This time around, we’re taking a close look at a couple of games from a specific company. The two games aren’t directly related to one another, but they’re both from the same rough “era” of gaming, and I thought they both looked interesting.

The two games are Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia from Shade Inc, and I wanted to explore these games not only because they were appealing to me, but because I found the fact that they were developed by Shade to be fascinating.

Not sure who Shade is? That’s what today’s all about. Let’s have a little history lesson.

Shade’s story begins in 1989 with the formation of a game company known as Quintet. The founding members included Tomoyoshi Miyazaki and Masaya Hashimoto, two alumni of Nihon Falcom’s Ys series, and the name was drawn from the term for a five-piece musical group. The reasoning behind it was the concept of there being five distinct pillars of game design: planning, graphics, sound, programming and producing, all of which are required to make a modern game a success.

Quintet’s inaugural title was 1990’s ActRaiser, an unusual game that combined side-scrolling platform action with strategic building simulation and god game elements. You play the role of “The Master” (or literally God in the Japanese original) as He attempts to rebuild the world after Tanzra (Satan) divided it into six lands and corrupted the hearts and minds of the people.

ActRaiser is doubtless a game we’ll explore in more detail another time as it’s a remarkable work in many ways, but suffice to say for now that it is very well-regarded for a number of reasons. Not only was it a technically impressive game that demonstrated the graphical and audio capabilities of the then-new Super Famicom, it remains a really solid, enjoyable and intriguing game to this day. And the soundtrack is one of legendary gaming maestro Yuzo Koshiro’s most enduring, beloved works.

For many people, Quintet really came into their own with what has come to be popularly regarded as the “Heaven and Earth Trilogy”, a series of four games (yes, I know) that, much as ActRaiser did in 1990, explored themes of the death and reincarnation of both people and places, usually expressed through the juxtaposition between an entity that brings creation and its counterpart that brings destruction.

First of these games to arrive was 1992’s Soul Blazer. In this game, you’re once again tasked with rebuilding barren wastelands into thriving towns and villages, but unlike its spiritual (no pun intended) predecessor, here you take a much more “on the ground” viewpoint on things, delving into dungeons to seal monster generators and rescuing lost souls.

As you rescue lost souls, various things happen. Some simply allow access into deeper areas of the dungeon, while others recover NPCs, their homes and their places of work. Naturally, once these people have been rescued, you can then interact with them once you return to the surface in order to get clues as to what to do next and helpful items. And cats. And dogs.

Soul Blazer is, among other things, noteworthy for having a really weird soundtrack by Japanese singer-songwriter Yukihide Takekawa. While the overworld themes resemble Koshiro’s work on ActRaiser to a certain extent, the bizarre ’80s synth pop soundtrack heard in the dungeons is… something of an acquired taste, to say the least. It certainly gives the game a unique audible identity if nothing else, and is just one of many ways that Soul Blazer is a highly memorable, if frequently overlooked, part of the Super NES’ library.

Soul Blazer was followed up in 1993 with Illusion of Gaia, known in PAL territories as Illusion of Time for some reason. This was a game that focused more on the action gameplay rather than rebuilding as in ActRaiser and Soul Blazer. Unlike many other similar games at the time Illusion of Gaia (as we shall refer to it hereafter) eschewed a free-roaming aspect in favour of tightly controlled linear progression that kept the story flowing constantly forwards. The game is still fondly regarded today for its strong emphasis on narrative and solid handling of weighty philosophical themes.

From a gameplay perspective, Illusion of Gaia was noteworthy for an interesting character progression system. Rather than levelling up through experience points, Illusion of Gaia instead presents you with a gem that permanently increases one of your base stats whenever you completely clear a room of enemies for the first time. In this way, the game still encourages you to engage with the combat system, but alleviates the need for grinding.

Illusion of Gaia is regarded as something of a Zelda clone, despite lacking its apparent inspiration’s open-world exploration aspect. The dungeon designs feature puzzles and obstacles as well as combat, and progressing through the game unlocks various skills that protagonist Will is able to use to continue onwards. Most noteworthy of these is the ability to access “Dark Spaces”, which allow Will to turn into one of two other forms: either a dark knight named Freedan, or a… blue thing called Shadow. Each of these have their own unique abilities that can (or must!) be used under various circumstances, so it’s not just a case of picking your “favourite”.

The final Quintet game for Super NES was 1995’s Terranigma, also known as Tenchi Souzou (The Creation of Heaven and Earth) in Japan. This game marked a return to the emphasis on “creation” seen in Soul Blazer and ActRaiser, and this aspect was deliberately emphasised as a contrast to the destructive tendencies seen in other action RPGs of the time.

Terranigma features a considerably expanded “sim” aspect when compared to Soul Blazer in particular, featuring a variety of sidequests and activities in the villages and towns you’re trying to rebuild which, in turn, will allow you to boost their respective economies and connections with other settlements. The payoff is, as you might expect, better items and services in the various establishments.

While Terranigma is a much sought-after game for Super NES collectors today, it originally released so late in the lifespan of the 16-bit console that it went largely overlooked, and didn’t get a North American release at all. To put this in context, Sony’s PlayStation hit the market in September of 1995 in both North America and PAL territories, and Terranigma wasn’t released in PAL regions until 1996. A lot of people had moved on by then, dooming this game to relative obscurity until the Internet provided the ability for people to screech about how good it was and how you’d all missed out on it by being early adopters of new platforms. Or something.

Anyway. You may well be asking at this point what all this has to do with Shade, who we haven’t actually mentioned at all yet. Well, they enter the picture right about now, as it happens.

Shortly after the Japanese release of Terranigma in 1995, graphic designer Koji Yokota left Quintet to form his own development company, and took a number of key Quintet staffers with him. Probably the most notable of these was Quintet co-founder Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, who had designed and written the three prior “Heaven and Earth” games.

This was a noteworthy event because although Quintet continued to operate up until the early 2000s — their last game was a PS2 adaptation of the InuYasha manga and anime series — the company had somewhat struggled to recapture the glory days of the Heaven and Earth games. Apparently having seen the writing on the wall long before this happened, Yokota and Miyazaki formed Shade and immediately set about creating a spiritual successor to Terranigma for the new PlayStation platform.

That game was known as The Granstream Saga, and is a vastly, vastly underrated action RPG that we’ll have to explore in more detail some other time. Suffice to say for now that it is absolutely old-school Quintet at its core, featuring themes of creation and destruction, a compelling narrative with some highly memorable characters and some solid gameplay.

The Granstream Saga is historically significant for a few reasons, perhaps most notably for being one of the earliest RPGs to feature a fully polygonal environment. It also featured real-time combat rather than the more typically seen turn-based battles, and this featured a strong emphasis on timing and careful blocking. In many ways, The Granstream Saga’s combat felt very much like an early incarnation of the methodical combat now primarily associated with From Software’s Souls series.

Unfortunately for The Granstream Saga and Shade in general, circumstances conspired to keep the game relatively unknown. Reviews from the period very obviously didn’t spend much time with the game, comparing it unfavourably to predictable mainstays of the era such as Final Fantasy, Suikoden and Breath of Fire, and as such it came to be regarded as rather mediocre by most outlets — with the notable exception of GamePro, who awarded it a perfect 5 out of 5, noting it was “one of the most enjoyable new role-playing games of the year”.

There was another factor, too: while in Japan and Europe the game was published by Sony Computer Entertainment’s respective local branch, in the US it was localised and published by THQ — a company who anyone that has been involved with gaming as long as I have will know is a brand that has had a lot of “ups and downs” in terms of reputation over the years.

As it happened, 1998 was a bit of a “down” period for the company, with its catalogue at the time consisting primarily of mediocre wrestling sims, licensed platformers and ports of FIFA to platforms that no-one played FIFA on. Oh, and Quest 64, which was not at all well-received at the time and thus didn’t particularly fill anyone with confidence that THQ was a company who could “do” RPGs.

Predictably, the game bombed, but remains well worth checking out if you ever get the opportunity. Shade survived the game’s commercial failure, however, and has continued to develop games to this day.

A notable example from the company’s history is 2000’s Orphen: Scion of Sorcery, a PlayStation 2 launch title published by Activision in both North America and Europe. This was an adaptation of Yoshinobu Akita’s light novel series Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, and in many ways can be seen as a highly appropriate title for ex-Quintet developers to work on thanks to its rather dark tone and themes.

Much like The Granstream Saga, Orphen: Scion of Sorcery had rather mediocre reviews at the time, with GamePro once again being one of the only publications to praise it, giving particular attention to its interesting plot. It was a cool game, though (and one of the first I personally played on PS2), combining platforming, exploration, puzzling and an unusual combat system that resembled a traditional turn-based setup, but actually unfolded in real time.

From hereon, Shade kind of faded into the background somewhat, but continued beavering away working on a variety of games on a contract basis for many different publishers. This included contributing to Sakura Wars V Episode 0 alongside Overworks, as well as a number of licensed games based on properties such as Ah! My Goddess, the Haruhi Suzumiya series and A Certain Magical Index.

Shade continued in this way for a while, quietly contributing to games that other companies took the majority of the credit for. In 2014, the company put out an original title via D3 Publisher known as Bullet Girls; while this remained confined to Japan and thus largely went unnoticed in the West except among the most hardcore of importers, it was well received on its home turf, netting a score of 30/40 from Famitsu and being the third best-selling game across all platforms in its week of release.

Bullet Girls concerns an all-girls high school founded on the principles of both duty and refinement. With the former in particular in mind, the school provides its students the opportunity to practice defensive military techniques, and explores the story of the Ranger Club and their various adventures over the course of their school life.

Being a 2014 release on PlayStation Vita, Bullet Girls followed the fashionable trend of erring on the side of ecchi, featuring a Senran Kagura-esque clothes degradation system, 1,600 different customisable lingerie patterns and a distinctly provocative “interrogation” minigame that is probably the main reason it didn’t see a Western release. Much like most ecchi games, however, the erotic content wasn’t its sole defining feature; a strong emphasis was placed on the characterisation of the core cast and their relationships with one another.

Bullet Girls 2 followed in 2016. The game was a direct follow-up to the first, featuring both returning characters from the original and newcomers, and promised systems “that users have been waiting for” including enhancements to the erotic interrogation scenes as well as a huge expansion to the costume possibilities, supposedly amounting to well over 14,000 possible combinations.

Once again, the game was well-received on its home turf, scoring 30/40 in Famitsu and charting in fourth place in its week of launch. And once again, the game didn’t even show a hint of coming West, leaving importers to check the game out for themselves if they so desired.

After contributing to the 3DS version of the excellent Puzzle & Dragons, Shade’s next standalone game was Gun Gun Pixies, which we’ll explore in more specific detail next time. This was originally released for PlayStation Vita in 2017 and initially appeared like it was going to be another Bullet Girls — forever confined to Japan, never to see an English script.

And indeed, it seemed like this would remain the case for a while, though an interesting happening in 2018 opened the doors for Shade’s original titles to return to the English-speaking market for the first time in quite a while: localisation agency Love Lab Japan translated the third Bullet Girls game into English.

Bullet Girls Phantasia, as the game was known, is a standalone game in the Bullet Girls series rather than a direct follow-up to its predecessors, making it an ideal title to explore new markets. With this in mind, Shade, Love Lab and D3 Publisher elected to release a dual-language Chinese and English version into the Asian market.

