nuskadamo

[scritta fresca oggi questa]

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae could be equated to all sorts of things, really.

It could pass off as a vertical slice, created by a small team of developers and meant to be seen only by few suits in a publishing firm, from which said team is hoping to receive the fundings necessary to finish the project. It features a greatly limited amounts of assets, it's unpolished and not all of the ideas have been properly figured out, but the intended audience is fully aware of this and will analyze it not for what it is, but for what it'll be if they were to give it a chance.

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae could also remind you of a low budget game from the 7th generation of consoles, something you would have picked up from the used section at a Game Stop for 19 bucks, maybe hoping that you came across a hidden gem. Whichever way you look at it, it's cheap and unremarkable, but maybe that's exactly what drew you in.

Have you ever found yourself playing a game from an anime you never heard of? Very often the charm of the source material gets lost in translation, and not just in the literal sense. Whether it's the limited technology, the lack of resources or the lack of care, if you don't have a context for these supposedly important scenes happening as you're playing, you'll never understand the weight they have in the original form, and you'll feel robbed in a sense. "There has to be more to this", a sentence that applies to the example i just made, as well as Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae. There HAS to be more to this.

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae is impressively competent for being made by such a small group of people. Does that matter? You can look at the details in the character models and their animations and think to yourself "whoever made this must be really good", but if you lacked the context of this being an indie game made by pretty much 3 people, would you instead think "i really like what i'm looking at"? Do you like the dishwater enemy designs, or the incredibly basic environments, or the anime girls that you couldn't pick out of a lineup? Do you remember any of the music? Did the story leave an impression on you? If you answered yes to any of those questions you're a very bad liar.

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae does have a fairly complex combat system and does feel mostly smooth to play, but even that aspect is not without its flaws. When you spend your currency to learn a special move, make sure to upgrade it immediately, as most of them won't allow you to chain them to anything in their first level, which is pretty much worse than not having them at all, since they all require directional inputs and they're very easy to accidentally trigger. No effort has been made in distinguishing which attacks can be blocked or not, a very cool feature especially when you're trying to figure out the patterns of any of the 5 bosses, 2 being rematches, or when any of the 4 enemy types in total (i'm not counting recolors) catch you off guard. The multiplier next to the life bar goes completely unexplained in the tutorial; it's easy to understand it's purpose so it's not a huge deal, but you'd think the translators would think to explain what those japanese characters mean, no?

I liked Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae. By no means this is a good game, but i did like it. It reminded me how much i liked this genre and made me wonder why it's been so long since i've last played a Ninja Gaiden or a Devil May Cry, the thrill of being stuck at a hard boss, learning its patters bit by bit and using that knowledge to beat it in the end. Good shit.

100 megs for in download size is genuinely impressive regardless of how little content there is to chew on, got me scared that i accidentally downloaded a malware of some kind.

[sono nato nella generazione sbagliata, direbbe un adolescente sotto un video musicale dei beatles]

You know what? Fuck it, i'm giving Activision Anthology the full fiver. It may not have the amount of features and content that Atari 50 has, but i'm not gonna fault a PS2 game from 2002 for not having save states, instead i'll just praise the stellar selection of games and great persentation.
I turned off the fantastic but limited OST baked in and replaced it with my own 80's Spotify playlist and spent a downright blissful couple hours, boomers had it so good. Oh, to live at a time when this experience was part of the cultural zeitgeist...
I saw someone here put their high-scores in their reviews for Atari/Arcade stuff and i'm gonna steal that idea for this batch of games. Brace yourselves for some unimpressive numbers.

Skiing
You skii down the snowy mountain, avoiding obstacles and nailing all checkpoints in the shortest time possible, simple and clean. That's the way this game is making me feel tonight.
Like with yesterday's Enduro, light input taps are more optimal than holding directions and it was fun to see how few taps i could get away with for a satisfactory score.
Not a flaw, but damn... if you miss a checkpoint you already lose several seconds off of the final result cathcing up, why did they think it was fair to give penanlties on top of that??
High Score: 35:56, Game 1. Right after this one i'll remember about the multiple Game modes on all Atari games and try to see which one seems more up my speed.

Kabobber
This is one of those long extinct games that required a thorough reading of the manual in order to truly know what you're doing, deceptively full of rules and mechanics in spite of the simple hardware they played in. Once you figure out what's going on, Kabobber becomes a fairly straightforward game about chasing down a blob while avoiding other blobs with your own group of little bobs. The game is over when you run out of units, which can be replenished by defeating certain enemies, enemies that you carefully need to attack when their mouth if closed. This may seem simple on paper, but when you're running against the clock inside in a grid full of moving obstacles it actually turns into quite the fun challenge. Highly recommended.
High Score: 9020, Game 1 (Game 2 just starts you off later in the loop)

Barnstorming
Golly, this is just like those 2D infinite runners you see so often on cellular phones! But how's one supposed to enjoy it without the constant demands to make purchases with real life money, and where are the ad breaks?
The courses are pre-determined and finite depending the Game modes, and you don't die when you bump into an obstacle, instead just slowing down a bit. Barnstorming is more about memorizing a path and optimizing it time after time rather than quickly adapting to a given situation; i don't believe one style is better than the other, but it's refreshing to see a "runner" game that isn't "infinite" for once. I never played Geometry Dash because it's a phone game.
High Score: 1:04:06, Game 2. This took me way longer than i'd like to admit.

