This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

WiZMan’s World Re;Try feels like a Nintendo DS game, which is not meant as a negative. It might be on the Switch and Playstation 5 now, two systems far more high-powered than Nintendo’s dual-screen handheld, but new skins on old bones do not betray the era it released in, nor its spiritual relation to the idea of “Nintendo DS RPG.” It has complexities and intrigue, it experiments with some levels of freedom that did not exist in previous eras of role-playing games, it expects a baseline level of knowledge of the genre and its workings, and it tries to marry multiple genres of RPG together into one — the marrying of Playstation-era visuals with Playstation 2-era advances in structure was what the DS was all about in terms of its RPGs, which also tended to scale back the sheer volume of hours required to complete the games from its PS2 inspirations, given the portable nature of their platform. It’s not quite a standout, either — few DS RPGs actually were — but if you have a very particular itch, WiZMan’s World Re;Try is going to scratch it for dozens of hours.

Wizman’s World, originally released by Jaleco in 2009 on the DS in Japan, is presented as a turn-based RPG with character customization and dungeon-crawling elements. The latter feels like a stretch, since there aren’t that many items or different layouts for the dungeons, and they certainly are not overly complex. The maps, for instance, are presented as squares and rectangles with connective points on something of a grid, and that’s plenty to follow along with if you’re attempting to pick a direction. There is only so much to explore in each, though, you will want to in order to not miss the occasional hidden, higher-powered enemy with better rewards, or the items that are scattered around waiting for you to collect. What gives the game its dungeon-crawl feeling is that you will occasionally be ejected from whatever venue you are exploring, due to instability that threatens your survival. When you reenter, the dungeon will look different than it did, even if only slightly: different music, different backgrounds, some different enemy placements and types, access to some chests or areas you could not previously access. This isn’t, say, a roguelike setup, where the dungeon would be completely different a la Shiren the Wanderer, but it adds some variety to otherwise basic areas to explore.

It’s a dungeon-crawler for lack of a better term, is the short way of putting it. The part of the game that stands out far more is its character customization, but getting to that will take a little bit of backstory and preamble. You control Claus, a young mage in training whose master has disappeared with nary a word nor trace, in a world its inhabitants are trapped within. They are all living in one town, Wizarest, which is isolated from the rest of the world. Surrounded by dungeons with seemingly no exit, unable to escape this perimeter, the mages are unclear as to why they are even placed here, and why the small world they do inhabit is closing in around them — the dungeons are unstable, continually “collapsing” as they lose energy, making them even more dangerous to traverse and threatening Wizarest with its own eventual collapse.

Image credit: Clear River Games

Claus is a silent protagonist, but there is plenty of chatter coming from your party. He is joined by three homunculi that all appear, in size and look, as faeries. They were the creation of Claus’ missing master, Giselle, and have been tasked with helping him continue to grow in his abilities and mastery of magic in her absence. The homunculi, on their own, do not have any abilities or power or battle expertise. They can be fused with the souls of defeated monsters, however, which gives them a battle form.

These souls have multiple characteristics to consider. Some enemies are far more skilled in physical attacks than in magical powers. Each has an element that they are associated with, which matters in this game where you have to remember at all times that water bests fire, fire is strong against wind, wind beats earth, and earth trumps water. Some of that might not make as much immediate sense as, say, Pokémon-type weaknesses can, but the logic matters less than the fact that those are the alignments you have to remember if you have any hope of beating a single boss in Wizman’s World.

Standard battles are a simple affair, almost overly so. You can get through the vast, vast majority of them without using any special skills whatsoever, just smacking enemies around with standard attacks until you’ve pummeled them into submission. It can actually make battles a bit tedious after awhile, but if you skip over fighting or avoid leveling up, you won’t defeat the bosses, which require you to not only have mastered how the battles work, but also to be able to buff your characters with Claus’ offensive and defensive spells, to have a homunculi able to heal at a moment’s notice, and to be aligned, elementally speaking, in opposition to whatever the guardian of a dungeon is. If the guardian is weak to wind and you are not only lacking in wind-powered monsters but also have water-based monsters in your party? You are probably going to die.

You also need to fight in order to earn money to power up your fusions with monster souls. Buying some equipment for your characters is important and costly, as well, but you do this far less often, since equipment only refreshes after a dungeon is completed, and Claus is the only one that requires a weapon and armor to go along with accessories — and the accessories update less regularly, with many of them found out in the wild, anyway. Those fusions, though, get pricey: base fusions are free so long as you have the monster soul you want — which again, you get from fighting monsters — but you can also combine the soul with various items you have found or purchased along the way, to enhance the stats of the resulting creation. Have a physically-minded monster you want to make even stronger? If you have an item that further boosts attack, then you can! It just will also cost you thousands in the game’s currency to do so, especially as you get deeper into the game and the items that cost double-digits are an inefficient waste as far as upgrades go.

Image credit: Clear River Games

The combo system will consume a considerable amount of your thought as you play. Not just what, but when. The more you fuse monster souls with your homunculi, the more experience you gain to increase your fusion level, which makes future fusions more powerful. You need to fuse with new souls to get the most experience, however, but each fusion wipes the items you paid to fuse with from the record, too, meaning you are starting fresh each time in that regard. So, you might have a more powerful soul to fuse with, but maybe the base stats are lower than the powered soul you had already fused with. However, you won’t gain access to new skills to utilize, and more powerful monsters you face as the game progress leave behind more powerful souls. Tricky!

There is a workaround to continue to grow, at least for a time, while not giving up on a fusion you like, though. If you fuse with the soul of the monster you are already fused with, your stats all get a boost — just don’t fuse with items while you do this, too, since every fusion only includes the items attached to that one, specifically. So, if you have five of one soul, for instance, fuse four times with it and then on the fifth pay to use those items you have for the best possible version of that monster fusion you can perform at the time. This is especially helpful when setting up for a boss when you have a pretty good idea of what element they are going to be thanks to their location.

Image credit: Clear River Games

You will find yourself experimenting with alignments — that you have three homunculi but four elements to work with makes for some puzzles to solve, in this regard. However, you can carry over two skills from your previous fusion whenever you fuse again, meaning, you can have a water monster with fire spells, letting you figure out ways to account for the lack of a particular element if you are trying to stay balanced. In addition, Claus has his own slate of elemental spells, as well as non-elemental magic that does less damage at its peak than spells that attack a weakness, but more damage than spells and skills enemies are elementally resistant to would.

The battles themselves can get tedious due to a lack of challenge — there is a quantity over quality aspect to standard fights — but there are a couple of bits that can help them stay engaging. Combos are a key to success, especially against bosses, as each successive attack performed by your party extends a chain that gives you bonuses. Your attack power and agility can increase, and you can begin to recover SP — magic points, to be more generic here — with longer chains. That last bit is especially useful since Claus has his hit points and SP recover after every battle, but the homunculi’s SP only restores when they gain a level or have returned to Wizarest to rest. This can lead to not wanting to have the homunculi spend their SP on skills, which is what makes the battles a little too same-y and tedious on occasion, since you’re just doing basic attacks, but if you can string together a lengthy chain you do at least get the excitement of feeling like you’re putting something together there.

Another way to cut down on the sheer volume of fights is to stack battles. If multiple enemies on the map notice you and chase you down, you have the potential to fight them at once. You would finish the first battle and then transition immediately into the second without a chance to recover your HP or SP, but as a reward you gain more experience points. The more battles within a battle, the higher that bonus rate, as well — try to avoid fighting a single battle when you can, and stack two or three or four foes at a time. It makes the battles more difficult, but Wizman’s World’s battles need that difficulty to keep everything feeling engaging. Stacking battles together also allows for some massive chains, too, so if you can time things right — use the visible turn layout to prioritize foes attacking next to defeat them and keep the chain going, then when you transition to the next battle you get a few turns to start the whole process over, only with an enhanced attack power and agility already aiding you.

Each dungeon has the same basic setup: you enter, you get sent back to the beginning a few times as collapse is threatened, you eventually find the magical stones that let you setup the mid-dungeon warp points that allow you to go back to town for items, healing, and fusion without having to restart the entire dungeon upon your return, and then you get to the guardian of the area. Each guardian, when defeated, will have left behind a near-death citizen of Wizarest that you have already met in your travels. Here is where one of the game’s promotional bullet points occurs: you can either save this character with the energy released by the dead guardian of the dungeon, or use that energy to restore some balance to the dungeon itself. The game does not chastise you for your choice, and neither is presented as “correct” either before or after you make the call, but the game’s story is altered depending on which route you take. After all, the characters get to live or they get to die, and as they interact with you and often have some seeming importance to the story or to someone within the story, that will mean something to those hoping for their return. And, you know. The dungeons are collapsing and all, so giving them energy to slow or stop that process, or saying hey whatever let them fall, has its own consequences.

Image credit: Clear River Games

The story is only so engaging as you play, though. The real star of the show, as mentioned, is the monster fusion. That there are homunculi-specific versions of each monster in the game is a lovely touch — that required a ton of sprite work, and oftentimes the homunculi version of a monster looks better than the original, because it can’t “just” be this grotesque figure or creature, but has to be a true fusion of these purposefully attractive fairy-like characters and a literal monster. Even outside of the look, though, adding your own touches of customization to create some real heavy hitters you’ll find yourself attached to is a nifty reward and reason to keep at it. If you enjoy monster fusion in games like Dragon Quest Monsters or Shin Megami Tensei, there are enough similarities here to, as said before, scratch a particular itch.

There a couple of features exclusive to the revised Wizman’s World, which is the WiZman’s World Re;Try release that came out on February 18, 2026, developed by Clear River Games and Gravity. The soundtrack has been completely reworked by soLi, as it is both rearranged and includes songs that were not in the original 2009 edition of the game. The music is a standout, as well, and not just when some very clear Falcom influences make themselves heard. The game has also been reworked graphically, with new sprites, enhanced 2D graphics, everything setup to work on one screen instead of two, and of course, the game is now localized, as well. Whereas the original was a Japanese exclusive, the Clear River Games release also includes English, Korean, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese.

Wizman’s World is very much a systems RPG. If you are looking for an engrossing story or deep dives into character and backstory, this is not the game that will give you that. If you want to play around with customization, though, and attempt to master a battle system, and hear some guitars riffing while you do all of that, then Wizman’s World can give you a few dozen hours of those very things. Just be sure to engage with the game in the way that it is optimized for, or else it might feel a little tedious: if you have the patience to focus on exploring fusions, and working to build up both chains and long stacks of enemies to fight in lengthier battles, however, this will all feel more rewarding than if you just try to ram through.

A Nintendo Switch review copy was provided by Clear River Games, and played on Nintendo Switch 2.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

At the time of Alex Kidd’s introduction into the world of Sega, the developer was known far more for its arcade output than anything else. That was just the way of things in the first half of the 1980s, however: Nintendo was also known more for its arcade releases than anything else until the Famicom was a hit that allowed them to shift to the living room. Why let others reap all the benefits of a Donkey Kong port when you can just sell the console it lives on yourself, you know?

The introduction of Super Mario Bros. helped take Nintendo and the Famicom to the next level. Understandably, when Sega came out with its Mark III home console in Japan — the basis for what would be known elsewhere as the Sega Master System — and Mario was a hit, the bosses wanted something that would be just as popular in order to drive Sega’s own home business. The designer of 1986’s Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Kotaro Hayashida, has admitted in interviews that the game was an attempt to create something that would resonate with audiences the same way that Super Mario Bros. had.