For obvious reasons, Asia is less beholden to the Western values that typically stop games like the Bullet Girls series from coming to Western locales, but with the region-free nature of modern consoles it’s a relatively simple (if sometimes expensive) matter for anyone to import these English language games. A number of publishers have deliberately eschewed the typical Western markets in favour of an English language Asian release, in fact, with probably the most notable example being Koei Tecmo and its “holiday sim, also there is volleyball” game Dead or Alive Xtreme 3.

For many developers and publishers, it’s a best-of-both-worlds situation: there’s the freedom to produce the sort of content that is accepted in Asia but blocked by ratings boards or platform holders in Western territories, plus the opportunity to reach a whole new market through the English localisation. It’s pretty obvious at this point that a number of developers and publishers put out an Asian English version knowing full well that North American and European players are going to pick it up — and indeed retailers such as Play-Asia are more than happy to help such things happen.

It’s been a difficult time for games featuring sexually suggestive ecchi content over the course of the last couple of years, though, primarily thanks to Sony’s rather opaque recent policies on what they will and will not allow on their platforms any more. This has proven to be a particular problem for many Japanese developers, who had historically put out such games on Sony platforms thanks to how welcoming the Vita audience in particular had been towards them.

All is not lost, however. While Sony doesn’t appear to know what to do with the weird boner it gets every so often, Nintendo has very wisely taken the reins from the Vita and fully embraced the lewd. This would have been unthinkable back in the 16-bit era — Quintet’s games that we talked about earlier all underwent considerable editing in the transition from East to West because Nintendo of America had very strict guidelines on not only provocative content, but also things like religious iconography. But the Nintendo of today is a platform holder more than happy to let series such as Omega Labyrinth and Gal*Gun exist on its platforms — not only in Asia but also, where ratings boards allow, in North America and Europe.

Which brings us back to Gun Gun Pixies. While by the point a localisation was being considered the Vita had pretty much finally been killed off once and for all (not before being repeatedly declared “dead” on a roughly annual basis ever since its launch) it was obvious that, with Sony lacking a successor handheld, a lot of fans had jumped ship to Nintendo’s new hybrid system, the Switch.

The increasingly prolific (and ballsy) localisation company PQube saw an opportunity. While they were still reeling somewhat from the considerable setback of roguelike Omega Labyrinth Z being refused classification by the UK’s Video Standards Council, they announced out of the blue that Gun Gun Pixies would be coming West — not in its original Vita incarnation, but for the Switch. And this wouldn’t be an Asian English release, either; it would be coming officially to Western territories in uncut, enhanced form.

But that’s a story for next time!

More about Gun Gun Pixies
More about Bullet Girls Phantasia

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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Yesterday, I found myself a bit frustrated by yet another example of Twitter’s never-ending focus on negativity and cynicism. In other words, it was a Thursday.

The tweet that frustrated me a bit probably didn’t have any ill intentions behind it, but its question to the community of what games you “hate but are highly praised by the general audience” almost inevitably became, to the community, an excuse to bash on predictable, popular things. So I decided to flip things around and post a tweet of my own with a more positive angle.

“What’s a game you love that is not well-regarded by the general audience and/or Metacritic?” I asked. Let’s see what people said.

I’ll preface this by saying that this was by no means a formal survey with any sort of rigorous sampling strategy behind it, it was just a casual thing on Twitter that, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting quite as many people to respond to as there ended up being!

But I’m glad there were so many responses, because, as I hoped, a lot of really interesting choices came up — much more interesting to me personally than the predictable “I hate The Witcher 3/Nier Automata/Zelda/Halo/insert popular game here” stuff that showed up in the other thread. It seems that people love talking about the games that are important to them but which don’t get a lot of time or positive attention from either the community or the press. Who knew?

M-me. I knew.

Gotta go fast

By far the most commonly seen series in the responses was Sonic the Hedgehog, with 11 different games mentioned by different people. This honestly didn’t surprise me all that much, because despite the apparently widely held beliefs that “there hasn’t been a good Sonic game for years” and the more vague “3D Sonic is bad”, Sega has managed to find and sustain a substantial enough market over the years to keep the character not only relevant, but genuinely beloved.

One of the most frequently occurring responses was Sonic Heroes, which I enjoyed a great deal back during the Sonic the Hedgehog feature here on MoeGamer. This is one of those games that just seems to have been commonly accepted as “bad” over the years, yet talk to people who spent time with it and they’ll often have a lot of positive things to say about it.

Personally, I found Sonic Heroes to be a really solid exploration of how to implement the “feel” of the Mega Drive Sonic games into a 3D environment, and the teamwork system — along with the fact that each team had a very distinct, different feel to their mechanics and progression through the levels — gave the game something fresh alongside its more familiar components.

I was more surprised to see Shadow the Hedgehog brought up by almost as many people as Sonic Heroes. I’d got the impression over the years that this game was widely disliked, but there were a significant number of people who praised the game’s interesting branching level and story structure and found its contribution to Sonic Adventure-era lore fascinating — both things I would agree with.

An interesting thing about those who praised Shadow the Hedgehog was that, without exception, they almost seemed apologetic about liking it; every person who brought it up felt the need to “acknowledge” things like how “edgy” it was before praising the things they liked about the game. This is a pretty common pattern in online discussion of media these days, as we’ll doubtless continue to see today.

I was probably most surprised to see Sonic 06 come up more than once, although having really, genuinely enjoyed that game, I was delighted to see this. This was also prone to the same phenomenon as Shadow the Hedgehog: people apparently feeling a strange sense of “guilt” over liking it, and feeling the need to say things like “it is objectively bad, but…” before describing their enjoyment of it.

In this specific game’s case, this can probably be attributed to something the game’s Wikipedia page used to say that appears to have been accepted as canonical fact: that the game is regarded as “among the worst games not only in the Sonic series but also in the video game medium”. This line has been edited to “it has been frequently described as one of the worst games in the series” since my original piece was written. This is a more fair statement, even if I don’t personally agree with it; even the most staunch of Sonic 2006 haters would be hard-pushed to describe it as “one of the worst games in the video game medium” with a straight face.

This raises an interesting point, though: some people seem genuinely hesitant to praise something that is popularly regarded as “bad” lest they incite the ire of the general public or even supposed friends. And this doesn’t just happen with “bad” games; a friend of mine on Twitter was concerned recently about expressing enthusiasm for the Nintendo Switch port of Atlus’ Tokyo Mirage Sessions because he felt like people would judge him negatively for it.

For the unfamiliar, the Switch port of Tokyo Mirage Sessions is based on the edited Western version of the Wii U original, even in Japanese, and this has made the more vocal anti-censorship types very angry indeed. My friend was concerned that people would yell at him for being excited about the game regardless. They probably will, to be perfectly honest, but that shouldn’t stop him being excited about it; Twitter has mute, unfollow and block functions, after all.

But I digress. Put a pin in the idea of being concerned about how you might be perceived for liking something; we’ll almost certainly come back to it.

Attack, Magic, Item

Five Final Fantasy games came up more than once in the responses, these being Final Fantasy II, the three Final Fantasy XIII games and Final Fantasy XV. These are interesting inclusions, because the Final Fantasy series as a whole is very well-regarded and widely acknowledged as being extremely influential, so why these three specifically?

Final Fantasy II is fairly simple to explain. While it hasn’t necessarily been subject to particularly negative reviews as such, a lot of people are not a big fan of its progression system, which eschews the traditional experience points of its predecessor in favour of a “use it to raise it” system: do physical attacks to raise your strength; get hit to increase your HP; cast spells to improve your magic, and so on.

The dislike for this is understandable to a certain degree, since it’s renowned as being fairly easy to exploit, particularly in its original NES incarnation. It is somewhat better in the later ports for PS1 and PSP and certainly isn’t a “bad” game as such, however; just not one to everyone’s taste. If anything, it’s historically noteworthy as one of the best examples of Final Fantasy being a series that constantly reinvents itself.

Final Fantasy XIII, meanwhile, continues to baffle me somewhat. This game got very good reviews on its original release and was immensely popular — popular enough to spawn two big-budget direct sequels. But for the last few years, it’s been fashionable to bash on it for all manner of reasons — its perceived linearity, the main character, the story, the battle system — but a lot of the things people bring up in this regard don’t stand up to deeper examination.

I even wrote about this subject back when I was on USgamer… but at this point, it’s one of those conversations I tend to just immediately disengage from, because if someone thinks Final Fantasy XIII is “bad”, they’re probably not going to listen to any reasons you think it is not “bad”.

The same is true for Final Fantasy XV. The people who hate that game really hate that game, to such a degree that some of those who actually like it regard it as a “guilty pleasure” that they’re hesitant to talk about.

Final Fantasy XV certainly had a chaotic development cycle and I would have personally preferred that once they’d released it they’d just left it alone rather than trying to turn it into some sort of “live service”, evolving game (they already have Final Fantasy XIV for that, and that’s much better at it) — but bad? Nah fam. Widely misunderstood? Absolutely, as you’ll know all too well if you’ve ever had the “Kingdom Hearts combat” conversation with anyone. But let’s not get into that right now.

If you like something, own it. Talk about it. Express your passion for it. Anyone who tries to tell you you’re “wrong” (or, worse, “objectively wrong”, since “objectively” is apparently an intensifier these days, regardless of whether or not it’s being used correctly) is probably not someone worth wasting too much of your time with. Someone who is curious as to why you enjoy something, even if they don’t, however? That’s how interesting conversations start… although I’ll be first to admit that sometimes it can be tricky to tell the difference between these two types of people’s initial responses!

“Popular” isn’t universal

One thing I found quite interesting from the responses I got was that there were a number of games in there that were popular and reviewed well but still assumed to be perceived as “bad” for one reason or another. Games in this regard included titles like Fire Emblem: Fates, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 days, Dark Souls 2, BioShock 2, Little Big Planet 3, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

There are various reasons that people might be a bit defensive about these games. In the case of the Call of Duty titles, there’s probably a certain degree of the shame some people feel about liking something mainstream and popular; the inverse of people feeling obliged to bash on something just because it is popular.

That said, both Ghosts and Infinite Warfare are noteworthy within the series for doing things a little bit differently, and it’s perhaps quite telling that the people who brought these games up didn’t mention the series’ iconic multiplayer at all; the things they liked about them were mostly to do with the spectacle of the campaign.

In the case of something like Little Big Planet 3, I’d conjecture that the way people feel about it may be something to do with the fact that it’s a game that has a popular, oft-parroted criticism about it: the Little Big Planet series as a whole has always had people saying they dislike it because of its “floaty jumping”. In this instance, it’s actually an accurate description of the game, but it doesn’t necessarily make the game “bad”; rather, it means that some people are fine with the way it handles, and others are not. Unfortunately somewhere along the line this has become corrupted.

I suspect a similar situation with Dark Souls 2, because while I don’t have a lot of experience with the Souls games in general, having tried several for a few hours each, Dark Souls 2 is the one I found myself enjoying the most and getting least frustrated with. And yet, this is the one that people tend to hold up as being “the bad one”, or at the very least, their least favourite in the series. A prime example of “your mileage may vary”, I guess… for reasons that are entirely personal to you.

Working as intended

One thing worth bringing up from the responses is Yooka Laylee, which was a title that several people brought up to me, and they all said the same thing: it was a game that did exactly what it promised, and that was both why they liked it, and why other people disliked it.

