics of it responded to the fact that people who appreciated and shared it had “anime avatars” rather than actually addressing any of the points I made. I could go on. But I won’t. For now.

Instead, let’s contemplate why this might happen and why it’s a problem.

A 2015 study by Katrina Fong and Raymond Mar found that people do indeed judge one another based on something as simple as their online avatar… but that this isn’t something we should be particularly pleased about.

Fong and Mar asked about 100 people to choose avatars for themselves using the now-defunct site WeeWorld. Half of them were asked to create an avatar using their own creativity, and the other half were specifically asked to try and reflect their personality as accurately as possible. Despite this, there were no obvious differences in how people approached the task, suggesting that people in general try to represent themselves as accurately as they can when creating an avatar.

The 100 participants then filled out a questionnaire that measured their “Big Five” personality traits: openness, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism, and this information was then cross-referenced with the avatar they created.

At this point, Fong and Mar brought in a larger group of about 2,000 participants who were asked to rate their perception of the personality characteristics based purely on the avatars, along with if they actually wanted to interact with the person in question.

The larger group made clear assumptions, particularly when it came to gender; men were assumed to be less conscientious and open to new experiences, for example. The study proved these assumptions to be inaccurate in most cases based on the personality data, however; the only traits that the larger group successfully assessed to a limited degree were extraversion and agreeableness, while others showed no real correlation.

The study noted that while context-free avatars had a noticeable effect on whether or not people decided they wanted to actually interact with a person, the assumptions made were not particularly well-correlated with that individual’s actual personality, suggesting that people tend to overestimate their ability to accurately judge based on a tiny JPG someone uploaded to represent themselves. Who’d have thought it?

Where did the assumption that all anime avatars are bad come from, though? Knowyourmeme suggests that it dates back to some forum posts from around 2012 or so, but a particularly noteworthy piece of the puzzle comes from a New York Magazine article from 2015, attempting to explain “how anime avatars on Twitter help explain politics online in 2015”.

This is kind of bizarre, though, since the article in question is filled with purely anecdotal evidence — mostly context-free tweets — rather than any actual evidence. And it certainly doesn’t explain anything, despite the headline.

“Because they don’t show actual identifiable human faces, anime avatars carry a strong whiff of ‘anonymous troll’,” writes the piece’s author Max Read. “They are also — and I say this as someone who can sing from memory the theme to Neon Genesis Evangelion — nerdy. If egg avatars are signs to Twitter, and likely Internet, novices, anime avatars would seem to be the opposite: the signs of people who have spent, or are spending, too much time online.”

Read doesn’t make any convincing arguments in his piece, but it seems a lot of people have taken similar attitudes to heart. And it’s honestly difficult to understand where this has come from.

Anime and anime-inspired works make up some of the most creative, interesting media out there, appealing to a broad spectrum of people of all ages, genders and sexualities. While Japan as a country is often criticised for less-than-progressive attitudes towards such things, its popular media demonstrates that those with more artistic temperaments are keen to break the bonds of social conventions and allow people to be who they want to be, expressing themselves as they see fit.

Anime is a medium in which we have an incredibly diverse array of stories to enjoy. One moment you can be enjoying a wholesome tale of teenage girls working out at the gym for no other reason rather than to better themselves; the next you can find yourself getting emotionally invested in the complicated interpersonal relationships of a group of nerds; after that you can enjoy tales of new lives in other worlds, people struggling to understand themselves, people coming to terms with grief, dynamic space operas and pretty much anything else you might be able to think of.

And anime-adjacent media is the same, too. Here on MoeGamer we’ve explored tales of shinobi students learning their place in the world and preparing for an inevitable battle; a young man following his rather mundane dream, supported by the people important to him; a group of people who have each been through their own considerable trauma coming together to support one another; the personification of the popular video game console manufacturers struggling to deal with the generational changeover; learning to live with a life-changing injury; even learning another language in order to pursue a relationship.