“Well, it started about one year after Sega had split its development sections into two, arcade and console,” Hayashida told sega.jp back in 2002 (translation by Shmuplations). “Super Mario Bros. was already a big hit by then, and the Famicom was building a rock-solid foundation as a game console. Sega had just put out the new Sega Mark III, and they tasked us in the Second Development unit to create something that would sell as well as Mario. And so we set out to develop a new action game.”

While the Second Development team at Sega wanted to make something as popular as Mario, they also wanted to try to differentiate from it. In some ways, this was a strength — Alex Kidd rode around in vehicles sometimes, and his offense was punch-based, while his projectile attack was very different from Mario’s fireballs. In other ways, well. Hayashida is blunt about some choices. “…we also reversed the jump and attack buttons from Mario. At the time we thought we were doing something ‘different’… but we were mistaken. Now when I look back on it, it’s just nonsense. And it’s harder to play that way. (laughs)”

The reversed buttons — the left jumps, the right attacks — are a nightmare if you’re used to things being the other way around, and why wouldn’t you be at this point? A decade before Super Mario 64 convinced developers of how players should expect to hold the Nintendo 64’s three-pronged controller, Super Mario Bros. had gotten audiences used to a specific button arrangement on the two-button NES pad. Once you rewire your brain in the present for Alex Kidd’s setup, though, it’s not really an issue. Luckily you don’t even need to do that in modern re-releases of the game, like the Switch’s Sega Ages edition from 2019 — you can use the Y and B buttons in a way that makes more traditional sense to your fingers and brain in 2026, rather than a reversed B and A setup.

Here’s the basic setup of Alex Kidd in Miracle World: Kidd is a martial artist from the planet Aries, dressed in a red jumpsuit, who for some reason on the North American cover is drawn like he’s a small blonde child wearing red overalls. Kidd sets out to save King Thunder and his kingdom from Janken the Great, who is named thus because the early boss fights in this game are with his henchman, whom you play rock-paper-scissors against — Janken is the Japanese name for that game. It is precisely as odd as it sounds, but in a good way. It can be frustrating to lose a game of rock-paper-scissors to a boss, but luckily each of the three henchmen is named after either rock, paper, or scissors, and have repeatable patterns stemming from utilizing the weakness to their namesake first, i.e. Stone Head kicks things off with scissors, so use rock against him. You will face this trio more than once, but the second time has its own tell, too, in that you use their namesake against them first. So it’s not impossible to figure out by any means, you just have to pay attention and get that first guess right, because if you don’t the repeatable patterns won’t be used. Oh, and there’s a “Telepathy Ball” item that lets you see what your opponents are thinking, too, which you should save for the later matches where it’s a little tougher to guess what’s coming.

Rather than jumping on enemies’ heads, Alex Kidd uses a special punch he’s trained himself for that allows him to punch through rocks. If you can punch through a rock, you can also punch monsters in the face. Beyond this punch, there are also a number of powers you can find or buy in shops along the way, and then use at your discretion, which differentiates Alex Kidd from Super Mario Bros. in a non-aggravating way. The Power Bracelet lets you fire off a projectile that can wipe out entire rows of rocks and blocks in front of you at once, which can be useful for defeating enemies at a distance or just for clearing a path that otherwise might be difficult or tedious to clean up with one punch at a time. There are two magic capsules, with A creating a bunch of smaller copies of Alex Kidd to help him fight enemies, and B creates a barrier around Kidd — the downside to the latter is that he can’t punch foes or rocks while he’s protecting himself, but it’s useful for walking over spikes, for instance. Teleport Powder does no such thing, but it does allow for Alex Kidd to be temporarily invincible against enemy attacks (but not spikes!) while still being able to fight. That one is helpful against the bosses which you will eventually have to punch instead of just beat in rock-paper-scissors.

The second time around, Stone Head decides a round of rock-paper-scissors isn’t enough, and that he has to much more literally beat you with rock.

Alex Kidd also rides in various vehicles, which can either be found or purchased from shops using the game’s currency, baum. The motorbike can jump and drive straight through rocks, allowing you to quickly get through some stages or just run over enemies in your path. The Peticopter is a small helicopter-like vehicle that Alex Kidd pedals to move: this feels a lot like trying to play Flappy Bird, in that you’re pressing the button or releasing it to float up and down, respectively, and if you touch anything the copter falters and you’re back on your feet again. And then there’s the boat, which is basically just the motorbike but on the water, in terms of what it does and how you lose it. Figuring out when you should deploy these vehicles that you have stored up in your inventory is part of the fun and strategy of the game, and luckily the stages where you’re expected to use them tend to have plenty of bags of cash floating around or hiding in blocks for you to collect, helping you make up for spending money for these vehicles in the first place.

These vehicles help break up the game and how you approach it, and that they are optional is also a nice touch — if you fall into the water in a Peticopter level where you could be flying above it, for instance, you now have to navigate underwater by swimming, which has its own distinct feeling since Alex Kidd is constantly trying to float to the surface, meaning you need to control his ascent and descent there as a default instead of ever just kind of floating in place. Be warned, though, that even though you can buy vehicles, you will want to keep an eye on your available cash reserves, at least if you’re playing an older version of the game. In order to continue after running out of the ones the game provides, there is a button combination to press to gain another continue — the catch is that it costs you 400 baum to do this. The Sega Ages version of the game removes the secret and just lets you continue without having to know the code.

The Peticopter makes you do a whole lot of floating up and down in order to avoid obstacles, which will instantly end your time flying around.

You will need to continue at some point, because Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a tough game. All of its little quirks and depth can be learned and mined, but a single hit kills you. In Super Mario Bros., this is only true if you don’t have a mushroom or flower powering you up; hell, even in Ghosts ‘n Goblins you get hit twice before dying. Vehicles at least serve this purpose, in that they are a free hit where you lose them instead of a life, but you don’t have vehicles against bosses, and some of the later stages are much longer than the early ones, as well as more fiendishly designed and stuffed with increased danger.

There was basically never a universe where Alex Kidd in Miracle World was going to be this widely popular game in the way that Super Mario Bros. was — while Super Mario Bros. is plenty difficult, it also has that arcade-style ramp up where by the time it gets too tough, you’re already completely sucked in and ready to pop another quarter in. And you didn’t even need quarters for that at home, just the desire to give it another go. Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a lot of fun, but you have to discover the fun in a different, less obvious way, too. None of this is a negative, to be clear. It’s just that it’s pretty easy to see why Sonic the Hedgehog managed to pull Sega even with Mario and Nintendo, albeit briefly, where Alex Kidd did not. “This game is for sickos and everyone should like it but does not” is basically Sega in a nutshell, though, so really, Alex Kidd still feels right at home despite being basically forgotten about for decades.

The Sega Ages release of Alex Kidd in Miracle World adds in some new interstitial art, such as this look at Alex’s reaction to Stone Head detaching his noggin for a fight.

What’s also a little curious about Alex Kidd’s whole deal is that Sega was not committed to the idea of his games being any one thing. Miracle World was the only one of Alex Kidd’s games to play this way for a few years, when the lone Sega Genesis release, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, came out in 1989. Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars released in arcades first, and included a timer and co-op. Alex Kidd: High-Tech World is the Super Mario Bros. 2 of the series, in that it was a different game first — an adaptation of the manga Princess Anmitsu — and had no connection to other characters or locations from the series to that point. And then there is Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, a crossover with Shinobi that features Alex Kidd but plays much more like Shinobi. Hey, they’re both series about martial artists, it’s fine. I like to imagine that it became an Alex Kidd game because someone at Sega saw the original spin-off project title, Shinobi Kid, up on a whiteboard, and then walked up and added another “d” to the end to cheers and applause.

The Sega Ages release is the way to go with Alex Kidd in the present, if you want to play a slightly modified version of the original. It has new pieces of art that introduce each level, adds an FM Synth soundtrack option as an alternative to the original PSG one, and a mode where you are able to rewind five seconds back. For those of you who turned up your nose at having to remember rock-paper-scissors patterns or think having to replay those fights would be a nightmare, the rewind mode is for you. And if you want something completely remade for modern times, there is Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, but be warned: the positive reviews were a normal amount of positive, while the negative ones were brutal. The controls were a constant source of complaint, and overall the project was negatively received enough that I did not bother picking it up and playing it to verify any of the claims. Hey, there are only so many hours in a day, I already had the Sega Ages re-release, and there are other Alex Kidds to experience, anyway.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World is very much a game that feels like it’s from 1986, which can be a positive or a negative depending on who you are and what you like out of games. It has its rough edges, sure, but there is a fun, very Sega game here that is worth experiencing just to get a sense of those early console days of the company. There is a bit of a feeling out process here, of throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what sticks, and the answer ended up being “very little” in a number of ways. Again, though, isn’t that very Sega, too? Listen, it wasn’t the more outlandish Genesis titles that had it neck-and-neck with the Super Nintendo, and the quality of the libraries of the Saturn and Dreamcast had less than nothing to do with how many of those consoles were sold. Alex Kidd in Miracle World has its flaws, but they are no reason to ignore it, especially now when the Sega Ages release can help you smooth over some of that without taking away from what the game was and is.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This one will take a little unpacking, for those who aren’t familiar with Compile’s whole deal. Our idea of what an independent game developer is these days is sometimes tough to pin down, but Compile was certainly a prototype way back in the 1980s and 90s. The Japanese studio released tons of games for consoles and handhelds and Japanese PCs, but they weren’t all major releases or handled by big publishers by any means. Compile regularly self-published, but did so most regularly with smaller, niche releases for Japanese computers like the MSX2 and NEC’s PC series.

These games, in many cases, were released as part of Compile’s subscription disk magazine, Disc Station. This is where the dungeon crawler Madou Monogatari first released — as part of Disc Station Special: Christmas Edition in 1989 — which in turn means Disc Station is also the origin of worldwide puzzle sensation Puyo Puyo, even if indirectly. Compile used the bi-monthly (and later monthly) Disc Station to release some games the studio was messing around with and experimenting with, a la Madou Monogatari, or sometimes just to put out something that was probably going to be difficult to find a publisher for given its short length or oddness or lack of commercial appeal — for instance, it seemed like Compile stopped making shooting games, or STG, after large swaths of the developers left to form other studios like Raizing, but new shooters like 1996’s PC-9801 release Rude Breaker were just coming out in Disc Station instead of to retail.

Sometimes Compile would iterate on an existing concept of theirs, or introduce a new one, via Disc Station. One such example is the Disc Station’s 1990 action-puzzle game Nyanpi, where you play as a cat walking around stages to try to reach balloons to pop, and once you manage to pop them all you make your way to the trash can that signifies the level is complete. Nyanpi originally had 40 levels, but there have also been expanded ProjectEgg releases of Nyanpi over the last 21 years for the MSX2 and Windows that included all the additional stages that were created over the ensuing years and Disc Stations, titled Nyanpi Collection. This could be important for later on, so remember that bit.

Carbuncles, plural.

Compile also liked to make games featuring its mascot, Carbuncle, whether they were entirely new or reskins that revisited an existing game. MSX2 game Carbuncle Pi is the latter: it’s Nyanpi gameplay featuring Carbuncle instead of a cat, and the trash can has been replaced with his buddy Arle from Madou Monogatari and Puyo Puyo, as well (lol). In this Disc Station release from 1991 (issue #24), the balloons are now red gems, and some of the cat-centric level design is now built around Carbuncle or random terms you might associate with Compile games, like the one that spells out “BLASTER BURN” — another Disc Station release by Compile — with its platforms. Oh, and when you collect every gem in a stage, you hear Compile’s little extend jingle from the Aleste games playing, which is a treat and not just because here you experience that without having to dodge a ton of bullets to do so.