Yooka Laylee is a deliberate callback to the “collectathon” 3D platformers of the N64 era, where gameplay revolved around exploring large, open levels and finding a variety of different items in order to progress in various ways. This subgenre, if you want to call it that, is seemingly regarded by people to have reached its peak with titles like Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie, and late bloomer Donkey Kong 64 is sometimes held up as an example of taking things a bit too far.

Times have moved on as far as 3D action games are concerned, though, and the collectathon doesn’t really exist as a mainstream genre any more. As such, it’s perhaps understandable why some modern gamers might bounce off this popular concept from 20+ years ago (yes, really, deal with it) — although that does raise the question of why people who weren’t nostalgic for the collectathon would be playing Yooka Laylee in the first place, given how it was marketed. Perhaps it’s a case of them having once enjoyed it, but no longer. Tastes do change, after all.

Regardless, everyone I spoke to who liked Yooka Laylee said it did exactly what it set out to do, and did it well.

Personally speaking, I’d throw Star Fox Zero into that category, too. Only one person brought this up to me, but it’s long been a game that I thought got a bit of a bad rap for working entirely as intended. It’s a game clearly designed as a 3D take on arcade shoot ’em ups — beat the game and you even unlock a one-credit clear “Arcade Mode”, for heaven’s sake — and as such is 1) short, 2) quite difficult and 3) unforgiving, demanding that you learn its unique quirks and mechanics, and how to deal with them.

Star Fox Zero is another one of those games with a “default criticism” thrown at it that people who haven’t played it often find offputting. In this case, it’s the use of the Wii U GamePad for precise aiming at specific targets: for the unfamiliar, the game unfolds from third-person on your TV screen, but the GamePad shows a cockpit view, and tilting the GamePad around moves your aiming reticle more precisely.

It takes a bit of getting used to but is an essential skill to master in the game, particularly if you want to challenge the harder routes. I understand why some people found it difficult or even something they didn’t want to engage with further, but it didn’t make the game “bad”; it made it not to everyone’s taste, which is quite different.

Summing up

There are a lot more games that people mentioned that I’d love to get into further, but we have to call this somewhere! I think the one thing we can all take from this, though, is that different people like different things, and that doesn’t make them in any way “wrong”. We should respect these differences in opinion rather than trying to shut them down, because they can lead to very interesting conversations. I’d certainly much rather hear why someone likes something than why they hate it, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I’ve always approached MoeGamer with the philosophy that if a creative work (one that has clearly had some effort put into it, at least) exists, someone, somewhere is either proud of making it or is an enthusiastic fan of it. As such, with that in mind it tends to leave a sour taste in my mouth to truly declare anything “bad”, because that is an absolute declaration when in fact what I probably mean is the entirely subjective “I don’t like this” or even just “I don’t get this”.

I’ve had a ton of fun deliberately seeking out supposedly “bad” games and examining them with the question “why might someone enjoy this?” at the forefront of my mind, along with “is this doing what it set out to do?”. Probably my favourite example of this to date is Sonic 06; I genuinely really, really enjoyed that game and am glad I didn’t skip over it just because it was popularly regarded as “bad”.

And there were several people in the responses who brought up completely unique games I never thought I’d see anyone highlight as a particularly positive experience — I think the one that brought the biggest smile to my face was the guy who told me that he had a real soft spot for the PlayStation 2 adaptation of the VeggieTales episode LarryBoy and the Bad Apple. You keep being you; I respect the hell out of that.

If Senran Kagura has taught me one thing, it’s that things often regarded as absolutes — good and evil, good and bad — are actually all a matter of perspective. It’s unfortunate we seem to live in a world where people feel like they might be shamed for liking the “wrong” things or holding the “wrong” opinions, but the only way to challenge that is with honest, genuine positivity and passion.

You like something? That’s cool! Feel free to shout about it without shame. And it doesn’t need disclaimers, it doesn’t need “I recognise its flaws, but…” and it certainly doesn’t need to be a “guilty pleasure”. You are the only one who knows if you like something, and the opinion of other people, the popular consensus or a completely arbitrary number plucked out of a critic’s sweaty arsehole doesn’t matter in the slightest.

If this whole conversation showed me anything, it’s that people have wonderfully, wildly broad and varied tastes. And I’m super-happy that one simple tweet got so many people to talk about the things that are important to them rather than feeling stifled by today’s fashionably cynical attitudes.

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.

Two more crystals to go, and the next is deep beneath the waves in the Sunken Shrine!

But what’s this? A choice of paths to go? It seems one way leads to topless mermaids while the other leads to a slobbering tentacle monster, and never the twain shall meet — doubtless much to some people’s disappointment.

Which way will the Warriors of Light go? I mean, obviously it’s both, but which way will they go first? Find out today, only on the Final Fantasy Marathon, and along the way we can have a nice chat about my leaky roof.

Hey look everybody, it’s Asteroids! Again. You’ll be pleased to hear that this is the last time Asteroids appears in the Atari Flashback Classics compilation, at least.

Today we’re looking at the Atari 5200 version of the game, which didn’t actually see a commercial release despite originally being intended as a launch title for the platform. It’s based closely on the version released for Atari 8-bit computers, and is a solid adaptation of the formula for 1-4 players simultaneously.

I didn’t like this all that much when I was kid (primarily because I was bobbins at it) but nowadays I find its chunky shooting action rather satisfying!

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

Hello everyone! I hope you’ve had a good weekend. Mine has been pretty quiet and dull.

I’ve been a bit bummed out by some rather negative happenings in the retro gaming community recently; thankfully none of them have involved me, but they do involve a creator I like very much and support on Patreon. You can read more about that elsewhere, though — I might even pen something about it myself next week depending on how things go.

It’s at times like this that a bit of enthusiasm and positivity goes a long way, though, so let’s take a look at some of the things you might have missed this week.

MoeGamer

Flicky: The Sound of Birdsong is So Beautiful – Been a while since I looked at a Mega Drive game, so I thought I’d examine an old favourite.

“Anime Avatar” is Not an Argument – I think this probably says it all, but I go into a bit more detail as to why anyone who attempts to get one over on you with this is a big raging stupid.

Warriors Wednesday: Grand Finale – We’ve done it! Warriors Orochi is finally down for the count after 60 episodes. Of course, there’s more I could do, but in the interests of… err… variety, we’ll be moving on to Warriors All-Stars next week.

Waifu Wednesday: Yomi – Apparently a very popular choice, Yomi is one of my favourite characters from the Senran Kagura cast, so let’s take a closer look at what makes her tick.

Shade: A Brief History – We kick off the new Cover Game feature with a look at the fascinating and surprising history of Shade, developer of Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia, among other things.

Your Favourite Overlooked and Underappreciated Games – I asked people on Twitter about their favourite games that were not well-regarded by the public or critical consensus. There were some really interesting responses!

Final Fantasy Marathon: Topless Mermaids – There’s two more crystals to go, and the first of them is somewhere deep beneath the waves in the Sunken Shrine. Also there are mermaids!

Atari A to Z

This week, we have a piece of “begware” for Atari 8-bit, an entertaining mouse-pointer shooter for Atari ST… and, err, Asteroids, again. That is probably the last time we’ll see Asteroids for quite some time, though, you’ll be pleased to know!

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 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. I also support Octav1us Kitten, but given the trouble she’s dealing with at the moment, her channel is presently offline.

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

And, as always, we finish with some stuff from around the WordPress Reader this week:

Deep Reads #0: Preface (Everything is bad for you) – AK is planning to start doing “deep reads” on some of the things that are important to him, and I’m very excited to see what he has to say. We’re all about the deep reads of things that don’t often get a lot of analysis here on MoeGamer, so I’m delighted to see someone else taking this approach too.

Symphony of the Night vs. BOOKS (Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster) – Kimimi’s back with another excellent piece of analysis, this time on how closely Symphony of the Night’s enemies resemble their legendary, mythological or Biblical incarnations.

Delving Into the Catfish’s Maw – The Design of the Dungeon that Almost Killed Me (Adventure Rules) – And another excellent piece of deep analysis — a good week for it, apparently — this time from Robert Ian Shepard, taking a close look at one of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening’s dungeons.

Steam Clock in Gastown, Vancouver (Wretched and Divine) – Some stunning photography from Rose that looks kind of otherworldly. Her featured image looks more like a still from an anime than an actual photograph!

In Defense of Jude Mathis (Alchemist of Blogging) – Logy delves into some of the reasons she finds Jude from Tales of Xillia such a compelling, interesting character. I have a lot of time for anyone who loves Xillia!

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And that’s your lot for this week. There’s a bit of the weekend left as I type this, so I hope you spend the rest of your free time (assuming it is free, I know some of you are unlucky enough to have to work weekends) in a suitably pleasant, relaxing manner.

It feels like there’s been a lot of horrible crap happening to a lot of people who really don’t deserve it recently. I sincerely hope that we can move on from these dark and difficult times and find a new age of peace in our hearts.

In the meantime, you’ve always got a nice, quiet, positive and happy place to hang out here, so feel free to drop by any time you want to escape from the crapness of the “real world”. I have anime girls and cookies.

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 love a good racing game. And, while the definition of “good racing game” may vary from person to person, in my case that means “ridiculous, physically improbable and probably fatal things happening in realistic-looking environments”.

I have no interest in an accurate simulation of what it’s like to drive a Rover Metro around Donington Park circa 1987, but present me with the opportunity to fling myself off the side of a quarry on a motorbike going over 200 miles per hour while I admire the ruins of ancient Greece passing majestically by beneath me, and I am 100% there.

As you may have surmised, nail’d falls very comfortably and firmly into this latter category.

nail’d is an off-road racing game in which you can drive either an ATV or a motocross bike. There are four different environments in which you can race, and a variety of different track layouts within each. Some are point-to-point (usually downhill) races, while others are lap-based circuits.

All are absolutely, wonderfully ridiculous.

nail’d was put together by the Polish studio Techland, who are perhaps most well-known today for their Dead Island and Dying Light series, as well as the Call of Juarez series of rootin’ tootin’ first-person gunslingin’ games. nail’d is about as far from those as it’s possible to get, though; what we have here is pure, simple, massively enjoyable arcade racing action — and a game that will have those prone to motion sickness bringing up their lunch.

The game is available for Windows PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, though note that while the former version looks and runs the best, as is usually the case, it really doesn’t like modern operating systems and graphics cards. It runs, just don’t expect to see any text on the screen. And that, as you might expect, makes navigating menus a bit of a challenge. At the time of writing, you’re probably best off with a console copy.

nail’d was designed from the outset to explore that much-overused buzzword, “verticality”. As such, you won’t be staying on flat, level ground for very long at any one time. If you’re not flying through the air in some of the biggest jumps I’ve seen in any racing game ever, you’re probably weaving around banked corners on the side of a mountain that will very quickly leave you wondering which way is “up”, or plummeting in freefall, hoping you land on that bit of road you can see several hundred feet below you.

nail’d takes positive glee in its overblown physics, and makes no attempt whatsoever to even look like it’s “simulating” anything. Instead, this is a game all about the joy of driving fast and having fun. It’s pure wish fulfilment; it’s a game about the fantasy of offroad racing and motorcross, rather than the somewhat more mundane reality.

The challenges you’ll face will take you from the desert wastelands of Arizona to the muddy greenery of Yosemite National Park, then onward to the aforementioned Greek ruins before plonking you at the top of a mountain in the Andes and inviting you to get on with it.