There are as many reasons for getting involved with anime and anime-adjacent media as there are people interested in such things. For me, as I’ve spoken about previously, it’s about feeling like I “belong”, like there are works that really “speak to me”, like there are creators who understand what sort of person I am. For others, it’s about pure escapism — leaving the mundane and the frustrating behind in favour of the colourful, the fantastic, the impossible. For yet others, it’s about the technical proficiency or artistic achievements of those at the top of their craft; and for others still, yes, it might even be about sexual gratification — which is perfectly valid.

The one thing these people would come together on is wanting to express their love and passion in some way. And an avatar is the perfect means of doing that. It’s a simple, non-verbal signal that allows you to show the things that are important to you; it’s the online equivalent of wearing a favourite band or show’s T-shirt. It’s a simple way of recognising people who might be into the same things of you. And it’s a signifier of what can often be a wonderful, welcoming, supportive, articulate and intelligent community — particularly if you step outside the cesspool of Twitter and onto more verbose platforms such as here on WordPress.

When I worked as a teacher, the number one rule of classroom behaviour management was that you should focus on a student’s moment-to-moment behaviour rather than making assumptions about them as a person.

This is sound advice for life. You can’t judge someone based on their appearance, or assume that they are always going to act in the exact same way, because there are so many complicated factors at play that change from day to day.

The kid who was climbing your bookshelves yesterday because he was frustrated at the declining relationship between his parents might demonstrate himself to be an artistic genius today as he figures out the things he wants to express and how. The kid who appears to be arrogantly lording it over the rest of the class might actually be struggling with crippling social anxiety, with their silent terror at unstructured interactions just coming across as aloofness.

But no. The anime avatar is a universal symbol of bigotry and hatred, if certain quarters of the Internet are to be believed.

It doesn’t make any sense.

And it needs to stop.

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 or PayPal.

You’re probably familiar with various methods of software distribution from over the years.

In the Atari 8-bit era, we had a lot of public domain software that was freely distributable, often sold for the cost of a disk or two from user groups, local software outlets and national publications. But “Begware”, a twist on public domain that literally begged you to pay what you thought the game was worth according to some specific criteria, is a new twist on the formula I’ve not seen in quite this form before.

Illinois Smith, possibly the first (and last?) Begware game, is a mildly entertaining if simplistic romp through a maze as you hunt for treasures. Would I pay up in support of creator Greg Knauss’ unashamed (and rather amusing) begging? These days, sure. Back in the ’80s? Don’t be ridiculous, no-one paid for software back then!

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

We made it, everyone! After 60 weekly(ish) episodes, we finally made it all the way through Warriors Orochi from start to finish.

The funny thing is that there’s still actually a bunch more of this game I could continue to play if I wanted to, and I might just do that off-camera. There are harder difficulties to challenge, hidden items to discover, weapons to collect and even more characters to unlock.

But for now, this particular “season” of Warriors Wednesday is over. Next week, we’ll be kicking off a look at something a little different: Warriors All-Stars, which brings together characters from a variety of different Koei Tecmo games to save a fantasy world from destruction. Please look forward to it.

And if you’ve watched any or all of this series… a sincere thank you! I hope you enjoyed it. But our job here is far from over!

Glutton for punishment? Watch the whole thing here and admire my gradual progression of confidence in both making videos and editing them!

All right, all right, one more Senran Kagura waifu and then we’re done! DONE, I say! For now, anyway.

I wanted to give Yomi a bit of attention because she’s an immensely likeable character who subverts a lot of expectations and has some interesting backstory.

She particularly shines in Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal’s Hebijo arc, but I can’t pretend her disappearance into the toilet for several Peach Beach Splash missions after drinking too much pool water wasn’t memorable…

Yomi, like her peers in Homura’s Crimson Squad (formerly the Elite students of Hebijo Clandestine Girls’ Academy) has been a fixture in the series since the very beginning, and she’s a prime example of the series’ interesting treatment of “evil”.

For the uninitiated, the interpretation of “good” and “evil” in Senran Kagura is less to do with your actual behaviour and more to do with who you work for… and how you got into that position. A core tenet of this dichotomy is that while it is possible to “not be good enough” for “good”, you can never be “too evil” for “evil” or, to put it another way, evil accepts everyone, regardless of their background and regardless of their behaviour.