The gameplay is simple enough to explain, but it does ramp up in difficulty — it’s the kind of puzzle game where, if you can’t see at least an inkling of the solution in advance or can’t put together a plan through trial and error, you’re going to struggle. You walk around as Carbuncle, and you have three moves. You can jump — but only straight up, not side to side — you can fall, and you can push, so long as the path for what you’re pushing isn’t obstructed. You need to take into consideration the gems for more than just collecting them, as you might need to use them as platforms in order to reach other gems you otherwise won’t be able to get, or to get to another platform you have to manipulate in order to make that part of the stage accessible after you do pick up the gem.

The very first level (as well as the brief tutorial) puts you in a situation where you can’t collect all of the gems if you grab them in the wrong order, so it’s not like the game hides this from you. The whole game concept is built out of this kind of sorting out the order of operations, and later stages don’t necessarily have more gems to collect, but instead have harder-to-reach ones or additional complexity for how you’re even going to get to the one or two gems that are even present.

Mastering the jumping is going to be vital, because if you walk too far too quickly into a gem, you’re going to accidentally collect it. And if you needed it to climb elsewhere, well, you’ll just have to restart the level. Luckily, there are no lives or continues, and you can retry as many times as you need in order to get things right, but you can also cut down on the mistakes by holding down the proper button in order to keep Carbuncle rooted in place. This lets you better guide the when of your movement and jumps, which again, are straight up but allow you to reach a platform so long as it’s right there to your very direct left or right. Falling works similarly, in that you can only fall straight down, not at an angle, which makes the placement of platforms — whether inherent to the level or from your manipulation of them — vital to actually getting around even when you aren’t jumping.

A visual example might help.

This is round 19, the second-to-last stage of Carbuncle Pi, a little more than halfway into it after quite a bit of trial and error for positioning and a handful of gems already collected. You could just grab some gems from the start or close to it — you begin the stage at the bottom platform near the two to the left — but if you do so, you won’t be able to reach the far-left gem on the second row of platforms, since the far-left gem on the very bottom doubles as a platform. So, you have to work your way up through the maze of movable platforms, using each part of them at different points to progress, and then work your way back down once you’re at the right spot with the gems, before climbing back up to meet Arle and conclude the round.

Each stage deals with this kind of thing, where you have to figure out which gems are platforms and which ones are safe to collect, which way the movable platforms have to be pointing at any given moment in order to allow you to make your way through the stage, how to even reach some of those platforms to begin with, where to start, what to move now so that it impacts you later on — in stage 20, for example, if you shift the platforms on the right the wrong way to start, you’re going to be so mad at yourself about 90 seconds later when you get to the part where you needed them to be pointed a different way in order to collect the one gem that is otherwise inaccessible. Again: at least you get to reset as many times as you want!

To circle back to ProjectEgg for a moment, it’s D4 Enterprises online subscription service for playing old Japanese video games, especially old computer games released for platforms like the MSX or NEC’s PC series of computers, which they are able to do thanks to collecting the publishing and distribution and licensing rights of a whole bunch of these companies over the year. D4 owns the rights to most of the Compile library, and recently started dipping into the Disc Station vault in its console service for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, EggConsole. On Christmas Day in 2025, D4 released Carbuncle Pi to the EggConsole series; whether this is a way to get some version of Nyanpi gameplay out there or an introduction to it for a future release of the much larger Nyanpi Collection down the line is unknown, but either way: hey, Carbuncle Pi!

One benefit to the EggConsole edition of Carbuncle Pi is that you can use the save state or rewind functions if the idea of starting a stage over from scratch every time you mess up is just too much to handle. But it’s worth noting that the stages themselves are short, and that you can complete this entire game in one sitting if you have the patience for it as there are just the 20 levels. Of increasing, ramped-up difficulty that require you’re able to visualize a solution in advance or at least figure out where to properly start in order to get there, sure, but still just 20 total.

Right from the start, you’re hit with Carbuncle-themed design, as well as gems that have to be collected in a specific order lest you fail.

Carbuncle Pi is by no means the best or most robust experience that Compile ever put in Disc Station, but it’s a fun continuation of an existing idea that the vast majority of its current possible audience has no idea even exists. The translation from MSX2 controls to a gamepad went smoothly here, too, which is no surprise given how few inputs are necessary to play — you move Carbuncle and you jump, sometimes holding down a different button to keep him from moving first, and another button resets the stage, that’s the whole of it — and it’s not a game that required a translation in order to understand what’s happening. Any words that are here outside of the title screen logo are in English, anyway, and those just tell you what round you’re playing in and how many gems are left, anyway, the latter of which you could just see on-screen by counting yourself if that weren’t the case.

You should check this game out if you’re into puzzle games or obscurities at all — EggConsole games being priced at $6.49 helps compel that kind of experimentation — but I am curious about whether or not this is a preamble to an eventual Nyanpi Collection release, or if this is the way that D4 and EggConsole are going to handle the existence of this particular style of Compile puzzle in the west, or a way to capitalize on a known mascot among the kinds of sickos who are looking into EggConsole releases in the first place. The gameplay is identical, but there is so much more Nyanpi than there is Carbuncle Pi, and Carbuncle Pi was a lovely little weekend diversion, so here’s hoping that this is just the start of a whole lot more Compile action-puzzle in our lives.

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This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

One of the fun things about Wario — especially early on — is that Nintendo didn’t have a specific use case for the character. So he just sort of shows up in whatever an internal studio felt like putting him in, with no consistency necessary — it all just became who Wario is today in the present, decades later. Wario debuted in 1992 as an enemy of Mario’s in the Game Boy classic Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, but he wasn’t out there kidnapping princesses or trying to take over the world, so much as stealing Mario’s house while he was out stopping Bowser from doing those very things. It’s a big castle, Mario, you could have shared it with an old friend in need even if he does smell like garlic.

While created by Nintendo R&D1 and designed by Hiroki Kiyotake, Wario has starred in games developed by nine different studios, and for varying purposes. In 1993, after Super Mario Land 2, he landed in Game Freak’s puzzle-platformer Mario & Wario, dropping buckets on Mario’s head to impede his progress while flying around in a plane sometimes. He ended up as a playable character — in place of Bomberman — in the Hudson Soft-developed but Nintendo-published Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman!, which in Japan was just Bomberman GB, sans Wario. That was in 1994, which is also when the first Wario Land game — still attached to the Super Mario Land series — came out. That traditional — well, you know what I mean — platformer was handled by Nintendo R&D1, as they turned their villain into a playable protagonist for the first time.

Later that year, with Intelligent Systems at the helm, Wario was a villain once more in yet another genre. This time for taking over the Peaceful Woods. Mario couldn’t be bothered to deal with him, so Toad came to the rescue of the forest and its new signage in his own first starring role, years and years before he’d be ready for adventure after a promotion to Captain. That game would be Wario’s Woods, which Wario was clearly able to take with ease due to his air superiority.

Image credit: MobyGames

If you have never played Wario’s Woods before, you might still know it for something specific: it was the final licensed game released for the NES in North America, on December 10, 1994. It wouldn’t arrive in Europe until 1995, but it had actually come out in Japan much earlier in the year amid a serious rush of Wario titles, in mid-February. That was six months after Mario & Wario, and just under a month after Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Because it arrived on the scene much sooner in Japan, it wasn’t the final Famicom game, even if it bore that distinction for the NES: the last licensed Famicom game was Hudson Soft’s Adventure Island IV, which arguably should have featured Wario in order to continue to shake things up in that series even more. Really you could say that about most games, though.

(Of course, “last game” is one of those things that really requires the word “licensed” these days, given how many unlicensed releases exist for classic systems in the present, and for commercial purposes, even. Hello, 2024’s Changeable Guardian Estique. But the actual last licensed game for a system does signal that publishers of the time have officially moved on from a platform, so there’s merit in recognizing those lines, even if they are drawn in the sand to a degree.)

Because of the late release date, Wario’s Woods is also the lone NES game to be slapped with an ESRB rating. It’s a little bit of a coincidence, too: the previous slate of brand-new NES releases came in August of ‘94, when three licensed games all landed in a row to end what had been a very quiet year for the system very much replaced at that point by the 16-bit SNES and the 8-bit handheld Game Boy. Those titles were The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, The Incredible Crash Dummies, and The Jungle Book, which brought the NES’ release total in 1994 to all of 11 games. That August date is important, as the first wave of ESRB-rated games came out on September 16, and included the likes of DOOM on the 32X, Super Punch-Out!! for the SNES, and Donkey Kong Country, also for the SNES. There would be no NES games in September, or October, or November, and the only one to be released at all in a world with the ESRB in it was Wario’s Woods. So, it’s the lone NES game to pull a rating — it landed “Kids to Adults,” by the way, the predecessor of “E for Everyone”.

All of these little historical bits obscure that Wario’s Woods also released for the SNES, with 16-bit graphics, different sound, and also some differences in gameplay. What also obscures that it came out on the SNES is that Nintendo basically pretends that it did not. Because Animal Crossing on the GameCube included playable NES games, Wario’s Woods’ NES release was the only option. Later on through Virtual Console on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS, however, Nintendo chose to go with the NES edition of Wario’s Woods over the SNES one, and in the present, this trend has continued with Nintendo Switch Online. Why is that? It’s not clear — while at some point you could have assumed that the NES edition was placed on Virtual Console for being cheaper, the NES and SNES libraries being accessed through the same subscription tier of NSO makes that theory pointless in the present.

The SNES edition of Wario’s Woods features more and better-defined colors, as well as detailed backgrounds. Image credit: MobyGames

As for how Wario’s Woods plays, let’s start by saying that it’s very much a game that shows the severe limitations of the term “Tetris clone.” Remember, the “clone” terms were always about a lack of language to describe what you were seeing, which is why every first-person shooter was considered a DOOM clone, all the action-adventure titles were labeled Zelda clones, and anything involving blocks or equivalent thereof falling from the top of the screen to be cleared was a Tetris clone. Even in the case of a game where what’s falling is creatures and bombs, and the bombs are used to blow up the creatures, and also you control a character who physically walks around on the screen picking up said bombs and creatures to place them where you feel like after they have already fallen and touched the ground. Yeah, sure, it’s just like Tetris, whatever. That’s Wario’s Woods.

You control Toad, who will pick up the different colored creatures dropping from the top of the trees that the levels take place within, and plop them down where they can be cleared, either immediately or eventually. Toad can pick up one creature at a time, or a stack of them. He can run up the sides of those stacks, or get underneath pieces to pick them up from there, or hold up a bomb or creature above his head to get it in line for a clear somewhere you otherwise would not be able to reach with it. There are a number of little tricks to picking up pieces and moving Toad around and manipulating the environment, and you can learn them all through the Lessons mode, which details the various moves you can learn, lets you practice, and teaches you about Diamonds.

There are “A” moves, which are performed, as you probably could have guessed, with the A button. These are basically just the kinds of moves you can make to drop pieces into place to cause a clear, which requires three “blocks” of the same color in a row, side-to-side or vertical or diagonal, that includes at least one bomb. It shows you every possible move you can make with a grab and drop using the A button, including running up the side of a stack of creatures until you get to the piece you want to grab, which lets you, say, have Toad lift a specific color of creatures from a pile to be placed on the same color creatures or bomb elsewhere to clear them.