These four environments present a surprising amount of variety. It would be easy to assume that an off-road racing game would be predominantly brown in colour, but each of the environments have their own distinct look, feel and colour palette, giving a nice sense of progression as you work your way through the substantial single-player campaign — particularly as the various races unfold at various times of day, too.

nail’d is a speedy game, and this is further emphasised by some stylistic, presentational choices. As you accelerate, the game’s field of view becomes exaggerated considerably, leading to deliberately distorted visuals that take a little adjusting to. This is combined with heavy use of motion blur, and making use of the game’s boost function also desaturates the colours and turns up the contrast, making it a little harder to see where you’re going and really providing a convincing sense of “white knuckle” thrills.

Ah yes, the boost. As if the game’s base speed weren’t already enough, performing various “Boost Feats” around the course enable you to build up a meter and unleash it as you see fit. Boost Feats range from flaming gates and hoops you need to drive (or fly) through to performing impressive stunts or takedowns of your opponents.

These aren’t necessarily essential to success in the basic races or checkpoint-based time challenges, but in Stunt Challenge events, you’ll score points for every Boost Feat you successfully accomplish. As such, it pays to learn the courses well, since many of them have multiple routes onward, only some of which have valuable flaming gates and opportunities to pull off spectacular tricks.

There’s a really nice feeling of exploration and adventure to nail’d’s various tracks; while they’re not completely “open-world” in design — thankfully; it’d be easy to get lost otherwise! — it can be very rewarding to try different things every so often and see where you end up.

Go too far off the beaten track or wreck yourself and you’ll respawn in a matter of seconds; this minimises risk and encourages you to enjoy yourself as you see fit, since although a respawn will cost you a little time, it never puts you in a completely unwinnable situation, even on the harder difficulties. The computer racers will mess up just as much as you inevitably will!

As you progress through the single-player campaign, you’ll unlock additional parts for both the ATV and the motorcycle rather than completely new vehicles. These allow you to customise the performance of each vehicle in several areas; none of them specifically make either vehicle “better”, since there is usually some sort of stat tradeoff going on, but if you’re struggling to come out on top in a particular race, it might be worth swapping your parts around a bit to see what happens.

You’ll also unlock new paint jobs and colour customisation options for both your ride and your rider (who can be either gender) — these are a fun way to gauge your progress through the game without ever feeling like you need to “grind” to acquire a new vehicle in order to overcome a particular challenge.

nail’d is a prime example of the Eastern European game development philosophy. It’s pretty simple and no-frills in terms of execution and structure, but it does what it does extremely well and is a massive amount of fun to engage with. I can’t recommend it enough for those of you who just want some ridiculous, high-speed thrills, realism be damned. For an arcade racer fan such as myself, it’s a truly heavenly experience.

More about nail’d

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.

Sometimes when you sit down in front of your 1980s microcomputer, you don’t really want to do anything particularly productive or meaningful.

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you have long been well catered to, since both interactive and non-interactive demos and software toys have been part of the public domain software landscape pretty much since the earliest days of computing.

A great example of something that is fun to play with but has no real “meaning” to it is Jane’s Program, an addictive exploration of sound, colour and rudimentary physics that might be just the thing if you’ve had a hectic day!

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

Say the words “minigame collection” to a modern-day gamer and chances are they will roll their eyes and say something about shovelware, perhaps the Wii.

But we’re not about that sort of negativity here on MoeGamer, particularly because I know that minigame compilations can be an absolute ton of fun, and there are numerous great examples from throughout the years.

One such example is Ichidant-R, the sequel to Tant-R, which in turn was a bizarre spinoff of Bonanza Bros. And wouldn’t you know it? Sega just happens to have released Ichidant-R as part of its excellent Sega Ages collection on Nintendo Switch. Let’s take a closer look.

The Puzzle & Action series, of which both Tant-R and Ichidant-R are a part, remained a mostly Japan-only affair throughout its lifetime in the 16-bit era — though interestingly, Ichidant-R did see an English language arcade release in Europe and Korea, unlike its predecessor. As such, you’d be forgiven for being unfamiliar with it, so let’s kick off with a basic exploration of what it’s all about.

In Ichidant-R, a princess has been kidnapped, and it’s up to one or two brave knights (who bear an uncanny resemblance to Robo and Mobo from Bonanza Bros.) to rescue her by proceeding through a linear sequence of side-scrolling levels punctuated by the villain’s henchmen.

In order to defeat a henchman and proceed on your way, you have to clear a particular number of minigames. Defeat all the henchmen in a stage and you have a brief bonus round in which you can earn extra lives, then you repeat the process on a harder, longer stage until you eventually rescue the princess.

The minigames are selected via a “roulette” system. Four are available to play at any time, each represented by an easily recognisable, distinctive icon. A highlight will move rapidly between them, but with careful timing you can easily pick the one you want to play. Once you clear a game, the ones you didn’t pick will remain, and the one you cleared will be replaced with a new one.

The minigames all involve scoring a particular “quota” by succeeding at whatever task is expected of you a particular number of times. Initially you’ll need three successes, but later in the game you may need to succeed five or more times.

Each minigame presents you with a seemingly simple task and a tight time limit. Some of these are tests of observation, others of skill, others of reflexes. In one instance, you might be tasked with a Tower of Hanoi-style puzzle in which you must stack a bunch of frogs on a specific lilypad in size order. In another, you might have to shoot down a UFO using Missile Command-style “aim and explode” controls. In another still, you might have to carefully time button presses to catch bouncing dango and impale them on a skewer in size order.

There’s a dynamic difficulty level in play. Succeed and your next attempt will be a harder version of the minigame; fail and you lose a life, but the difficulty will drop back down again, meaning you shouldn’t get “stuck”. The arcade version of the game found in the Switch port allows for unlimited continues, so you can brute-force your way through the whole game if you so desire, though since there’s no formal “scoring” system as such, it’s much more rewarding to simply see how far you can get on a single credit.

Or play against a friend, of course. Like its predecessor (and indeed its original source material), Ichidant-R is a game probably best experienced alongside a friend.

When played in multiplayer, Ichidant-R is a curious blend between competitive and cooperative. In order to clear a minigame, you simply need to meet the quota between you, but the game also keeps track of who has won the most rounds in total, allowing you to battle it out for bragging rights. A two-player game also makes continuing feeling a bit less like “cheating”, since these scores don’t reset upon using a credit, so you can simply declare the winner based on who won the most rounds by the time you reach the end of the game’s complete runtime.

There’s a ton of variety in Ichidant-R’s minigames. Some are recycled from Tant-R, but there are plenty of new challenges, too. Some unfold in split-screen, allowing each player to work on their own personal task, while others see both players competing to be the first to spot something on a shared screen. And the fact that the mechanics vary enormously from testing twitch reflexes to your powers of logical deduction and memorisation mean that there’s a chance for all types of player to be able to excel at different times.

But there’s more. The Switch version of Ichidant-R also includes the Japan-only Mega Drive version of the game, which not only includes a near-perfect port of the arcade game (including the option to play with limited credits if you have no self-control) but also features several new ways to play.

Probably the most fascinating of these is the Quest mode, which unfolds like a top-down RPG. In this mode, you’re tasked with finding a series of hidden items by locating monuments around the game world and defeating the sages within at one of the minigames. As you wander around the world, you’ll get into random battles — which, of course, are also resolved with minigames — and earning experience allows you to earn extra lives on each level up.

This mode can be played with one or two players, and presents some interesting twists on the formula, because not only do you have to deal with the minigames themselves, you have to deal with larger “meta-puzzles” in the game world. There are mazes to navigate through, a logic puzzle that demands you search the correct village for a hidden item and plenty of other challenges besides.

There’s a fairly major catch for us here in the West, though; while the arcade version of Ichidant-R can be played in English, the Mega Drive version remains resolutely in Japanese. This means all the dialogue and clues in the Quest mode as well as the minigame instructions are completely indecipherable if you don’t have a certain amount of Japanese literacy. The latter is a little less of an issue, since you can learn the minigames in the English arcade version before jumping into the Mega Drive port, but not being able to understand the dialogue in Quest mode is a bit more of a problem.

Fortunately, Sega had the foresight to include some helpful information in the Web-based electronic manual; while it doesn’t transcribe the Japanese characters into romaji to allow non-Japanese speakers to “sound them out”, it does indicate what the most common words and basic kanji you’ll encounter will be — and even provides some assistance with what is probably the Quest mode’s most complicated puzzle.

It’s not ideal, obviously, but print out the most important pages from the manual on your home computer and have them to hand when you try your hand at the Quest mode and you should be able to take on its challenges without too much difficulty.

If that all sounds like a bit much, the Mega Drive game also offers a board game-style Competition mode for up to 4 players, and a Free mode that is likewise for up to 4 players where everyone competes for points. You can also compete against other players online — though given the fairly niche-interest status of this title you’re probably best off pre-arranging a game with a friend rather than hoping to rely on matchmaking.

It’s a pity the Mega Drive version of Ichidant-R wasn’t localised for this Switch release — particularly as that’s where the most interesting multiplayer options lie — but the whole package is certainly still very playable, whether you’re solo or playing with friends. As well as being a highly enjoyable “Puzzle & Action” game in its own right, from a broader perspective it demonstrates Sega’s clear commitment to the Sega Ages collection on Switch being a comprehensive worldwide celebration of its games from over the years — whether or not those games made it out of Japan.

Now if they’d just hurry up and release G-LOC, I’d be a very happy man…

More about Ichidant-R

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.

With Warriors Orochi finally down for the count, it’s time to start a new game!

Warriors All-Stars came out in 2017 and was originally intended as another Warriors Orochi game, but subsequently grew into its own standalone project that de-emphasised the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors characters in favour of… well, an all-star line-up drawn from a variety of different Koei Tecmo games.

And what a cast! We’ve got Sophie from Atelier Sophie; Arnice and Christophorus from Nights of Azure; Kasumi, Honoka and Marie Rose from Dead or Alive; and many more besides. With 15 possible endings ahead of us, we’ve got to start somewhere… so where better than with my favourite lesbian vampire (half-)demon, who seems a lot more cheerful than the last time we saw her?

I respect anyone who knows what they want, and who is not afraid to freely express those things that they want, regardless of how it makes them look.

Pixie Team’s Private Usamiel, better known by her codename Bee-tan, certainly falls into this category. Despite hailing from a planet that has largely lost the knack of everything to do with interpersonal interactions and relationships, Bee-tan is a libidinious young woman with a penchant for lusting after anything in a skirt. Including her own partner Private Kameriel, or Kame-pon.

She’s a colossal pervert, as gay as a window and I love her to bits. Let us celebrate this tiny little Pandemonian ahead of our in-depth exploration of the game in which she appears.

Bee-tan and Kame-pon were chosen for a mission to Earth on the grounds that they are some of the only remaining Pandemonians who have managed to successfully cultivate an honest, genuine friendship with one another. While the two appear to be opposites in terms of attitude — Kame-pon is very serious, in contrast to Bee-tan’s rather lackadaisical attitude — it’s clear that the pair have become very important to one another.

A cornerstone of their relationship is complete openness and honesty. While Kame-pon is somewhat more reserved in this regard, tending to only bring things up she absolutely needs to — albeit never hesitating when these instances arise — Bee-tan has trouble restraining herself from speaking her mind at all times. She makes no secret of the fact that she is extremely excited about the prospect of visiting a girls’ dormitory on Earth because she found the pre-mission reference materials “SUPER DUPER CUTE”, and she is genuinely concerned about how Pandemonian society is “a bit weird”, particularly because everyone is “far too disinterested in the girls”.