Laser Blast
Looking at the cover and the screenshot on tv i thought for sure this was gonna be an Asteroids clone, only to be surprised by how the game puts you on the perspective of the ship flying above, instead of the 3 cannons of the ground that you'll be tasked to destroy.
Both you and the targets can slightly rotate the direction of your shots, but it's a bit clunky to do with the limited inputs of the 2600, being mainly a mean to increase the difficulty, which sits at quite a high level on average. I do like how once you get hit you can maneuver where you're gonna crash for some last second extra points.
High Score: I got to 1620 on Game 2 by complete fluke and couldn't sniff the 1300 since no matter how hard i tried.

Seaquest
A game that is simple on appearance and gameplay but has a lot of small details that positively contribute to the experience. Seaquest is a single screen shooter that asks you to save divers from a storm of hungry sharks and whatever else (they made this when people still thought sharks were dangerous, lol) whilst making sure your air reserve is always full by swimming to the surface. Saving divers individually doesn't net you any point, you have to grab 6 at once and send them to the surface, which adds to the challenge given you gotta do this with a limited air reserve, and while sharks can't eat the divers, they can send them running out of the screen.
High Score: 11530 on Game Mode 1, the only single player mode available.

[altre recensioni per Backloggd in arrivo per sta settimana]

I was starting to get a bit tired of the Atari 50 game selection in spite of my seemingly endless hunger for anything ancient and crusty, and the Capcom Arcade Stadium stuff, while quite good on average, suffers a lot from how frustrating the arcade format can be, so i went and booted up the Activision Anthology for the first time in a second, curious to see if i'd find an even bigger appreciation for this collection than i did around 7 months ago when this passion of mine was still in its inception. Short answer: i think i may have to increase the score by half a star LMFAO.
Activision at one point was the shit, the bomb. At one point Activision actually cared. What a fall from grace.
Have some quick reviews.

Commando
Fucked up on multiple levels that this is wayyy better than the arcade version. Difficulty is still hard as nails, but way more manageable than the OG as you don't have to deal with 20 enemies at once shooting at you from all directions. Graphics are good for the 2600, the soldier animations are a bit garbled but there's a good amount of detail all over and it even keeps the jingle which is a rarity for this console.
The grenades do remain useless and their direction is still locked right above you, but at least killing someone with them grants you extra points and you can destroy some obstacles with them, which wasn't the case in the arcade i believe.

Enduro
It's a racing game on a 2D console without Mode 7, which means it plays like all other racing games on 2D consoles without Mode 7. Well, that's not entirely true: while the formula doesn't do anything revolutionary, the sprite scaling, the smoothness in which the road changes direction, the sense of speed, the unusually bouncy physics and that trademark 60 fps of the 2600 all work to make Enduro really fun to play.
I found myself giving the action button multiple fast taps rather than keeping it pressed, as it's a much better way to control your movement.
My only complaint is the foggy sections where you can't see half of the road ahead... they don't make the game more challenging, just frustrating.

Chopper Commando
What the fuck. This is Fantasy Zone, 4 whole years before Fantasy Zone. The gameplay premise of a side scrolling shooter where you can move on both sides freely inside a circular map and you're tasked to kill all enemies before going to the next level... it's literally the same, minus the bosses and the fancy colors. Maybe Chopper Commando wasn't even the first to have this specific gameplay loop but i can't think of anything that plays like it from before '82.
The camera is a bit too prone to making you hug the side you're facing for my tastes, otherwise you're in for a simple good time and i appreciate the detail of the minimap down below to keep track of where the remaining enemies not on screen are.

H.E.R.O.
This one is from much later into the console's lifespan, having a port for the 7600 as well, and you can tell right away because it tries to do many things in theory you shouldn't ask from a joystick with a single button on it.
In H.E.R.O. you can shoot, that's pretty straightforward, you can hold down to place bombs that will destroy obstacles and such, and you can hold up for way longer than necessary to use a really janky jetpack. This is a reasonable control scheme but it needed some serious polish to truly work and likely does play a lot better on the 7600.
Even without all these logistical complications, the level design is complete bullshit and you're guaranteed to instantly die a ton to all types of cheap traps whenever you fall down a level or the lights get magically turned off and you can't see shit.

Fishing Derby
About what you'd expect from a title like that: a fishing competition that can be either played in local multiplayer or against a CPU. The deeper under underwater the fish you pick is, the higher the score you'll earn, but WOAH be careful dude! A big shark is looking to snatch it off of you!
This is a simple game, easy to pick up and probably very fun in multiplayer, but when you play solo i sense a bit of a bias from the shark towards me. Skill issue, maybe?
I like how the thread of the fishing rod is animated, it almost feels like it has proper physics rather than just using pre-drawn sprites, the way the water gently moves up and down in waves is also a nice touch. The sprites of the fellers in charge of the fishing are janky as hell, but in a good way.