Then there are “B” moves, which use the B button and are less about grabbing entire stacks of creatures and more about grabbing singular creatures at a time. Press B to grab the creature in front of you at the bottom of a stack, instead of the entire thing — this lets you get a specific color in hand, but also has what was on top of said creature fall a level. You can create combinations where they didn’t exist if you’ve got an eye for these potential scenarios, where ripping a single Jenga piece out causes the whole thing to crash down in a way that’s productive instead of game-ending, basically.

You can also “Kick and Clear,” which involves holding down on the D-pad and pressing A — Toad will very literally kick whatever piece is directly in front of him and send it flying across the screen until it’s stopped by another piece. This is a more advanced move you’ll find yourself performing later on in order to more efficiently clear groups of creatures and bombs when there isn’t as much time to pick up a specific piece, move Toad, and then drop that piece where it can best be deployed. Boot it right across the screen to that same place instead when you can.

Requirements for clearing specific enemies are shown on the left side of the screen — here, one kind of enemy needs diagonal clears to be removed. Image credit: MobyGames

You can also press up on the D-pad and then press the A button to drop whatever piece you’re holding directly underneath you. You can walk right off of a stack holding a necessary color above you, and, while falling, line those pieces up so that they clear. You can clear multiple colors at once by setting up combos. And, most importantly for later on, you can clear five pieces in one go and earn a diamond of that color. While Diamonds can’t be picked up — Toad has a little struggle animation for when he attempts to move on — you can bring pieces to those Diamonds to clear the whole thing. Diamonds are a necessity as the game increases in speed, complexity, and the number of creatures, as clearing a line with a Diamond instead of with a bomb — a Diamond is the only scenario in which a bomb is not necessary for a clear — will eliminate every piece of that color.

The goal of each level is to clear it fully of enemies. It’s fine if there are bombs remaining in the play area at the end, so long as there aren’t any creatures still sitting there animating in place. Toad can die if he’s trapped beneath creatures, but you just lose a life when this happens — additional lives can be earned with 30 coins, the number of which you get at the end of a level is determined by your performance within it. Some creatures will require multiple blasts to clear, while others require a specific kind of clear, like a diagonal one. The ceiling will drop down when Wario and his bird buddy Pidgit show up, and you don’t want it to fall too far or it limits the space you have to work with in your play area.

What you’ll face also depends on what game mode you choose. The Round Game has two modes, an A and a B, and the B has boss fights within it. The A mode goes from level 1 to 99, and just ramps up the number of enemies, enemy types, and how many colors of those enemies are within as you go, but the B mode has bosses that will defeat Toad if they touch him. Which is a pain sometimes, as the bosses materialize and dematerialize and rematerialize, and if the latter happens on Toad, well. Hope you had some extra lives stored away. Earn clears while the boss is fully materialized to cause damage to it; after you take away all of its hit points this way, you can move on.

There is also a Time Race mode, which sees you pick four different levels at three different difficulties, while trying to clear them fast enough to earn specific ratings. Clear the whole slate of Hard levels in 18 minutes or less, and earn a Gold, that sort of thing. And then there’s the Vs. mode, which makes things like Diamonds important again since a clear with a Diamond will drop junk on your opponent’s side — it’s a different way of playing, but also the same strategies you’d use to clear things quickly and effectively in single-player can work here, since you’re still racing against a clock and trying to do so in the most effective way possible.

Wario’s Woods is one of those games that the people who are into it think it’s great and very different than plenty of other puzzlers out there — the wide variety of moves for Toad makes it feel very much like its own thing compared to other puzzlers, especially at the time, to the point you can argue it’s more puzzle-platformer than falling-block puzzle — but at the time the reception was pretty mellow. It wasn’t as good as Dr. Mario, by some accounts, which was a disappointment, but also you could find reviews from people who thought it wasn’t different enough from Tetris, either, which is the kind of thing that will hurt your brain if you dwell on it for too long. For example, here’s a review from GamePro:

Ah yes, bombs and monsters and Wario, nothing new for [squints] Tetris.

Retrospective reviews have been far more kind to Wario’s Woods, recognizing it as complex, deep, and different from what was around both at the time and in the years since. It’s also one of Intelligent System’s first forays into the puzzle space, which they’ve produced some tremendous work within in the decades since. They would co-develop Panel de Pon with R&D1 on the Super Famicom and SNES, with it known as Tetris Attack in the latter case, and the Puzzle League series that sprung out of this was theirs to maintain. The very underrated Pushmo games are also courtesy of Intelligent Systems, and also have a whole puzzle-platformer thing going on with them, in a 3D space. (Note to self: publicly complain about the lack of Pushmo games available today.)

Wario’s Woods was also Intelligent Systems’ first go at Wario, but certainly not their last: they co-developed the first WarioWare game with R&D1, and have been the co- or sole developer on the WarioWare titles since. See? Wario’s Woods is notable for far more than just being the last NES game, and it’s also still a ton of fun to play in the present, too. Even if it merely boasts the usual Tetris features.

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This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Scurge: Hive isn’t exactly like Metroid. It’s very much its own thing with its own ideas. However, it also very clearly pulled inspiration from Nintendo’s long-running series, and not in the usual Metroidvania ways. Well, also in some of those, but specifically here I mean things like “a bounty hunter receives a distress signal from a galactic military official while wearing a skin-tight specialized outfit” and “enemies are more easily defeated with specialty beams that you can cycle between at will” and “your ship AI is your source of direction and companionship and you have been infected with a virus that will kill you if appropriate measures aren’t taken, also it will destroy the universe if you let it escape the facility it’s wreaking havoc on.” That last bit is more Metroid Fusion than anything, sure, but that game predates Scurge, and if the reverse were true, because people are so normal about Nintendo, we would be 20 years deep into them saying that Fusion’s whole deal had been lifted from Scurge.

None of this is a negative, of course (besides said lack of normalcy), but just to let you know how Orbital Media’s game wears its inspirations in very visible places. The gameplay is also very Metroid, with you continually finding upgrades that unlock new areas for you while blasting away a million respawning enemies and being judged for how long it’s taking you to complete it all. And the -vania part of things gets representation, too, with protagonist Jenosa gaining levels to increase her health and the strength of her attacks courtesy of said continual blasting.

There are a couple of things that make Scurge stand out as its own thing worth zeroing in on here, and they are also what make this a more appealing experience than a Metroid-like to tide you over in between releases of the real thing, in an era before “Metroidvania” was a search term on Steam that would bring you roughly two billion results. Hell, at that point, “Metroidvania” wasn’t even a fully ubiquitous name for the genre yet. The first of these is that Scurge: Hive takes place from an isometric perspective, rather than as a sidescroller. It changes the way platforming works, for one, but also combat — you can be surrounded, and you will be, if you don’t handle the kind of mobs that just didn’t exist in the genre’s standard presentation because of the way existing in that space even worked.

Image credit: MobyGames

The most significant difference, though, and the thing that will drive how you play Scurge and interact with every single facet of it, is the aforementioned infection. This isn’t just a narrative device that is saying oh, you have X amount of time before the virus kills you, that then plays out via cutscenes at predetermined points. No, your character is infected in a way that impacts gameplay: the rate of infection spreading through your body is constantly displayed at the top of the screen, and it is always climbing. You have a way of bringing it back down, as the game’s save points scattered throughout each area are known as Decontamination Platforms and are used to reset your infection level, but never to remove it entirely. When you step off of the save point, your infection has already climbed back to two or three percent. Your suit is specially designed to keep the infection from immediately taking over your body and turning you into a titular Scurge, but it is merely a filter that impedes its progress, not a way to fully counteract it.

When your infection level reaches 60 percent, you start to hear Jenosa’s heart beating. At 80 percent, that heartbeat is a little louder and a little faster. At 90 percent, it sounds like it’s trying to burst out of her chest, and at 100 percent it’s at its loudest, and also your health starts to drain, a process you cannot stop without reaching a save point to reset the infection. You have very little time in the grand scheme of things before your infection shoots up to worrying levels — just about enough to get from one save to another, or, if things are taking too long for you, for you to backtrack and then return to whatever room you were working on solving before the infection became too much of a risk to continue on. You get more time late in the game since your health is so much higher by then, but the rooms you’re solving are more complicated and difficult at that point, too, and the area maps more labyrinthine as well. Your infection level also spikes quicker if you step on the terrible red biological material scattered throughout the game, or from taking damage from enemies infected by the virus.

Even leaving aside the multi-stage final boss, this isn’t a game where you can just skip the combat and leveling to save time. That will catch up to you, especially when you’re in a position where letting some health tick off via infection is necessary in order for you to complete the trek to the next save point and infection removal. You have to balance this need to constantly be moving forward with the environmental puzzles you must solve and the combat you really, really should partake in, even if it slows you down. Defeated enemies are the only source of health recovery besides the save points, and collecting those health pickups from downed foes are also how you get your experience points. You begin the game with all of 25 hit points, but can go up to 999 at the maximum level. There are times where that much health will seem like overkill, and other times where you will be worried that it isn’t nearly enough. Wow, it really is like a Metroid game!

As for those environmental puzzles, they are regularly tied to platforming, pathfinding, and specific skills you pick up as you play. You get a tether pretty early, which serves as a grappling hook in addition to being used to latch on to objects and enemies to drag them around. You can only reach some areas with the double jump you’ll eventually acquire. Others are too dark to be explored until your suit can radiate light, or full of poison gas that will sap your health until you find a counter to it. There are switches that have to be powered with an electrical weapon, and others that need the charge taken from them. There are thick branches to be burned, and switches that require you place something heavy on top of them. Sometimes that “something heavy” is in the room already, and other times it’s a block you need to make out of an enemy using your cryostasis beam. There is an adrenaline upgrade that lets you move faster so that it appears as if time has slowed down, which is useful for moving past certain obstacles that block your progress if they hit you — and they will — at normal speed, or just for putting distance between you and some enemies you don’t feel like fighting. There is a plasma bomb that takes time before it explodes, but it has a little bit of a directionally-based homing element to it, and can also blow open blocked doors or boulders in your way, opening up previously closed off areas.

Image credit: MobyGames

The weapons, in particular, will require mastery, as how quickly you’re able to progress through an area or clear a room of foes will be determined by your ability to react contextually via weapon choices. The normal beam works against every kind of foe, but it’s weak and will take you the longest — you can get away with it at first, but as mobs grow in size and strength, you’ll end up avoiding it entirely. You get an EMP that quickly disables enemies powered by electricity in some way, such as the many, many security drones — it also sets off a chain reaction when one dies, which damages or outright kills any other foes in its vicinity. The Dissipator is for energy-based enemies, as it breaks them down on a cellular level. Combustion is basically a heat blast for burning biological enemies alive.

There is a rock-paper-scissors element to this trio to watch out for, too: Combustion, for instance, will either instantaneously defeat a biological enemy or cause it to take all of two shots to defeat them, or if it hits a mechanized foe it will power them up. The Dissipator eradicates energy-based enemies, but powers up biological foes. The EMP empowers energy-based enemies while wrecking the drones and robots. When you accidentally (or purposefully?) shoot the foes that are empowered by a particular weapon with that weapon, they move faster and hit harder, and you know you messed up because a big “Attack Up” message appears above them, and also they come after you in a hurry to use their newfound power on you. So, you spend all your time trying to not be infected to 100 percent and die from this mystery virus, while also continually pressing the R button to open up the radial menu with your different weapons and switch between them in order to combat the foe in front of you.