In other words, Bee-tan is a bit frustrated in how her society is. It’s obvious that she wants to express herself freely and enjoy friendships and relationships with a variety of people, but the nature of how society has developed on her home planet makes that very difficult for her to do. She’s an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s world, but rather than letting this get to her, she simply takes pride in who she is and shows no shame whatsoever in even the most outrageous things that come out of her mouth.

Despite her seemingly less than wholesome intentions at the outset of the story, it becomes clear over the course of Gun Gun Pixies that Bee-tan has an honest interest in both Earthling society and in the wellbeing of the dorm occupants. Early in the game, she is extremely concerned about one of the girls they are observing dieting to excess, and takes it upon herself to use the “Happy Bullets” she and Kame-pon have been armed with to help make a positive difference. And as the game progresses, she becomes very obviously attached to each and every one of them, fully invested in all their rather mundane struggles of day-to-day existence.

She has an endearingly cheeky streak about her, though, and this is beautifully rendered through a combination of her wonderfully expressive character art and Marika Kouno’s incredibly enthusiastic voice acting. Her distinctive “Ushashashasha!” laugh is incredibly infectious, and her honest expressions of surprise and delight when she thinks she might catch a glimpse of something she shouldn’t are just wonderful.

This carries across to her movements in the game, too. Rather than running in a sensible, dignified style, she sprints with her arms out behind her in a clear expression of childish joy. She whoops and hollers with delight when defeating an enemy, and she grunts with adorable determination when crawling into tight spaces.

She also knows her limitations. She freely admits that she doesn’t set secure passwords on her computer back at home because she can never remember them and she immediately admits when she doesn’t know or understand something, but you always get the impression she’s trying her best. Kame-pon respects this, too; despite frequently seeming to express impatience and disapproval with Bee-tan’s impulsivity and airheadedness, it’s clear there’s genuine affection there.

In many ways, Kame-pon feels a lot like an older sister or even a mother to Bee-tan’s rambunctious childishness, and this is probably what makes their relationship work so well: they complement one another perfectly, with each able to compensate for the areas where the other struggles. Bee-tan can express herself to a fault; Kame-pon, meanwhile, is typically the one able to take a more level-headed approach to a situation.

Bee-tan recognises the importance of this relationship, too, though it’s clear she’s never known anything different. At the conclusion of one mission, she hesitates to report the pair’s findings on the grounds that she didn’t think it was anything unusual, until Kame-pon points out that everything they observed would be brand new to a Pandemonian. Bee-tan simply notes that she thinks what they observed was “normal”, at which point Kame-pon reminds her that they “aren’t like other Pandemonians, for better or worse.”

These feelings give Bee-tan a strong desire to want to spread happiness; she seemingly spends most of her life being happy at just existing — particularly as she gets to spend all her time with her beloved Kame-pon — and, as she comes to understand the targets of their observation more and more, wishes nothing more than to keep them all smiling, even when times become difficult and bizarre for everyone involved.

She’s noisy, exhausting, constantly inappropriate and probably a complete nightmare to deal with for any period of time, but it’s hard not to come away from Gun Gun Pixies feeling like you want a Bee-tan in your life — even if, as in the game, all her influence is from somewhere that she cannot be seen.

She’s an absolute delight, and there’s no-one I’d rather have in charge of my emotional wellbeing while I went about my everyday business. Sadly, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not nearly “girl” enough for her…

More about Gun Gun Pixies

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

—

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

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

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

It takes guts to show up for a job you were hired for several months late… particularly when that job is saving an entire planet from destruction by a comet.

Unfortunately, your considerable tardiness (thanks largely to a delay on the planet Targ, as depicted in the original Mercenary) means that there are just three hours and ten minutes before the planet Eris is obliterated by the eponymous comet, and of course the solution to this rather pressing problem is anything but straightforward.

Along the course of your journey through this spectacular polygonal 3D open-world solar system, you’ll have to deal with the aftermath of eccentric professors having a spat with the head of state over a chess game, a severely incompetent post office, an overenthusiastic prison service and that most fearsome foe of all: British parliamentary politics. Damocles is a classic, and in this video I fuck it up completely. Enjoy!

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

Remember Columns? Remember how we talked about how chilled out it was, and how it didn’t want to stress you out? Yeah, you can forget all that with its direct follow-up.

Columns II is an example of an approach to sequels that was popular for a short while in the late ’80s and early ’90s: the provision of an experience clearly geared towards expert players, and a distinct case of “the same, but more so, and way harder“.

While Columns wanted everyone to relax and have a fun old time matching coloured gems, Columns II does everything in its power to stress you out at every opportunity. And I both love it and hate it for that!

For the unfamiliar, a quick recap. Columns is a falling-blocks puzzle game most commonly attributed to Sega these days, but which was originally developed by a Hewlett-Packard employee known as Jay Geertsen. Sega purchased the rights in 1990 after Geertsen had already ported his creation to a variety of home computer platforms, and from that point on the most well-known and well-regarded incarnations of the series were on Sega platforms both in the arcades and in the home.

In Columns, you control stacks of three coloured gems that fall from the top of the screen. Pressing a button swaps the three gems around between all their possible arrangements, and pulling down on the directional controls drops the block quickly. Your aim is to make lines of three or more like-coloured gems in horizontal, vertical or diagonal arrangements.

Columns II’s arcade incarnation puts a little twist on the formula by focusing on the “Flash Columns” mode that was introduced in the original game’s Mega Drive port. Here, rather than simply surviving as long as possible while the speed gradually increases (or, more accurately, ebbs and flows every few levels with a continual upward overall trend) you’re tasked with destroying specific, flashing gems in 70 different stages of pre-arranged gem stacks by incorporating them into a match. Inevitably, these flashing gems are partially buried at the start of a level, requiring a bit of “digging” to even reach them.

Columns II further complicates matters by introducing a new mechanic to the mix: skulls. Every so often, a random gem on the field (usually near the top) will be replaced with a coloured skull. If you happen to include this skull in a match, it will disappear as a normal gem does, but it will push the bottom of the play area upwards, giving you less available space to work with.

These small tweaks to the base formula make the game a lot harder. Probably the most significant difference from the original Columns is that you’re now starting with a bin that is already nearly half-full at the outset of play, meaning you need to immediately get matching in order to simply survive — and if you want to progress, you need to set up these matches with a mind to eventually digging out your target gems.

The atmosphere of Columns II is very different, too. While the original game’s rather “Classical” feel — created through a combination of visuals inspired by ancient Greek architecture and a gentle, constantly flowing contrapuntal soundtrack — made for a fairly relaxing time, even when the speed increased, Columns II is much more aggressive.

Its soundtrack is driving, determined and even angry-sounding at times, and the “time travel” theme to the backdrops often finds you matching gems against cold, unyielding, metallic, futuristic backdrops rather than the pleasant stonework of ancient architecture. On top of that, matching a skull makes a very unpleasant noise (or as unpleasant a noise as an FM synthesis chip can muster, anyway) and the overall pace of the game feels significantly higher than its predecessor, constantly pushing you onwards in a seemingly deliberate attempt to stress you out as much as possible.

To put it another way, while spending some time with the original Columns is like hanging out with an old friend who just wants to chill out and have some fun, playing Columns II is like meeting up with that friend a few months later only to discover that you’ve inadvertently pissed them off somehow, they won’t tell you what the problem is and as a result they’re going to subtly but surely make the entirety of your time together just slightly uncomfortable, awkward and vaguely unpleasant — but somehow, you still enjoy the overall experience. It’s one of the most passive-aggressive games I’ve ever played, and that, I realised more clearly the longer I spent with it, is not something I think I’ve felt all that often!

All this combines to create an experience that is clearly intended for Columns veterans rather than newcomers to the series. Columns II absolutely throws you in at the deep end and expects you to immediately get to work rather than providing you with the certain amount of almost insultingly easy “grace period” that many puzzle games provide in their opening moments. Straight away, you’ll need to think and react quickly in order to clear a path to those all-important flashing gems — and you’ll need to practice quite a bit before you can progress anywhere beyond the first couple of stages.

Thankfully, the recent Sega Ages release of Columns II on Nintendo Switch allows you to select which stage you start at rather than going from the beginning every time, and also to turn the “skull” mechanic off altogether in the rather intimidatingly named “Skull Smash” mode. The Switch release also comes with a lightweight version of the original Columns’ arcade mode, too, providing a much more straightforward experience for those who want to brush up on their basic skills; This starts from an empty bin and simply tasks you with surviving for as long as possible rather than clearing stages.

The Switch version also plays host to an “Infinite Jewels” variation on Columns II that removes the stage-clearing aspect, instead causing the flashing gems to destroy all other gems of the same colour when incorporated into a match, but otherwise acting as an endless marathon mode. Just to heap on the pressure, in this mode new rows are added to the bottom of the well every so often — but you don’t have to worry about skulls in this mode. Thank heavens for small mercies, eh?

And, of course, in obligatory puzzle game fashion, there is a two-player versus mode, too. This can be played either locally or online on the Switch version — though as with most niche-interest games, it’s probably best to pre-arrange an online battle with a friend rather than rely on matchmaking. The Switch’s local multiplayer mode also features a pleasing option with tabletop play in mind: the ability to flip the second player’s playfield upside-down, allowing two Joy-Con-wielding opponents to sit across a table from one another with the Switch laid flat between them, cocktail cabinet-style. There is, unfortunately, no ability to play a Versus game against a computer-controlled player — though the rest of the package is more than enough challenge for even the most grizzled puzzle veteran!

Everything I’ve described above may explain why Columns II never got a home release until a Sega Ages compilation for Saturn in 1997; the Mega Drive jumped straight to Columns III in 1993, which offered some significant changes to the formula. So far as puzzle games go, Columns II is perhaps not the most friendly or accessible to newcomers — though the Nintendo Switch Sega Ages version including the arcade mode from the first Columns certainly goes a way to alleviating this issue somewhat. Newcomers should definitely practice here first before tackling the considerably ramped up challenge of the sequel!

As a complete package, the Nintendo Switch Sega Ages release of Columns II is definitely worth your time if you’re a puzzle game fan. While it may take a bit of time and practice to adjust to the main game’s deliberately stressful nature, it’s a rewarding experience if you take the time to engage with it — and the addition of a “Jewel Case” featuring a variety of unlockable Sega characters provides plenty of longevity, too.

Plus it’s a cool part of Sega history that we haven’t seen celebrated all that much over the years. And that seems to be a key part of what this new Sega Ages collection is all about. I’m definitely all for it.

More about Columns II

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.

After successfully making takoyaki out of Kraken last time around, there’s just one more crystal for the Warriors of Light to, err, light.

It’s not going to be easy to get to, however; it’s guarded by the fearsome Tiamat, who has taken up residence in the Flying Fortress, the former home of the Lufenian people. And, what with the Flying Fortress being… flying, even reaching Tiamat is going to be a bit of an ordeal.

Thankfully, all the things the Warriors of Light have done up until this point have prepared them adequately for this moment… so it seems the only way is up. Baby.

One thing I always like to see is when developers get a bit experimental.