This means that the ranks of the “evil” shinobi not only consist of those willing to do unconscionable things as most of us think of when we hear the term “evil”, but a significant proportion come from deprived, abusive or otherwise chaotic backgrounds; their turning to “evil” was their sole means of escaping a life of misery.

In Yomi’s case, her enrolment in Hebijo allowed her to escape from poverty. She grew up in the slums with her parents, and never knew anything else; consequently, she learned to appreciate everything she had, and this is reflected in how enthusiastically frugal she is throughout the series.

Her love of beansprouts stems from the fact that they are a cheap but nutritious staple food in Eastern cuisine, and following the events of Burst/Burst Re:Newal, in which Homura and friends are forced to walk the renegade path rather than returning to Hebijo, she proves herself to be highly resourceful when it comes to living off the land.

An interesting thing about Yomi is that although she is from a very deprived background, the way she carries herself does not reflect this at all. She speaks in a refined manner, making use of the “desu wa” sentence-ending particle that is typically associated with “princess” characters, and she is always polite and articulate, even when confronted with a mortal enemy — or someone she thinks is a mortal enemy, anyway.

Some of this may come from the fact that while she grew up in poverty, she is, at least during her time at Hebijo, fairly well off. The school, it seems, provides a generous stipend for its students — though Yomi deliberately donates all of it to help the people of the slums rather than spending it on herself.

Her background means that she initially harbours great resentment towards the affluent, with much of that ire initially directed towards Ikaruga, who hails from a wealthy family. However, the revelation that Ikaruga was adopted gives her pause and makes her reconsider the path she’s walking, demonstrating that while she is firm in her beliefs and values, she’s not so stubborn as to cling to them blindly when they come into question.

The pairing of Yomi and Ikaruga is very much intentional; they are a study in contrasts. While Ikaruga is very much a traditional Japanese beauty with her long, flowing black hair, Yomi’s blonde locks give her something of a “Western” look about her.

And this contrast continues with the way they dress and the weapons they use, too: while Ikaruga fights with a nodachi named Hien and has a number of costume elements associated with Eastern culture, Yomi makes use of a large, Western-style two-handed sword, and her costume is inspired by that of Viking warrior women.

To further add to the Norse theme, too, her Ninja Arts are called Sigmund, Niflheim and Ragnarok, all of which are terminology from traditional Norse mythology.

As the series progresses, Yomi is able to let go of much of her bitterness, though she still has little time for people in positions of affluent power causing trouble. She follows Homura without question at the end of the Hebijo arc in Burst and Burst Re:Newal, and displays little patience for the way the whole cast is manipulated throughout Peach Beach Splash.

Yomi ends up just being someone that it feels like it would be nice to have around. She’s kind and caring — something she clearly learned from her early life on the streets and having to muck in with the rest of the community — and often acts as something of a “motherly” figure to the rest of the Crimson Squad. She’s also resourceful; while her peers often tire of her “wild grass” soup, it’s fair to say that she always manages to keep them fed, even when times are particularly tough.

One interesting bit of characterisation comes in Peach Ball, of all things, where the majority of Yomi’s narrative arc sees her lying through her teeth in order to try and convince her friends to come back to their “humanity” after being partially transformed into animals. She’s not above completely fabricating surprisingly convincing stories in order to get her friends back on the right track; in some ways, this is reminiscent of the lies that parents tell small children in order to get them to behave.

It’s also something of a reflection of Yomi herself, however; as previously noted, the way she carries herself and her actual background are completely at odds with one another, so one could see this as a form of bending the truth somewhat — albeit in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone. Of course, you could (and probably should) also take it as yet another reason you should not judge anything or anyone by first impressions.

A pretty apt theme on which to wrap up our look at this series in general, hmm?

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.

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

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Errant apostrophes aren’t just for fantasy RPGs any more; sometimes they show up in the most unexpected of places… and inconsistently, to boot.

No, I have no idea what the apostrophe is doing in Crack’ed’s title, or indeed why it isn’t present on the actual spine of the box it comes in, but… well, there you go.

The game itself is classic Atari arcade funtimes — simple but addictive gameplay, some good use of the ST’s graphical capabilities and mouse control… and hairy poo monsters!

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