Image credit: MobyGames

And no, it is not as simple as “oh this area is full of mechanized enemies, time for the EMP.” It’s a mix. It’s always a mix. You’ll find yourself constantly, constantly switching, angling yourself to take out one type of foe before reangling and switching to get a different one, or calculating the risks of powering up one type of enemy while you dispose of the other, or going hey you know what, this mech in the middle of these energy guys will explode along with them if I can set off a chain reaction here.

The game is broken into a central hub area, and from there you go to other locations where you will use whatever new upgrade you have found — or find additional upgrades — in order to progress further through said central hub. You have to turn on all the teleporters that the staff, which you can barely find any remnants of besides memos and the occasional corpse, made sure to turn off. They did so to keep the virus, which very much seems to be a conscious entity growing in power and size and intelligence as it infects more and more oh that’s why the game is subtitled Hive, from leaving the facility and spreading throughout the galaxy. The problem is you can’t get to the source of the infection to get rid of it until you reopen all those teleporters, which require you to move around a bunch of power generators in environmental puzzles scattered throughout each area. You will become very efficient at this, but luckily whenever you go to the closed-off teleporter in each new area, the location of these security nodes will appear on your map, which also autopopulates with the location of Decontamination Platforms/save points.

Unfortunately, the location of the many, many security keycards you will need to open up locked doors do not show up on your map. Which is fine in terms of having to search them out, but once you did enter a room with one, it would have been nice if it then showed up on your map as including a card, since there are times where you can’t get to one just yet, or a room has multiple exits so you want to focus on a little more exploration or have to since again, you can’t always get to a card you can see when you see it. This is a minor complaint, however, and at least the game continually dings at you when you’re in a room with a keycard, so you can’t miss any of them by not noticing that you’re sharing a space with one of these required pickups.

The boss fights occur once you have unlocked a teleporter for use, as you are sent directly to it. These are all varied, but follow a similar pattern in that you have to figure out which weapon will be most effective against it, and then use it — sometimes that’s just for getting them to expose a weak point before you switch weapons and then attack with something else, sometimes you can just roll with a single beam from your gauntlet. The bosses are all huge and room-filling in one way or another, though, and are all a little gross in a way I am being complimentary of here. This is a game about a virus slowly corrupting everything it touches, including you, after all.

Image credit: MobyGames

While there is just the one game mode at the start, after completing Scurge, you unlock a hard mode as well as some alternate color schemes for Jenosa’s suit. Complete the hard mode and unlock a boss rush. Complete that, and you unlock the actual top difficulty — by this point you should already know where everything in the game is, or else you are just going to die.

The game’s soundtrack — which you should hit play on above — was composed by Jake Kaufman, who has worked on a number of projects you’ve heard of from those in the Shantae series, to Red Faction: Guerilla, to Shovel Knight, to one that a certain subset of you have definitely heard of in Cave’s Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi. It’s excellent for setting mood in each area, and every boss has its own theme, which all slap. Really a tremendous soundtrack, and one that somehow wasn’t hampered by the Game Boy Advance’s admittedly inferior sound hardware that seems to lose all pleasantness the second the volume goes up.

The game as a whole was developed by Orbital Media, and published by SouthPeak Interactive for the GBA and Nintendo DS. With the exception of the DS version of the game, all of their titles were on the GBA. Racing Gears Advance was their first game, which came out in 2005 (2004 in Europe), and it was followed up by Juka and the Monophonic Menace, which released in PAL territories in 2005 and North America in 2006. Scurge: Hive was their final game, as plans for sequels to their other projects were canceled, and this despite receiving positive reviews for Racing Gears as well as Scurge. So it goes sometimes in the industry.

Given that they didn’t find enough success to continue on, it’s amazing how regularly secondhand copies of Scurge are seen whenever I go out to a retro games shop. It’s always there! It’s difficult to miss that yellow background on its cartridges, so it always stands out, but it seems no one who did buy it held on to it. And hey, even if it weren’t available for those with original hardware and a penchant for perusal, Scurge: Hive has found a second life on modern platforms. In 2025, it released on the Switch, Playstations 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series S|X, and PC. This time around, it was published by Ratalaika Games, and it has the same emulation and quality of life options as the many games they have re-released in the present. Their ports aren’t the best around for this sort of thing, but hey, you have save states and rewind and fast-forward and some options for tweaking the presentation. You have played far worse modern ports, too.

Scurge: Hive is one that’s absolutely worth your time if you’re into this kind of pathfinder game. That it is constantly pushing you forward out of necessity — you will die otherwise — combined with its rock-paper-scissors weapon system in an action game makes it stand out even as it elbows you and goes, “psst, hey, do you like Metroid Fusion?” There is much more to it than its plain-as-day inspirations, is the thing, and the final result is a bit of an oddball in all the best ways.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

You know those sliding piece puzzles where you can move one square at a time? Usually to complete a picture or a specific pattern? The earliest known version of a sliding puzzle is the “15 puzzle,” named thus because there are 16 slots but 15 pieces in the puzzle, with the one open spot being how you maneuver the rest around the board. You can’t pick up and move any pieces around, but have to slide them — that’s the whole point. You can find them in little physical toys, in video games, there’s basically no chance you haven’t actually encountered one, even if you didn’t know what the name for them was.

I am… alright at this kind of puzzle. I get where I need to eventually, as evidenced by my having completed every Resident Evil and Legend of Zelda game out there, but it’s not the kind of puzzle that makes me feel like a genius afterward. Instead, I’m expecting a C+ to pop up on the screen at some point to let me know I could have done a much better job of things than I’d managed. If I needed to complete one while Mr. X was chasing me down instead of having puzzles like this in their own little isolated safe rooms, I never would have wrapped on some Resi games, that’s for sure.

In 1990, Namco — through their home-console publishing wing, Namcot — released Megapanel for the Mega Drive in Japan. While Namcot’s work in the west is probably better known for their extensive publishing on the Famicom, given the mass release of Namco Museum Archives collections, by this time Namco was also focusing on Sega’s 16-bit console, too. Here, with Megapanel, they made the whole thing out of 15 puzzle, except the number of pieces to be slid around, and the playing area you were working within, were variable. The lone constant was the number of blank squares to work with and through: one. And also there are pin-up girls. Hey here’s one now.

Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

Just to be clear, there’s no nudity here — nothing more scandalous than some short shorts, a bit of cleavage, some evidence of tanning, a suggestive wink, a tiny pervert man pointing at a bunny bum — which all makes sense given this was a console release in 1990, and not an arcade game meant for adults in an adult-only space, hoping to glimpse to catch a glimpse of a topless lady if they were skilled enough a la Toaplan’s Pipi & Bibi’s. It’s probably the kind of game that you would find on the Nintendo Switch eshop in the present that makes sure the word “Hentai” is front-and-center like a flashing neon sign in the title to grab your attention even if again, it’s something being sold on the Nintendo Switch eshop, so nothing as scandalous as that implication.

Your enjoyment of Megapanel is going to come down to two things, outside of how much you can appreciate some detailed pin-ups that Namco’s artists made sure felt like a reward for getting through some fiendish puzzling. There is your ability to contend with said fiendish puzzling, for one — see above re: my C+ brain for this kind of puzzle — and your patience for working through the game’s specific designs that make completing these puzzles even more difficult than usual. As previously mentioned, the number of pieces you are working with at a given time, and the size of the playing area you’re sliding them around in, are variable. This is because of the fact that you clear blocks from the playing area, which can create an uneven distribution of them that might even be disconnected from where the free space — the one that allows you to slide the other pieces around — is.

Meaning! If you stick in the middle of the puzzle area for too long, then you’re going to build up these taller columns on the side, and you might not be able to access them. Which means whenever new lines of pieces are introduced from the bottom, those towers will go up another layer. When they reach the top, you lose. You can’t just match, match, match without some consideration to it, basically, and have to instead let the number of lines build up a bit so you have more room to work with, and can bring in those pieces from the sides

The playing area is a grid that is six blocks wide and 11 blocks tall, and it will continually add entire lines from underneath at set intervals. You can also manually add the next line yourself, if you need the blocks to make your next move sooner than later, which also helps keep things moving along. Given how much taller than it is wide, you can infer how easy it would be to keep making clears in the middle horizontal parts, which would then allow vertical columns to rise above the rest. You can get away with that strategy early, too, but by the time the speed of the game increases — or the complexity for what it’s asking you to do in order to proceed — you will pay for your lack of planning.

Image credit: MobyGames

There are three different modes. There’s a two-player versus mode, which is pretty self-explanatory and a matter of survival as they so often are. What we’ll focus on here more are the Exercise and Pin-Up modes, which play fairly differently in terms of how you are going to approach things, as they force you to focus on different processes and therefore slightly different ways of playing Megapanel.

Exercise is a single-player experience in which you are trying to clear specific colored blocks in whatever number the level requires. So, in the first stage — as seen in the above screenshot — you need to clear five 3×1 red blocks to proceed to the next level. Matching three blocks of a single color is the minimum match, so it’s not asking much of you there. As you progress, though, additional colors are added in to the pool of colored blocks that can make an appearance — you start with three, but additional colors like yellow and pink make their way in eventually — making it more difficult to isolate the required number of one block color in one place. In addition, Megapanel will start requiring matches of more than just three of a kind in order for the match to count toward your goal. Anyone can match three of these blocks — I’m living proof! — but having to make sure your maneuvering doesn’t match three because you actually want to match four and haven’t set up for that just yet is a whole different beast.

The Pin-Up mode asks quite a bit of you, but in a different way. Instead of specific arrangements of colors and numbers of blocks, it instead has you clearing away blocks to reveal an image, with the actions taken on the left part of the screen in the playing area having an effect on the to-be-revealed image on the right. The playing area is the same size as with the other modes, but the image you’re trying to reveal can be larger or smaller, and the game can even throw in the added wrinkle of needing to clear specific spaces more than once in order to actually reveal what’s underneath.

Image credit: MobyGames

You make your matches on the left, clearing the three or four or however many blocks from the playing area, and whichever block is at the center of the match will be the one that is triggered on the right. Bombs fall from the top of the screen on the right to blow up the blocks underneath, revealing more and more of the image as you go. So you can’t just clear whatever to proceed, but have to be purposeful — clearing the middle-right again and again does nothing for you if you need to clear the middle-left to reveal the image and advance to the next stage.

It also makes vertical clearing a required skill, especially on the ends, since the only way to get a center clear on the leftmost and rightmost parts of the grid is via vertical clears. And the only way to be able to maneuver these pieces around in those spaces to get those clears is to make sure you haven’t accidentally built skyscrapers with nothing next to them and no way to access them. This is important from the start, but as said, when the game begins to require that you successfully blow up a block on the right multiple times in order to actually clear it, it’s even more important that you are doing all of this with intent.

Each five rounds has a specific pin-up that you’re revealing images of, some set and some random. This means you have to complete the Pin-Up mode multiple times in order to actually see every single image within, which is simply not happening for me. Looking around the ol’ internet, it also appears as if it just isn’t happening for anyone else, either, though thanks to the wonders of Action Replay and Game Genie codes, all of the images have been revealed and put online for your unearned perusal. The excellent Gaming Hell has them all laid out for you, as well as which rounds which ladies can and will appear in, if you care to take a look, but here’s an in-game example, as well:

Image credit: Gaming Hell

You might have noticed the woman in the middle of the screen there, sweating and pointing at your playing area as the blocks rise ever-closer to the top and your failure. There is some advice about what to do coming out of her/that portion of the screen real estate, though it’s in Japanese like the rest of the non-menu and scoring text in Megapanel. If you find all of that distracting, you can press the C button to mute her and the incoming hints. Above her are the number of lives you have left on a given stage: while the Exercise mode ends once you fail, in Pin-Up, you get three chances to retry before you see the Game Over screen.