Idea Factory and Compile Heart have always been good at this, and their numerous experiments over the last ten years or so have really allowed them to hone their craft, showing marked improvements from their earlier PS3 titles up until today. And when you partner up with an ensemble like Shade, who, as we’ve already seen, are certainly not averse to doing things a bit differently from the norm, the results can be very interesting indeed.

One such result is Gun Gun Pixies. So let’s take a closer look at what’s going on with this unusual game.

Before we kick off here, it’s probably worth acknowledging a bit of context with regard to the broader landscape of Japanese gaming — particularly those segments that are focused on catering to a more specific, niche audience.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about smaller-scale and/or lower-budget games from Japan — particularly those with a narrative focus — is that they often aren’t designed with what I’d regard as a traditional balance between “gameplay” and “story”. We’ve seen a few examples of this previously on MoeGamer, including Aselia the Eternal breaking up its in-depth, challenging and immensely satisfying strategy RPG battles with lengthy visual novel sequences, and titles such as Nocturnal Illusion, Root Letter and Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa disguising their core nature as visual novels with adventure game and puzzle mechanics.

This makes for a bit of a dilemma, as you might expect. Does the fact that these games deliberately eschew a mechanical focus in favour of emphasising their narrative component above all else make them “bad games” from a design perspective? Your response to that primarily comes down to where your own personal priorities lie: ask yourself why you’re playing the game in question. Are you mainly playing to have your mental and/or physical faculties challenged? Or are you mostly interested in the narrative, themes and characterisation?

The reason I bring this up is that it’s extremely relevant to Gun Gun Pixies. While primarily marketed as a third-person shooter, this is not a game you should go into expecting a Splatoon or a Gears of War. Instead, this is a game that uses some of the presentational and mechanical conventions of third-person shooters as a means to an end: the delivery of its story and the crafting of the narrative universe within which that story unfolds.

What I mean by this is that the game isn’t here to be an especially challenging experience or gate you off from experiencing its whole story with difficulty spikes, but rather, the more you engage with its mechanical aspects, the more opportunity you have to learn things about the game world, the protagonists, the secondary characters and the context in which everything is unfolding.

To explain further, let’s look more broadly at what Gun Gun Pixies is all about.

In Gun Gun Pixies, you take control of Pixie Team, a two-person unit of commandos from the planet Pandemo, consisting of Privates Kameriel (aka Kame-pon) and Usamiel (aka Bee-tan). The pair was specifically chosen for a special assignment to visit Earth, because Pandemo is facing a crisis: societal developments on the planet have caused the population to shy away from direct interpersonal relationships with one another.

This is starting to cause a variety of difficulties for Pandemonian culture: not only are people forgetting how to cooperate and work together for a common good, making for a society primarily built on self-interest and self-gratification, but perhaps more significantly, the fact people are not interested in pursuing relationships with one another has caused the birth rate to decline.

This setup for Gun Gun Pixies’ narrative feels deliberately relevant to our modern world: the rise of social media’s inherently self-absorbed nature has led many commentators and philosophers to note a sharp increase in narcissism as compassion and empathy appear to decline, and the specific case of a rapidly falling birth rate has been a particular issue for Japan for quite some time now.

With this in mind, it’s quite interesting that Kame-pon and Bee-tan are sent to observe Earth, of all places, as an example of how to do things better. But it’s worth noting that for all our faults as Earthlings today, we are, on the whole, as a population, still capable of caring for our fellow man, and we do still have empathy and compassion for those who need it. Pandemo’s situation can thus be seen as a warning of what might happen if we don’t pay attention to certain societal trends until it’s too late.

Kame-pon and Bee-tan were chosen for the mission for a specific reason, too. While they were both considered to be “failures” at the military academy they attended, the fact that they were some of the only modern Pandemonians to actually form an honest, genuine bond of friendship with one another made them ideally suited for a mission that primarily involves observing interpersonal interactions between others. Not only will the nature of their relationship allow them to recognise the different ways in which their targets are interacting with one another, but the way they simply work together as a team will, in its own way, provide helpful information for the Pandemonians to consider.

Kame-pon and Bee-tan’s target is an all-girls dormitory named Lilypad. In the context of the game world, modern Japan has enforced an age-enforced independence policy, where young people in their late adolescence and early adulthood are required to move out of their parents’ house and develop their own life skills. With this in mind, numerous dormitories have been set up to allow a more gradual transition from the support of one’s childhood home to the harsh realities of solo living as an adult, and Lilypad is one such place.

As the story begins, three young women call Lilypad home. There’s Amayo, a university student; and sisters Kira and Misa, who are in high school. As the narrative progresses, several other characters are introduced, too, including the rather chuunibyou Minami, and Kira and Misa’s younger sister Eri. For one chapter, Neptune and Noire from Compile Heart’s Neptunia series also show up posing as “exchange students”, apparently attempting to carry out a similar mission to Bee-tan and Kame-pon, albeit without any awareness of the tiny soldiers.

Oh yes, although otherwise resembling humans, Pandemonians are miniscule when compared to Earthlings, which presents both pros and cons for our brave protagonists. On the positive side, their diminutive stature makes it relatively easy for them to conceal themselves and their spaceship from the targets of their observation — they successfully keep their ride home disguised as a cardboard box on top of the dormitory’s fridge for a good six months over the course of the game as a whole — but on the other hand, this makes getting around the dormitory and simply keeping themselves safe somewhat more of an effort than it might otherwise be.

This brings us on to what I was talking about earlier: how the mechanical aspects allow us to explore the world in which the game unfolds, and find out more about the cast as a whole.

Gun Gun Pixies is split into eight missions, each of which are divided into three “Orders”. In each Order, you’ll have the opportunity to visit one or more of the three bedrooms in the Lilypad dormitory, and while in there, you’ll have various tasks to accomplish, usually while attempting to avoid the eyes and ears of whoever occupies the room at the time.

Naturally, with Bee-tan and Kame-pon being tiny, the dorm inhabitants appear gigantic in comparison, and the game does a great job of providing a convincing sense of scale as our heroines hop around in pursuit of their objectives. Those who… have a thing for bare feet will also be in a happy place, since no-one (except Bee-tan and Kame-pon) wears any shoes indoors; we are in Japan, after all. And, of course, if you’re a tiny little pixie, you can get right up on those plates o’ meat for a good ol’ look.

But, uh, I digress.

Usually, the tasks that Pixie Team are tasked with carrying out are extremely straightforward if you know what you’re doing — one of the Orders can literally be completed in six seconds by simply turning around and leaving both rooms you find yourself in after the story scenes — but the experience is much more rewarding if you take the time to explore a bit.

In each new Order, a number of Picoins are scattered around the various rooms you are able to visit, with a roughly equal number and value in each. Alongside this, there are ten pieces of “Information” that you are able to seek out and investigate. The former provides you with currency that you can use to upgrade Bee-tan and Kame-pon’s weaponry and ammo capacity (as well as purchasing new sets of lingerie and, after a first playthrough, costumes for the dorm inhabitants) while the latter is purely for flavour, albeit with a few Orders specifically requiring you to find certain pieces of Information.

The Information is hidden to the naked eye, but making use of Pixie Team’s zoomable scopes reveals it as a sparkling area in the room that can be searched by standing near it and tapping the action button. Doing this will cause Bee-tan and Kame-pon to have a conversation about what they’ve discovered. Sometimes this will be a helpful observation that they decide to put in their reports; at others, it will be Bee-tan either lusting after the dorm students (and their respective underwear drawers) or displaying a remarkably strong attachment to the tall indoor plant in Kira and Misa’s room, whom she dubs “Green” and enthusiastically follows the development of over the course of their six-month mission.

These scenes are consistently, utterly charming, and worth seeking out for no other reason than the fact it’s a pleasure to witness yet another interaction between Kame-pon and Bee-tan. Which is good, because you get no other rewards whatsoever for them; they’re present for nothing more than flavour. (That said, there are a few lingerie sets you can unlock for our heroines by spotting an occasional pair of discarded panties on the floor and allowing Bee-tan to take a little too much glee in scanning them for future reference.)

With all this in mind, you can quite easily romp through the whole game in a couple of hours — something that those interested in pursuing all six of the available endings will be pleased to hear — but on your first runthrough at least, it really adds a lot to the experience to discover this additional context.

The Picoins fit into this, too, although less explicitly. While some of them will be on the floor of the rooms, the majority of them will be scattered around the various items of furniture and shelving. This requires you to figure out exactly how to get around the room when you’re a tiny person, and in doing so you may well find yourself stumbling across some interesting details that you might not have otherwise noticed.

Pursuing both the Picoins and the Information also draws your attention to the fact that the rooms aren’t completely static, either; over the course of the various missions, subtle things change about their layout each time, allowing you to draw certain conclusions about what might have happened “off-camera” since your last visit. These are all rather mundane things — a character might have clearly spent some time watching their favourite DVDs, for example, causing them to end up somewhere else in the room from the last time you saw them — but they play a part in bringing the world to life and making it feel like you really are seeing how the lives of these young women are developing over time.

Which brings up an interesting point about the overall narrative structure: despite Bee-tan and Kame-pon being the playable protagonists of the game, the story isn’t about them at all. Rather, they act as something of a modern take on the “Greek chorus” format by observing the action from “outside” (kind of) and commenting on it as it progresses. Of course, it doesn’t take long for them (well, Bee-tan, whom Kame-pon finds it difficult to say “no” to, it seems, despite her protestations) to decide that they want to try and help out these girls with their various struggles, and their armament of euphoria-inducing “Happy Bullets” appears to make them ideally suited to this role.

The stories that involve the girls in the dorm begin in a fairly mundane but nonetheless poignant fashion. In the first mission, for example, the girls are concerned about a strange smell in the dormitory, which it turns out stems from a “diet gum” that Amayo is abusing in an attempt to lose weight.

Rather than seeking properly balanced nutrition, Amayo is relying exclusively on the gum and is making herself sick with both worry and a lack of good food. Evidently feeling somewhat ashamed of this — as people with eating disorders often do — she has been hiding this fact from her dormmates, but Bee-tan and Kame-pon are in the unique position of having found out her secret without her knowledge. This, in turn, allows them to reveal it to Kira and Misa while making it look like an accident, thereby helping to resolve the situation without directly interfering.

This is how the majority of the missions unfold; despite the fact that Kame-pon and Bee-tan are armed with literal examples of the “magic bullet” trope, they never directly solve the girls’ problems for them. Rather, the most they do is help them clear their head a little bit — typically by releasing nervous tension through an explosion of endorphins — which then enables their target of the hour to look at things a little more rationally and address the situation accordingly.

These aren’t always problems with easy solutions, either. When Minami shows up in the dormitory, her story revolves around her having rediscovered an old friend, but almost immediately feeling like she’s lost her forever by not being recognised. Already in something of a fragile mental state — her chuunibyou fantasies are clearly a coping mechanism that allows her to “check out” of reality at will whenever things get a bit much for her — this understandably causes her to go into a deep depression.

By extension, this makes her unwilling — or unable — to talk about it to any of her dormmates, despite them having already shown early in their relationship that they are all kind, supportive people in their own way. As with many mental health issues, this is something that only Minami can solve herself — though Bee-tan and Kame-pon can perhaps give a few subtle nudges in what they believe to be a helpful direction.

Likewise, the arrival of Eri at the dorm highlights the fact that there has apparently always been something of a strained relationship between the three sisters. Eri, it seems, is enormously talented, leaving Misa and Kira feeling somewhat inferior and unsure how best to approach her. When Misa — who is an aspiring eroge developer — attempts to recruit Eri into helping with her latest creation, the result is… suboptimal for everyone involved, and Kira is quite simply at a loss as to how to handle it all.