I’m a little torn on Megapanel. It feels like it almost has the juice, but how strict it is — and how quickly it gets that strict — about not letting the sides grow too tall harms it for me, but that’s also just because, again, I am not wired for this kind of puzzle game. I want to be, though, and I feel that way about Megapanel while I play it, too — I kept going back to it again and again despite my struggles, because what little I was able to string together did feel satisfying in the way that puzzle games do when they’re hitting right. Which suggests that the issue is with me more than the game itself — that’s good news for those of you who are wired to succeed at this sort of puzzle.

If there is a complaint to be made that isn’t just about me, though, it’s that there just isn’t enough music here. Each mode has its own track, but it’s the only one, and none of it is as catchy as what you’d find in Tetris, or Dr. Mario, or Puyo Puyo, or Columns, or… you get the point. Not an earworm, and more grating after a long time, both of which seem like a problem when it’s all that’s on offer.

Visually, though, Megapanel sings. The blocks aren’t just colored, but also have designs on them that range from a tree to a bag with a dollar symbol on it to hey that’s Pac-Man isn’t it. There is a sepia-tone mode if you want to play with that — though I’m not entirely sure why you would want to, given that it makes it tough to know which blocks are what color, and forces you to go entirely by the symbols on them. I might be missing something that simply isn’t obvious to me there, though, so don’t take that as me putting down the mode’s inclusion. Obviously, the standout on the visual side is the Pin-Up art: Namco’s artists — who do not seem to be listed in the credits anywhere, as those just include the planner, composer, and programmer — made sure that there was variety there in both appearance and scenario.

As for why Megapanel wasn’t released overseas? At a time when puzzle games were the thing going, thanks to the rise of Tetris as an international sensation? Let’s just say every look at Megapanel that does exist out there in the present is wondering the same thing, with no definitive answer given. It’s unlikely that it would have been a huge hit or anything, but still. It would be nice to play the game with the hint system actively working for non-Japanese speakers. The best guess I can manage is that some of the pin-up ladies are pin-up girls — high schoolers — and Namco didn’t want to have to deal with any redrawing or aging up of this risqué (but again, non-eroge, non-nude) art, but if that’s the case then explain the existence of Wonder Momo. [Remembers Wonder Momo was a Japan-exclusive until very recently] Okay maybe I’m onto something there.

Still! Megapanel is entirely playable in the present via emulation, through an Everdrive, what have you, even if you can’t access that advice or the text that goes with your next goal in Exercise mode. You just need to be able to sort out sliding puzzles in a timely and strategic fashion, which is a much larger problem than some text you can’t read for some of us,

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This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

When you think of Irem and the arcades, your mind probably goes to the likes of Moon Patrol, Kung-Fu Master, and, of course, R-Type. In 1983, however, they tried their hand at American football with what was, arguably, the most advanced game of its kind yet: 10-Yard Fight. Originally developed for arcades and only later ported to the NES as a launch title for the system, 10-Yard Fight was a massive leap forward in visual quality for football games, which in that era existed on the Atari VCS and Mattel’s Intellivision, with the kind of colorful — but ill-defined — sprites that you know from those systems.

10-Yard Fight, though, had more detailed sprites with what were obviously helmets and uniforms on, far more of those sprites on screen — not 22 of them yet, but 18, which was a massive leap forward from the 5-on-5 NFL Football and RealSports Football from Intellivision and Atari, respectively — and had you fully controlling the action in a way that Stern Electronics’ Goal to Go, a LaserDisc football game in arcades that had you perform quick-time events during footage of amateur football teams facing off, did not.

You couldn’t choose from a number of plays in the way you could in Intellivision’s NFL Football — simply named “Football” once the license ran out — but you still had variety to work with in 10-Yard Fight. You could make lateral passes in the backfield to running backs on your left or your right, depending on which direction you were pressing in, and that served, plus the option to just take the ball and run while controlling your quarterback, made up your running game. Or, you could pass to a single receiver making his way downfield, which was more difficult to pull off but with obvious benefits if you could manage to keep from having your passes intercepted. It was a difficult enough maneuver to pull off, comparatively, that you received a significant point bonus simply for completing a pass even if you didn’t pick up additional yards after the catch.

While critics were understandably wowed by the level of visual detail and the scope of the game, there were some complaints about how it wasn’t “real” football. And, to be fair, this was no football simulation: it was an arcade game, and designed with that audience in mind. You only played offense, not defense. It’s called 10-Yard Fight because achieving first downs is the only way to continue playing, and while that’s true in the NFL in the sense that you turn the ball over when you fail to pick up a first down in four attempts, here, the game simply ends. In addition, though, is the way the game’s clock works. You’re on your last drive of the half, and if you run out of time, even if you haven’t run out of downs, you will also turn the ball over and lose. However, successfully earning a first down will not just reset your downs, but also add time to the clock — progressively less depending on your difficulty level, with the starting time for your drive also reduced depending on how deep into the game you are, but you basically need to chain first downs together in order to have time to run another play.

Konami’s Super Basketball, released a year later and also in arcades, borrowed from this idea of a late-game drive to win, though, it was far harsher with regards to the clock since it made every possession that didn’t end with you scoring into some form of additional penalty to your time. Like how you can keep a drive going infinitely — or, until you finally score — so long as you keep picking up first downs in 10-Yard Fight, you could keep playing and playing until you finally were ahead in Super Basketball, so long as there was time remaining on the clock.

Super Basketball also borrowed the idea of progressively tougher foes to face off against that would play better defense and force you to adapt or lose, while naming them after various levels of play in the sport. You start off in 10-Yard Fight against a high school team and play two halves, assuming you score in the first one. Then you move on to college, then the pros, then the playoffs, and finally you end up in the Super Bowl. That’s not quite how things work in football, sure, but at least it’s an understandable progression that reflects the levels that exist in reality, with two levels of amateurism, and a playoff team being a tougher opponent than any old pro team, and the toughest opponent being the one that made it to the Super Bowl to take you on.

If you don’t understand how 10-Yard Fight’s defenders work, you aren’t going to last long enough to reach the Super Bowl. Or even to defeat the high school squad, really. Press a button to snap the football from your center to your QB, and then take a beat to read the defense’s movements. If a defender has broken through your offensive line, you’re not going to want to make a forward pass if they are in the path of the ball, because they will, without question, intercept it. Unlike in actual football, the ball doesn’t turn over if this happens, but you do get sent 20 yards back. Depending on your skill level, that’s either a huge imposition that will make scoring difficult for you, or a way to farm additional points on your way to a touchdown. Yes, people let themselves be intercepted on purpose to give themselves more points, though you can also skip those risks and just let the time bonus on a TD pay off for you instead.

A defender breaking through isn’t the end of the world, though. You can draw them in with your QB as the above video shows, and as they commit to chasing you down, fire off a short lateral pass to a running back, who now has one fewer defensive player chasing after them. At least at first that’s the case, anyway: all of the defensive players move faster than you do, so you’re going to need to learn how to do three things: zig-zag back and forth, switching between running straight ahead and running at a diagonal — you move slower running diagonally, but so do the defenders, and you can put a different kind of space in between the two of you by doing this at the proper time — figure out the timing of players diving at you in order to not be where they are going to end up, avoiding a tackle in the process, and finally, learn to shed would-be tacklers.

You do that by wiggling the joystick (or D-pad on the NES) in order to shake a defender who has caught up to you — you would be amazed at how many more yards you can gain by having a defender drop off of you because they can’t hang on. And you will need every one of them, because of the scale of the field and the speed of these players. You might feel like you’ve gone 10 yards already, but until you get a sense of the pace of 10-Yard Fight, your instincts are wrong and you’ve gone more like five of them. Again, look at that video — see the distance between those hashmarks? You will feel the tension of each and every attempt at a first down even when the clock isn’t running low.

As you move up the ranks, you’re going to want to keep an open mind about forward passes. They were almost universally a no go against weaker competition because those defenders hang back, waiting on you a little bit. As defensive players begin to chase after your QB in the pocket more aggressively and in greater numbers, though, it opens up clear passing lanes — throw a strike to your receiver past the line of scrimmage at the same time that a bunch of defenders are diving right at your QB, and suddenly there’s wide-open field with no one around to chase your wideout down for a while. They’ll eventually catch up to you, sure, but every second they haven’t is one that brings you closer to another first down.

You will also have to figure out how to properly return a kick for additional yardage if you want to make life easier for yourself against more difficult opponents. A pro team kicks the ball a whole lot deeper than a high school team, for instance, which means you need to pick up more yards before you can score a touchdown. And you need to do that while the amount of time you have to score has also dropped. While you have 60 seconds in the first half of your game against the high school team, the kick will make it to the 30-yard line giving you 70 yards to travel, and the first defender isn’t going to show up until the 39-yard line, against pro teams those numbers drop to 25, 10, and 23. The Super Bowl opponent will kick the ball all the way to the 5-yard line, and you will have 10 seconds to score. Meaning, you need a first down on every single play, or, you need to be tackled so quickly that just a couple of seconds come off the clock, but you also will lose yardage if that happens.

All of this makes kick returns that much more important, because the clock doesn’t run during the return. Start on the 5-yard line, but you make it to the 30 or 40 or even the 50? You have just made your life significantly easier, since you now have to pull off far fewer first downs in a row in order to score. Notice in the above video how you have a formation of blockers around you as you return the kick: they do not make independent decisions to block, but instead follow whatever direction you’re pointing in. So you’re responsible for putting them in the way of the oncoming defenders, but you have to pull this off at the same time that you’re actively dodging the defenders who did break through and reached you, in order to extend the distance of your kick return. The rewards are obvious, however: that kick reached the 25-yard line, but the return, by way of using the blockers and shedding some tackles, reached the opponent’s 44. That’s nearly 30 yards gained right there, or, three first downs you don’t have to make, and all without any precious seconds ticking off the clock, either.

Sure, it isn’t exactly like football, but it’s not not football. And the fact that 10-Yard Fight was just the sixth or seventh football game ever, depending on the release date of the aforementioned Goal to Go, and had this level of strategy to it is impressive. Also, “just the sixth or seventh football game ever” is a count that includes Dartmouth College’s FTBALL from 1965 — for a system, DTSS, that is ancient enough that the BASIC programming language was designed for it — and the Magnavox Odyssey’s 1972 game, Football, which also used dice and playing cards in addition to the usual TV overlay with lights. It was still real early in the development of football video games, and 10-Yard Fight was the first true arcade-style game out there in the field. It was a huge accomplishment, and has a hook that makes it worth your time in the present, too. It might be simple in terms of what your options are, but let’s see how many quarters you would have had to feed a machine before you become Super Bowl champion.

Speaking of its run in arcades, 10-Yard Fight was a hit. It debuted as the top new table in January of 1984 by GameMachine’s accounting — the game released in Japanese arcades the month before — and hung out within the top three spots on the charts through the beginning of April, before slipping to ninth in the mid-month report. It would stick in the top 10 for a few more reports, though, before dropping to 16th in its final entry. Consider what arcade games released or continued dominating in 1984, though — Pole Position(s), The Tower of Druaga, Xevious was still hanging around the charts, a slew of Nintendo’s VS cabinets kept coming out — and realize that spending the first quarter of the year at or near the top of the charts in Japan was a significant accomplishment.

While 10-Yard Fight got its start in arcades, it would be ported to the NES as a launch title and even published by Nintendo. Irem still handled development, however, and adapted it for home play by adding a two-player mode that also allowed for defensive play. The play is a little faster than in the arcade mode, too, which makes completing the earlier levels easier, but the difficulty does ramp up in a noticeable fashion against the playoff and Super Bowl opponents. Pro isn’t a cakewalk, either, but you can get through that more easily in the NES port than in the arcade original.

For whatever reason — it’s licensing, but let’s keep it mysterious — the NES edition of 10-Yard Fight is not available on Nintendo Switch Online despite Nintendo’s other sports offerings being on the service. However, you can experience the original arcade edition on the Switch and Switch 2 thanks to Hamster’s Arcade Archives series. There, you’ll find the original edition of the game, as well as VS variant, High Score mode, and caravan mode where you try to score as many points as you can before time runs out. It’s not a football simulation, no, but it’s a perfect distillation of the game with a serious arcade hook to it, and over 40 years later it still sings when you escape trouble in the pocket and successfully complete a pass downfield.

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This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Ask about the quality of Kid Icarus, and you’re sure to get a range of opinions in a way that you wouldn’t for a number of Nintendo’s other newer franchises that popped up between 1985 and 1987. Super Mario Bros.? Vitally important all-time classic. Metroid? Sure, it’s not Super Metroid, but what a proof of concept and enjoyable ride in its own right. The Legend of Zelda? It’s literally The Legend of Zelda. Kid Icarus, though, is not a beloved classic. And to be fair, it’s not exactly on the level of those games, either. That it’s so often outright dismissed, though — and that includes by Nintendo itself, which released a Game Boy sequel in North America and Europe but not Japan, and then didn’t bother with another game in the series until Masahiro Sakurai wanted to make one for the 3DS in 2012 — is a little unfair. There’s a good game in here for those who are fine with taking a beating, and those folks have and will tell you as much.

The start of Kid Icarus is the most difficult part. You play as Pit, who is attempting to help rescue the goddess Palutena from Medusa after her army has been defeated and turned to stone, and it sure feels like you’re controlling some random dude who has been left to fend for himself. Your health is low, your damage output is lower, and oh, you’re platforming vertically and if you fall, you die. There might have been a platform underneath you before, but if you can’t see it on the screen, then you’re doomed when you fall there. In addition, the left and right sides of the screen are connected, which means enemies on the left can get to you on the right if they exit the screen, so you’re not actually safe over there. Though, in fairness, they aren’t safe from you because they are on the opposite side of the screen, either.

Despite this being an action platforming game, your health is tied to combat. You need to rack up a higher score in order to receive health upgrades — points are experience here. So you can’t just jump and climb as quickly as possible to reach safety, you need to hang around and not avoid enemies, instead defeating as many as possible, in order to receive health boosts in between levels when your score is compiled. That doesn’t solve the automatically falling to your death thing, sure, but it is going to make the dungeons and boss fights something you can actually complete.

Image credit: MobyGames

Speaking of those dungeons, it would not be surprising to find out that a number of people who dislike Kid Icarus — and this is by no means a generalization or accusation that everyone who isn’t into it hasn’t bothered to actually play through it — aren’t even aware that the entire game isn’t like the beginning. It starts out with Pit vertically climbing because he’s leaving the underworld. You transition from these first three vertical stages to a fourth, which is a dungeon that’s like a cross between what you’d find in The Legend of Zelda and in Metroid. Single-screen rooms in an 8×8 dungeon, designed to be a labyrinth, where the first thing you need to focus on is finding a way to illuminate and author a map so that you can get a sense of where you have been and where you still need to go, in order to find the exit located where the dungeon boss is hiding. There, too, will be one of the three sacred treasures: equipped with all three, Pit will be able to battle against Medusa and rescue both Palutena and Angel Land.

That’s not the lone switch in genre or orientation. After you leave the first dungeon, Pit is out of the Underworld, and hey, the game is side-scrolling now. You can still fall to your doom here, sure, but there is a lot more ground here to walk on, and fewer holes to infinitely fall through — plus, if you’ve been doing the fighting you should (or got lost in the dungeon long enough), your score has begun to progress in a way that means you have more health than you did. Suddenly, Kid Icarus is much easier to handle — it’s not easy, not by a long shot, but it feels manageable. So long as you aren’t turned into an eggplant by a wizard shaped like the vegetable, anyway.

There is a complexity to Kid Icarus that, understandably, turned people off from it. Super Mario Bros. was tough at the time of its release, but the concept it had refined was so engaging and welcoming that people were hooked, anyway — it helped that it was difficult in the way that arcade games were, and you overcame its difficulty in the same way you did those types of games: by playing more of it. The Legend of Zelda was for action-adventure games what Dragon Quest was for role-playing ones, in that it was both something new and a more approachable smoothing out of existing concepts that made it less intimidating and aimed at a broader audience than what came before. Kid Icarus stacked systems and genres on top of itself and made dying and getting lost common occurrences — also you could be turned into a walking eggplant by wizards and then have to go looking for a place to cure yourself before advancing, even if it happened, say, right before the dungeon boss for maximum aggravation.

You have to engage with the game in the way it demands — fighting enemies you aren’t strong enough to defeat at first without risk of serious harm and quick deaths — in order to get stronger. The game does not always make this, or really any part of it, easy.

Image credit: MobyGames

You have to complete training rooms where Zeus throws a bunch of garbage at you continually to see if you can survive the assault, before relenting and saying hey good job, pick an upgrade, all of which puts your health at risk in the process. Your enchanted weapons are temporary, not permanent additions — they can be stolen by a particular foe, and if your health is low enough they won’t be active even if you do have them — so you’re always at risk of going back to your base strength (or, at least, a weaker, basic bow and arrow instead of one ringed with flame or magical abilities). There are rooms filled with pots where you can keep breaking them open to find the treasures inside, but if you open the pot with the little reaper dude inside, guess what? You give up all of those treasures, and also you don’t get another shot at the room. There are rooms you will risk damage and death to get to, only to find out that there is nothing inside of it — it’s supposed to grant you an upgrade to your damage if you’ve done enough to impress the gods, such as by defeating enemies or not opening those aforementioned treasure pots or having a ton of the game’s currency, hearts, in your possession, but sometimes you find the room before you’ve done enough for a reward. There is a shop in the game with fair prices, but also a black market where everything costs far, far more, and it can even put you into credit card debt by letting you pay for things you don’t have the hearts to buy. In the standard shops, you are able to haggle using a second controller, but beware: if the shopkeeper doesn’t like you and you attempt to haggle, the prices will go up instead of down. Reapers, if they see you, continually call down reinforcements that fly around making further progress difficult, and once they are gone, the reaper can call down some more if they see you again. This game does not want you to succeed.

You can, though! Equip that sacred bow and keep your heath up so you have a larger attack range instead of Pit’s pitiful one. Stick it out in the training grounds each time to claim the reward. Make sure you’re doing as much as you can to impress the gods in case you end up in a room where an upgrade to your bow’s damage will be available. Don’t shy away from fighting, in order to receive boosts to your health after you finish a stage, and because if your power level is higher than the stage number you’re in, the items in the shop will be even cheaper than they already are. Make note of where the hospitals in dungeons are, so you know how to get back there after you’re turned into an eggplant, and also remember where on the map the hot springs are — you’re going to need to go there to refill your health when you’re lost in the labyrinths, and it’s always going to be worth the backtracking to do that. Use your mallets that you find or buy throughout the levels and dungeons to free the Centurions from the statue form Medusa cursed them with, so that they can help you fight the bosses at the end of each dungeon — bosses that can take a serious beating, especially if you haven’t bothered to upgrade Pit like you should. I cannot stress enough how much you want to rack up a high score here, if only to make the rest of the game that much more manageable. You wouldn’t skip as many random encounters as possible in Dragon Quest to just to get on with the game, would you?

Eggplant Wizard. What else is there to say?

On that same note, Kid Icarus is a series of solvable problems that seem impossible to solve at first, but that’s only because it’s a role-playing game dressed up as an action platformer, and if you engage with it solely as if it’s the latter, you won’t be able to figure it out nor proceed within it. It’s the kind of ridiculous layering of rudeness and complexity that allowed Xanadu to become a classic on Japanese computers, except Kid Icarus released on the console that brought the masses to gaming in your living room, and the same kind of praise and patience for it just wasn’t going to be there given the differing audiences.

It’s almost entirely rough edges, and you can see why the Game Boy sequel did things like eliminate the falling deaths, instead opening up the size of the rooms you were navigating just like Metroid II: Return of Samus did for the original Metroid, and allowing the penalty for falling to just be “well that’s a long way back up.” You can also see why it entranced Sakurai, though, he of the “actually, there’s a lot going on here” game development philosophy. Kid Icarus: Uprising? Now there’s a game that can’t stick to a single genre and hoo boy is there a lot going on there [complimentary].

Image credit: MobyGames

While Nintendo has mostly ignored Kid Icarus in terms of new entries, it has actually done a lot to keep the original available over the years. It was given a re-release on the Game Boy Advance like so many other NES titles were, despite the fact that its re-issue was met with a lot more “but why though?” than for its mid-80s cousins. It was included on Virtual Console on both the Wii and the Wii U, and was part of the NES Classics mini console lineup. The best re-release, though, and one you hopefully already down because you can’t legally pick it up anymore, is the 3D Classics version of it on the 3DS.

This is still the NES version of Kid Icarus, and it still features 8-bit sprites of both Pit and all of his foes, but the backgrounds have been completely redone. No more blank, black backgrounds in the Underworld — now, when you enter a room, you can see that it is a room, with bricked up walls, and there are all kinds of visual additions to liven up your climb, too. It’s all very different visually from the original, but not in a way that’s necessarily ill-fitting: think of it like the difference between an actual NES game and a modern throwback game that borrows the style of those titles.

Image credit: Nintendo

The one issue here is that the true look of the 3D Classics remake can’t be replicated in these digital pages, as the true power of it came from turning up the 3D slider and seeing everything pop off the screen. The level of depth that provided to the visuals was the real draw — it made the game that much more visually appealing, and allowed the enemy designs to really pop.

Those enemy designs, by the way, are so emblematic of Kid Icarus’ whole deal. It’s a weird game, in terms of its design and its many, many little guys that you have to fight. Again: Eggplant Wizards. It’s just such an oddity, and difficult to replicate, that it’s really no wonder that it took Sakurai to be the one to finally go, “Listen, I have an idea for what to do with all of this nonsense” in the present. It is nonsense, but that’s part of what makes it so fun to play, even as it is actively trying to ruin your life.

Of course, the original idea for Kid Icarus wasn’t Sakurai’s — this all predates his time with the company. Kid Icarus was Toru Osawa’s first credit as a game designer, and his work would not get less odd or streamlined for some time. Osawa also served as the director on For the Frog the Bell Tolls, another genre-defying classic that hasn’t received enough love from Nintendo over the years, directed Mario Clash on the Virtual Boy and indiezero’s “internet simulation game” Sakura Momoko no Ukiuki Carnival on the Game Boy Advance, produced Electroplankton on the DS, has been a part of the Famicom Detective Club development team from the beginning and into the present, and has been a producer on the various Fatal Frame games that Nintendo has had involvement in, too. Osawa was also the script director for Ocarina of Time, if you need to hear about something far more mainstream that he worked on, but by and large his body of work over the last four decades has been more oddball than anything.