While Bee-tan and Kame-pon do their best to once again subtly contribute to the resolution of this issue as best they can, it’s clear that there’s something deeper going on here — and indeed, exactly what that “something” is makes up the remainder of the story as it escalates towards its unusual and surprising climax.

The situation with Eri does highlight something else very important, though: since, by this point in the narrative, both Amayo and Minami have been through their own internal struggles over their respective issues, they know how important it is for someone who is suffering to feel compassion and empathy from those close to them, and as such they do their best to offer their own words of support. They’re not able to solve Kira, Misa and Eri’s problems for them — once again, since this is all about mental health and interpersonal relationships, it’s something that only the people directly involved can truly resolve for themselves — but they can simply “be there” and make the sisters feel less alone.

The overall major conflict of the story revolves around this, too. Without giving away the specifics, it concerns how someone who is lonely and vulnerable can be coerced into doing things they don’t necessarily want to do by someone who sees an opportunity to take advantage of them. It also highlights the fact that even people who seem to have it together or who might appear to lead something of a charmed life can be just as vulnerable as those in more obviously “less fortunate” situations.

To put it another way: we should never make assumptions about an individual’s circumstances based on the superficial things we can observe from an outsider’s perspective, because human beings (and Pandemonians) are complex beings whose pain is often hidden away on the inside, typically behind several layers of coping mechanisms that can vary enormously from person to person.

On paper, Gun Gun Pixies might appear to be rather limited in terms of content, particularly with just three rooms to explore. But as noted above, this is one of those games where you need to throw out the conventions under which you might normally assess a video game, because being a “normal video game” is absolutely not this title’s intention.

In practice, Gun Gun Pixies’ deliberately limited scale and scope works well for its narrative in much the same way as theatrical productions with small casts or static sets do: it allows the audience to focus on the characterisation and narrative without being distracted by external stimuli. It also allows the story the flexibility for things to happen “off-camera” or “off-stage” and for us to witness — and interact with — the aftermath of those situations.

While this sort of design absolutely isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, it’s admirable that Compile Heart and Shade had a clear vision for what they wanted to achieve with Gun Gun Pixies — and that they successfully pursued this vision without getting hung up on whether or not it followed the rather limited definition of what makes a “good video game”.

It’s a bold, experimental work that does a good job of tackling some weighty issues that are extremely relevant to modern life — and it does so without falling into the trap of getting overly bleak and hopeless about things. If there’s one thing everyone should be able to take away from Gun Gun Pixies, it’s that however tough things get, there’s always a light in the darkness. Sometimes it takes a bit of work — or a gentle nudge — for you to find it, but it’s there.

We may not have our own personal Bee-tans and Kame-pons to support us in our times of need — more’s the pity — but we do have friends, family and even professionals that we can reach out to for help and support.

It’s easy to forget that, sometimes. But enjoying a wholesome story like that found in Gun Gun Pixies can serve as a helpful reminder. And that alone gives this game a great deal of value and meaning.

More about Gun Gun Pixies

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

—

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

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

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

Hello everyone! I hope you’re doing well.

The wife and I have been having a troublesome few months. Our hob went, our roof leaked, our cats had fleas and yesterday our washing machine broke. Thankfully all but the latter of these have now been resolved (at varying levels of expense) but as I type this, the wife is in search of a suitable replacement washing machine to go in our awkwardly shaped gap.

But you don’t need to know all that, really. You’re here to find out what you might have missed in the last week or so, right? Read on, then…

MoeGamer

nail’d: Look Out Below – Want a ridiculous racer that doesn’t take itself at all seriously? Techland’s offroad title nail’d is a ton of fun, featuring insane jumps and eye-melting speed.

Ichidant-R: Minigame Mayhem – The latest Sega Ages release for Switch brings back the Bonanza Bros. spinoff in both its arcade and Japanese Mega Drive incarnations. It’s a delight.

Warriors Wednesday: Starting Life in a New World – We kick off a new series of Warriors Wednesday with our first look at Warriors All-Stars for PlayStation 4. We’re in for a wild ride!

Waifu Wednesday: Bee-Tan – Having played a lot of Gun Gun Pixies over the last few weeks, I’ve developed a significant soft spot for Bee-tan, one of the two leading ladies.

Columns II: The Most Passive-Aggressive Puzzle Game Ever – Reckon yourself at Columns? Well, Columns II might have a thing or two to say about your skills, and now you can really put your money where your mouth is now that it’s part of the Sega Ages collection on Nintendo Switch.

Final Fantasy Marathon: To the Heavens – There’s just one more crystal to go on the Warriors of Light’s grand quest… but how to get to it?

Gun Gun Pixies: Tiny Girls, Huge Hearts – Our Shade-centric Cover Game feature continues with a look at Gun Gun Pixies, a game about the pursuit of happiness, empathy and compassion. Something we could all do with more of in this day and age!

Atari A to Z

This week our journeys through the world of retro include a bouncy-bouncy software toy, an incredible 16-bit open-world 3D adventure and an Intellivision port that I only realised the addictive qualities of after I finished recording and saw my timestamp read over 40 minutes…

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 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. I also support Octav1us Kitten, and thankfully her copyright woes have been resolved, so her videos are back online. She’ll be back making videos after some much-needed rest!

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

And as always, here’s a selection of things from around the WordPress Reader this week.

The 10 best DLC packs on Vita (kresnik258gaming) – DLC is a subject that tends to get ignored in a lot of writing about games, but there are some great examples of additional content for beloved games. Kresnik trawls through the PlayStation Store to find some of the best for Sony’s underappreciated handheld.

The pursuit of classic systems is an expensive business (The Late Night Session) – The Night Owl explores how collecting retro systems is becoming a somewhat pricey affair, depending on how “into” the hobby you want to get.

The mystery of Atlantis (Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster) – Did you remember that Tomb Raider got really fucking weird at the end? I didn’t. Kimimi provides us with a helpful, fleshy reminder.

Bring Mobility Back to Mobile Games (DJMMTs Gaming & More Blog) – djmmtgamechangerdoc bemoans the fact that most “mobile” games these days are dependent on constant Internet connections — which you can’t necessarily rely on when you’re out on the go!

Hype Soundtracks: Relaxing Lunch Break (Love Live!) (Chase the Light! Reflections) – New Patron Kikoman589 explores one of his favourite incidental tracks from the Love Live! soundtrack.

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That’s your lot for now! Now I’ve got a podcast to edit, so please look forward to it!

Thank you as always for your ongoing support: here, on social media and on Patreon. It means a lot — especially in cases such as my Gun Gun Pixies article I wrote this week, which several people personally and privately reached out to me and thanked me for after the whole debacle over mainstream reviews of it a while back. That’s always a cool feeling.

Anyway. Have a good what’s left of your weekend, and I’ll see you soon.

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.

Mattel’s “M Network” label brought over a variety of classic Intellivision titles to Atari’s 2600 platform.

One of these games that seems to have always proven quite popular is Astroblast, originally known as Astrosmash on its original host platform.

It’s a fairly simple fixed shooter in which you blast space rocks into smithereens while attempting to protect your planet… but hoo boy, is it ever addictive!

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

I bring you humble greetings, weary Web-wanderer, and I bid you welcome once again to The MoeGamer Podcast, featuring me and my good friend Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels.

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

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

Today’s episode was a bit of a cultural exchange when it comes to our main topic: video pinball. Turns out I have experience at both the early and late end of the spectrum, while Chris’ experience is in the middle, “golden” age of the genre. We take in discussions of everything from Video Pinball on the Atari 2600 to Senran Kagura Peach Ball, via Flipnic, Devil’s Crush, Time Scanner and many more besides.

The topic discussion is, as always, preceded by a look at the recent happenings in the news. This time around, it’s a grab bag of little stories, including a new project from Suda51 and SWERY65; the distinct possibility a new Okami game is on the way; and a bunch of Muv-Luv goodness.

We’ve also been playing some interesting games recently — I have, of course, been all over Gun Gun Pixies, while Chris has been enjoying Hardcore Mecha and… exploring Contra: Rogue Corps.

Thanks as always for your support; we hope you enjoy the new episode!

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.

The year is 20XX. You are a grown-ass adult who has always enjoyed video games.

But just recently you’ve caught yourself being a little dissatisfied with your experiences engaging with your favourite hobby. You can’t quite put your finger on exactly what it is, but you frequently find yourself getting irritable and restless, often coupled with an irrational desire to hurl abuse at random strangers online.

To the rescue, here I am, with a 10-step plan to enjoy video games more as a 21st century grown-ass adult. Results not guaranteed. Your mileage may vary. Subject to status. Some chafing may occur.

Put the phone down

Seriously, put your fucking phone down. I know load times can be annoying and sometimes dialogue sequences or cutscenes can feel like they’re dragging on a bit, but a sure-fire way to completely lose your focus — and by extension, your appreciation of what you’re playing — while you’re trying to concentrate is to pick up your phone and check Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Discord every few minutes just in case something of Earth-shattering importance has happened since you last looked.

Spoiler: it hasn’t. And even if it has, you probably can’t do anything about it right now. You are, after all, in your pants.

Fiddling with our phones is a nervous habit that most of us have picked up to one degree or another over the course of the last 20 years or so, and it’s become particularly apparent since smartphones became a thing. Next time you find yourself reaching for your phone, think about exactly what you’re doing with it; chances are, you’re just looking for something to do with your hands and you’re not actually all that interested in seeing what updates have happened online.

Good app developers know this, too; they deliberately give apps a pleasingly “tactile” feel to them that is inherently satisfying to engage with. That’s why most modern phone operating systems and apps do that pleasing “twang” thing when you reach the top or bottom of a scrolling page, and why most social media apps have “pull to refresh” functionality with enjoyable audio-visual feedback of some description. (Shwwww… POP!) They’re preying on our innate need to seek out and repeatedly engage with mindless habits — and in the case of many apps, they’re doing this to make you look at more ads.

Put your phone down, at the very least just out of reach — far enough away that you have to make a specific effort to pick it up — and concentrate on the thing you’ve sat down to do: play video games. If you’re feeling particularly prone to phone-fiddling, put it in another room entirely, preferably on silent. Doing this also has the added bonus effect of making you less likely to check walkthroughs or YouTube videos rather than working things out for yourself!

Be selective about what you share

One of my pet annoyances about modern social media is when people feel the need to post (usually commentary-free, context-free) screenshots of every other line of a visual novel they’re reading, or every three seconds of an anime, or every time they get a new piece of equipment in an RPG, or whatever.

Personally speaking, oversharing tends to make me switch off from paying attention to that person — I’ll even go so far as to mute them completely in some cases — in an attempt to 1) avoid spoilers (particularly in the case of visual novels and anime) and 2) simply reduce the amount of “noise” in my timeline.

And I avoid being the one doing the oversharing because, like checking your phone every few seconds, I find it extremely distracting and flow-breaking to be popping out of a game every few minutes to share a screenshot or video clip. I prefer devoting my attention to one thing at a time.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t make use of the modern consoles’ Share functionality at all, mind. If something particularly interesting, impressive or amusing comes up, it’s worth sharing, as it might get your friends and family interested in what you’re playing, giving you more people to talk about what you love with. Winner!

As a happy medium, consider taking all the screenshots and videos you want while you’re playing, but don’t share them immediately. When you’ve finished playing, pick one or two that you think are particularly cool/impressive/funny/whatever and share those — preferably with a comment explaining what they are — then keep the rest for your own enjoyment or reference. If you absolutely must share large amounts of screenshots, consider using a hashtag unique to yourself (I would use something like #PetePlays or #MoeGamerPlays, for example) so that people who want to avoid spoilers and/or noise can mute that hashtag without muting you entirely. Or perhaps take the approach some bloggers do, and collect all your screenshots and clips together into a gallery post on your own website, then just link to the gallery so people can browse at their leisure.

I take hundreds of screenshots while I’m playing games, but this is primarily for my own benefit: I like being able to refer back to story sequences in particular so that I can analyse them in detail (including direct quotes where appropriate) when I’m writing an article. I’m much more selective about what I post on social media because I know if I post too much, people are going to ignore it. Because that’s exactly what I do!

Ignore Metacritic

As a former professional of the games press, I’ll let you into a little secret: those numbers that some people ascribe such importance to are completely plucked out of reviewers’ arses based on no criteria whatsoever besides gut instinct. 

Seriously. They’re meaningless. This is why I don’t use review scores here on MoeGamer — well, that and I don’t really do traditional “reviews”, anyway. They’re nothing more than a made-up number that roughly approximates how much an individual person liked something, with no commonly agreed criteria, scale or means of measuring. There is, after all, no means of measuring how “good” something is — or indeed how much someone likes something.

Not only that, popular opinion changes over time. Look at Nier. Rated in the 60s on its original release, now regarded as a modern classic. But because of the way Metacritic works, it’s forever burdened with that “mediocre” score.

With this in mind, you absolutely should not let Metascores inform your purchasing decisions. If something looks like it might appeal to you, by all means read what other people said about it and talk to others who have played it, but ignore the big number. It means nothing. If you like the look of it, just go for it.

Judge games based on their obvious intentions rather than what you want them to be

We talk about this quite a lot on The MoeGamer Podcast. It’s not unreasonable to go into a new game with certain expectations as to what you’ll get from the experience — but if those expectations aren’t met, it doesn’t immediately mean that the game is “bad”.

Instead, take a moment to contemplate how the game — not the marketing, nor the coverage by the press — sets itself up. Imagine you hadn’t read anything about the game and you’d just sat down in front of it for the first time. What is the overall design and structure telling you about the experience? What are the mechanics telling you? How is the story presented? Do these initial impressions get subverted by things that are revealed later — either in mechanical or narrative terms?

Some of the most interesting games out there might be positioned as one thing, but are actually something completely different; Shade’s Gun Gun Pixies is a great example of this, as are many early “adventure game-style” visual novels such as Nocturnal Illusion. While one can point the finger at marketers for being misleading at times like this, it’s always worth contemplating the experience purely on its own terms rather than in comparison to anything else.

Play what you want, not what you think you “should”

So, you noticed everyone and their dog playing the latest, greatest triple-A game (and oversharing their experiences on social media), but you think it looks like yet another brown open-world Western game with uncanny valley NPCs and an endless checklist of quests that don’t feel like they have any meaning? Firstly, welcome to my world, and secondly — great! Don’t play it. But also don’t bitch at people who are enjoying it.

(This goes the other way, too; chances are most people reading this won’t fall into this category, but on the offchance you dislike colourful games featuring pretty girls shouting things in Japanese, you can always just not play those, too. And, equally, not bitch at people who do like them.)

You have no obligation to play something just because everyone is talking about it, or even because everyone has been saying how amazing it supposedly is for years. If something doesn’t appeal, it doesn’t appeal — and if you try and force yourself through something you know you’re probably going to dislike, you’ll almost certainly end up resenting the experience.

It’s great to take yourself out of your comfort zone now and again, of course, and it helps you develop a much broader literacy of how different developers do things. But you should always do this on your own terms, when you feel like having a bit of a change, rather than because you feel like you “should” — or because someone says that you “should”. Entertainment is for enjoyment. There is no “should”.

Everyone’s tastes are different. Respect other people’s tastes, but respect your own, too. You know what you like better than anyone else.

Remember you don’t have to be “current”

Related: a game doesn’t stop being good or worth playing just because it didn’t come out in the last week. In fact, in most cases outside of multiplayer-centric titles (where it’s usually best to jump online when the community is at its most active) it pays to give a game a month or two (or more!) for the hype to die down, as this will allow you to come to the experience free of unreasonable expectations and judge it purely on its own merits, as we talked about above.

A good game is timeless. That’s why so many games from prior console generations continue to be held up as both all-time classics and “hidden gems”. If there’s a game that you want to play, but for one reason or another you’re not able to right now, don’t feel bad. In most cases, that game will still be there waiting for you when you’re good and ready — even generations later in some cases. Though if you are concerned about missing out, which can sometimes be the case with games that are likely to have a limited print run, you can always buy the game now and play it later. Just be careful not to do this too much; having too much of a backlog can be demotivating for many people!

Don’t rely on excuses

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve talked to someone and they’ve said something along the lines of “I really want to play game name, but I’m much too busy with my job/life/kids/everything else that has been released!”

If you’ve ever caught yourself saying this, contemplate a few things. How many hours have you spent watching online videos or live TV that you weren’t really interested in this week? How long have you spent idly browsing social media wishing you were doing something, anything else? How many work socials did you show up to only to get bored after ten minutes, but still felt obliged to stand around watching everyone else get drunk and annoying? How many games are you juggling right now without getting anywhere in any of them?

It’s easy to make excuses, particularly when it comes to things that are likely to take a lot of time. And it doesn’t have to be annoying adulty obligations that you’re trying to avoid, either; some people almost seem to take pride in “never having had the time” to play something that they supposedly really want to play.

If you want to do something, you can find a way to make it happen, even if it’s a 100+ hour RPG. Bear in mind the things we’ve already said, particularly the fact that you don’t need to be current; while we can sometimes feel pressured to rush through things just to avoid spoilers, ultimately you are the only one saying that you must get through any piece of media in a set amount of time. It took me over a year to play through Persona 5, and I don’t feel bad about that. I have a job, an occasional social life and a website and YouTube channel to run. If someone as disorganised as me can juggle all these things, I have faith you can too!

Focus and take the time to finish things

The first video game I ever beat was Super Mario World on the Super NES, and it gave me a massive sense of achievement. Ditto for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Prior to that, I’d always felt daunted by the prospect of completing games — at least in part because games I’d played prior to that either couldn’t be beaten by virtue of being endless arcade-style affairs, or were extremely difficult to beat due to the skill requirements.

From the PlayStation 1 era onwards, though, I started making a specific effort to finish what I started, because that had became more practical as many games became more narrative-focused. Developers and writers wanted you to see how the story ended, so while they still put roadblocks in your way to test your skills, they tended to be somewhat more surmountable.

If I began a game, I generally liked to try and see it through to the end before starting something else rather than flitting around from one thing to another, never really settling on anything and never really getting to know anything beyond initial impressions. I feel like I had a much more enriching experience as a result — and, by extension, I have many fond memories of a wide variety of games.

I’ve stuck to this approach over the years — probably even more so now that MoeGamer is such an important part of my life; I don’t like writing about things I haven’t finished.

I love seeing narrative games through to their conclusion, and I’m particularly fascinated by the different ways that developers and writers approach the concept of “the finale”. Final Fantasy VII also taught me that it is not uncommon for the most impressive, memorable piece of music in the whole game to be reserved for the final boss, so I always look forward to final encounters in RPGs.

This ties in with several of the other suggestions above. Focusing on a single game allows you to have a rewarding, complete-feeling experience, but you shouldn’t feel pressured to rush through or beat something as soon as possible after launch. At the same time, if you’re not enjoying something, you shouldn’t feel obliged to beat it — but if you are enjoying it, I can strongly recommend taking the time to see it through from start to finish. Your memories of the game will be that much fonder for having seen the whole story, and you’ll be able to talk about what that game did with much more knowledge, confidence and authority.

Consider if trophies/achievements are adding to your experience

When trying to “beat” a game, consider carefully if the trophy/achievement lists are adding to your experience at all.

Sometimes they can be useful — in the case of games with multiple endings, for example, they can give you clues as to what you might need to do in order to see the various conclusions.

Sometimes they can be fun — in mechanics-centric games, achievements and trophies can highlight fun and interesting ways to play that might be a bit different from the “norm”. The gold standard for this will always be the original Crackdown for me.

And sometimes they can be dumb and pointless. Using a specific skill 200 times (I’m looking at you, Tales of Xillia) isn’t proving anything other than your own stubbornness and/or boredom threshold. Consider whether or not performing some sort of repetitive task like this is actually helping you to enjoy the game, or if you just feel obliged to do it. If the latter, sod it. A Platinum trophy isn’t worth souring your experience with a game by doing something that you wouldn’t do if the trophy wasn’t there.

If you have somewhat involuntary, compulsive tendencies in this regard and find yourself pursuing boring trophies just because they’re there… consider playing on Switch where the option exists. No trophies to worry about there! Just enjoy the game as you see fit.

Ditch the disclaimers and take pride in what you enjoy

You know what you like, so don’t be afraid to talk about it and share it with everyone — and, crucially, don’t be afraid to do so without adding disclaimers and caveats. Take pride in what you enjoy and don’t feel shame or embarrassment over it.

I’m always much more interested to hear from someone who has genuine, unconditional passion and enthusiasm for something rather than someone who rattles off a list of common “flaws” that clearly don’t matter to them, but which they feel obliged to mention because everyone else does.

If something really does affect your enjoyment, by all means mention it. But you’re under no obligation to simply cite popular criticisms you don’t necessarily agree with just because they’re popular. If you don’t give a shit about Senran Kagura’s bouncing boobies — or perhaps you even like them — you don’t need to “acknowledge how problematic the game is” before praising it. If you enjoy a game that runs below 30fps and found that the frame rate did not affect your enjoyment of the game one way or the other, you don’t need to talk about it.

It’s okay to just like — even love — things. It can be fun and interesting to analyse and criticise things in detail — but more often than not, it’s absolutely fine to just say “I like this” and leave it at that… or indeed, to focus on those specific things that you like about it.

The world is filled with enough negativity and cynicism these days. Switch off once in a while and just enjoy something, for yourself and no-one else, unconditionally. You’ll be surprised how happy it makes you.

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.

The ’80s were a strange time, particularly for Atari, who, it seems, were never quite sure how to release or market things properly.

One of their well-received arcade games received an official port to the Atari 2600 and 5200, and the latter version then ended up on the 8-bit Atari computers. Unusually, however, this was published via the Atari Program Exchange or APX, which more commonly published consumer-submitted games rather than licensed ports.

That game was Kangaroo, and it’s an enjoyable single-screen platformer with lots of monkey-punching and fruit-grabbing. It also used to terrify me as a kid and I can’t remember why…

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

Having established that we are well and truly in isekai territory, Arnice, Christophorus and Rio appear to have a lot of work ahead of them.

For now, it seems, their best course of action is to go along with the furry inhabitants of this other world. These strange individuals appear to not only be trying to restore the life and colour to their broken world, but also are locked in a war for outright supremacy and dominion.

The struggle for the throne begins with a skirmish on Zack Island, of Dead or Alive Xtreme fame, and sees Arnice and co getting to know their rival forces a little better.