Maybe you have given Kid Icarus a chance before, and you just couldn’t get into it. Totally understandable, but consider this: this is a game I have always had a fondness for to some degree or another, but I find that as I’ve gotten older and been exposed to more and more games, my appreciation for it has only grown rather than diminish. This game is weird, sure, but that’s part of the appeal: it was not meant to be a smoother version of an existing experience, but is instead coarse and rough and challenging and new. That Nintendo has barely revisited the concept over the years, and that it lacks the kind of industry-wide influence of its peers on the NES, means that it can still feel like all of those things to you now, nearly 40 years later, just as it did when it first hit with the kind of thud that only eventual cult classics can.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Atari’s 1978 game, simply named Basketball, was not the first basketball video game. At least, not officially. The Magnavox Odyssey, the first video game console, had a basketball game in 1973, though, this title (also named Basketball) was a TV overlay with lights. Taito had a basketball game in arcades a year later, TV Basketball — the first to use character sprites to represent human characters in a game.

Unofficially, though, Atari’s take was the first game to feel something like basketball. The side-view setup might have looked similar, but you couldn’t dribble the ball on the Magnavox Odyssey²’s attempt at pure video game basketball — named Basketball! to switch things up — which released the same year as Atari’s first attempt at the sport. TV Basketball had some of the trappings of the game, but was more like a Pong variant than basketball itself. Atari’s Basketball wasn’t the first, no, but it was the one that figured things out for adaptations of the sport in video game form, thanks to the introduction of a computer-controlled opponent and a true differentiator from basketball’s video game past to that point: dribbling.

That might not sound like much, but again, this was 1978. The system that Basketball released on, the Atari VCS — or 2600, depending on where in time you’re discussing it — came out in 1977. Taito’s Space Invaders released the same year in arcades, in black and white, and was and is so alien to what existed at the time and since that it exists outside of the history it helped create. These were early days — implementing a dribble and having it work as this major achievement sounds prehistoric here in 2025, but yeah, this was some dawn of history-era development here.

Image credit: Atari Mania

Thankfully, we can see what the basketball games to that point looked like, to give you a sense of how different — and more in line with the basketball games to come — Atari’s effort was. There are Let’s Play videos for Magnavox Odyssey games, courtesy the University of Pittsburgh’s OdysseyNow research project, for instance, which helps if you’re having trouble conceptualizing what a TV overlay basketball game with lights would even look like.

And then there’s Taito’s TV Basketball, designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, the future creator of Space Invaders. It’s black and white and in arcades, and has you controlling human-shaped character sprites in a line, attempting to knock a perpetually bouncing ball that does not, in any way, shape, or form exhibit the physics of a basketball, into the hoop. What if Pong was turned sideways, and the size of the goal shrunk? That’s TV Basketball, which Nishikado even admitted was what he did in order to make it feel “fresh and new”.

The Odyssey²’s Basketball! was significantly different from the original TV overlay property, and it utilized a side view as well as a level of player control that didn’t exist in TV Basketball. However, the physics were still pretty wonky, and dribbling wasn’t an option — check the way the ball and the player move here.

The hoop is also a little funny, since you have to get the shot up and into the basket, but what you really need to do is get it to make its way through the hoop horizontally — sure, it might feel that complicated sometimes when your shot keeps going in and out of the basket, but that’s not how things really work in basketball.

Which brings us to Atari’s Basketball. Here, you don’t just have a side view like with TV Basketball and Basketball!, but it’s also angled to create what looks like a 3D space to move around in, and, through control of a joystick, your sprite can move within it in 8 directions. Because you’re doing more than moving just side-to-side (or jumping up and down), dribbling was required: you need to chart a path to the basket, just like you would in actual basketball, and you can blow right by a defender or be intercepted by them, depending on their positioning and their own movements.

It’s still very simple of course, but considering what came before, it was revolutionary in a way that should be obvious just from watching a 30-second clip:

Sure, there isn’t a three-point line — hell, the NBA didn’t even implement that until 1979, a few years after the merger with the ABA, so why would it be here? — and the computer opponent seems literally incapable of missing a shot no matter where they take it from, but there is so much more going on here as far as basketball goes compared to the game’s predecessors. You hold down the shot button longer to change the angle of the shot, which allows you to fire one off at a high arc that’s going to be difficult to defend, and you can steal the ball either as part of a block as a shot is first released, or by crowding your opponent on defense while they dribble. Considering that the computer opponent is, as said, hitting their shots from anywhere like they’re a Larry Bird highlight reel, you’re going to need those steals to avoid falling behind.

The game’s manual was helpfully preserved in Digital Eclipse’s Atari 50 collection from 2022, which includes Basketball as part of one of its downloadable content packs.

The manual is basically just art, these two interior pages, and a back cover, but it has all you need to know about Basketball contained within.

“To defend against your opponent’s shot, place yourself between the ball and the goal.” See, it really is basketball.

Each game is four minutes long — you can ignore the zero after the first number in the timer in the top-center of the screen, which, in the thumbnail to the embedded video above, makes it look like 10:38 remains in the game when it’s actually 1:38. Which is plenty of time, considering the speed at which things move: to reference the thumbnail again, less than three minutes into the game, the score was 48-46. You are always moving, as you have to be in order to keep your opponent from having a wide-open shot they are 100 percent going to sink, and the game automatically resets your position after a basket. So, you shoot, score, and then teleport back to your basket to begin defending it as your opponent similarly teleports to their side with their ball in their hand. You are always facing the direction you need to be for what you are doing at that time, with your back to the basket and face to the ball on defense, and your face to the opponent’s hoop on offense.

Dribbling is automatic — unlike in Konami’s 1984 arcade game, Super Basketball, in which dribbling was a thing you had to do yourself in order to move — so you don’t have to worry about that part of things, but in order to steal the ball there is some action required. You have to align yourself just right with your opponent, and then basically race by them — you’ll have to imagine the act of ripping it out of their hands, but that’s what you’re doing. Sometimes the two of you are still lined up just right in a way that sees the ball go back-and-forth quickly, or your steal is immediately met by a counter-steal and then they take off with the ball again to avoid a repeat, but you get used to the feel of it all as you play more, too.

There are also multiple difficulties, which have you moving faster or slower, depending. When set to the “B” position, you move more quickly, which will let you catch up and defend even when you take a poor route. With the Atari VCS’ difficulty switch in the “A” position, you move slower, and have to be much more efficient with your routes and better about your decision-making.

If you have never played Atari’s Basketball, it’s still possible that you’ve seen it in action somewhere besides in newsletters or articles on the internet. It has a cameo in the 1980 Zuckers brothers movie, Airplane!, a disaster comedy starring Leslie Nielsen and NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, among others. It briefly shows up as the flight controllers are supposedly doing their jobs, attempting to track the titular airplane — they’re working, sure, but they are also playing Basketball on one of the giant monitors that’s supposed to have something more important on it mid-disaster.

The funny thing about Abdul-Jabbar being in a movie featuring Basketball as part of a gag is that he was also in Atari’s commercials for the game.

Atari wouldn’t just go one-and-done with Basketball. Instead, in 1979, they released a computer version of the game with improved graphics, where the character sprites were wearing clothes and had basic faces, the court had lines painted where they were supposed to be, and also the baskets actually looked like baskets, with backboards and defined nets. They would also release an arcade game, Atari Basketball, in 1979, where the more powerful hardware allowed for even more detailed sprites and the side-view angle was further emphasized as being a view from slightly above, but it was no longer in color. Again, that was normal for the time — Space Invaders didn’t originally release in color, and that thing was a Star Wars-level cultural event on multiple continents.

Basketball games would rapidly progress after Atari’s introduction of this angle, dribbling, a computer opponent when you didn’t have a friend to play against, and a touch of defensive complexity. Intellivision would release a 3-on-3 basketball game, NBA Basketball — the license only extended to the name, not anything within the game itself — in 1980. One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird would come out on multiple platforms starting in 1983, and featured players licensing their likenesses out for the first time. Konami would release Super Basketball in arcades in 1984 with its highly-focused crunch time gameplay hook, and then Double Dribble was not far behind. More and more developers started focusing on making basketball games, and while it never took off to quite the degree that baseball games did in terms of sheer quantity or variety, this leap in popularity certainly arose out of the progress Atari made with Basketball between 1978 and 1979. It’s a simple game, sure, but it’s an important one.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gradius was an early pillar for Konami. It wasn’t as popular overseas as it was in Japan, but it was big enough at home that it received plenty of spin-off titles, which regularly became their own series in their own right. Salamander was a pseudo-sequel to Gradius with its own gameplay style and rules, the third of which just released in 2025. Cosmic Wars was a proto-4X strategy game set in the Gradius universe, released for the Famicom of all things. There was Solar Assault, the arcade-only, 3D rail shooter that still followed the general rules of Gradius rather than those of the games it was following in the footsteps of. And, of course, there is Parodius, which was named through a portmanteau of “Parody” and “Gradius,” as it’s a goofy cute ‘em up version of that style of gameplay, only featuring classic music, other Konami characters and sprites, and octopi. Like, so many octopi.

We almost got much weirder than that. Well, okay, maybe not weirder than Parodius, but at least stranger in terms of getting from Point A to Point B… from horizontal shoot ‘em up to futuristic racing game in the style of F-Zero and Wipeout, only starring ships from Gradius as the vehicles. This game doesn’t exist, but only in the sense that it was never released: Konami was working on it at the same time they were developing the arcade sequel to Salamander, Salamander 2, and it was even featured in the same video game magazine as that game in November of 1995.

Electronic Gaming Monthly covered a few Konami titles that were unfinished but playable on the floor of that year’s JAMMA show — the Japan Amusement and Marketing Association’s Amusement Machine Show in Japan, with the likes of Capcom, Sega, Namco, and Konami showing off what they were working on to attendees, which helped give them an idea of what games had players excited. Konami had builds of varying completeness at the show, for the shooting game Salamander 2, the racing game Midnight Run, and another racing game titled Vic Viper. That’s the name of the ship from Gradius — there are other ships to choose from, sure, but that’s the one from the original that appears again and again throughout the series. And here, it was meant to be both the name of a racing game and a racer itself. That’s Vic Viper: Battle Racing.

Image credit: Gradius Fandom

According to Electronic Gaming Monthly, the version they played at JAMMA’s show was 30 percent complete, and by the time they went to print, it was up to 40 percent. And that was that: it was featured in multiple magazines as a title that could possibly come out, and then nothing again, despite there being a playable build. Obviously, “40 percent complete” and “complete” are two very different things, especially if you’ve ever heard a developer talk about how long it takes to get those last few percentage points taken care of to actually get a game to be finished. But it’s unclear if Konami cut development off at 40 percent, or 50, or 90, or what.

Electronic Gaming Monthly was already speculating that Konami “might not bring it out” considering that Namco and Sega were showing off racing game after racing game at the same show, and, you know, they were mid-90s Namco and Sega. So it’s possible that they decided to just focus their attention elsewhere instead of continuing with Vic Viper: Battle Racing. Regardless of the why, however, it’s disappointing: seeing what Konami had to offer in the style of F-Zero or Wipeout is something I would have jumped at both in the 90s and in the present, and given you are here reading this, at least with the second part, it’s not a stretch to imagine that goes for you, too.

This would not have been the first racing game to feature the Vic Viper. In May of 1995, Konami released Speed King: Neo Kobe 2045 into arcades worldwide, and then would port it to the Playstation in 1996 and 1997, in Japan and Europe, respectively. The Vic Viper was a secret vehicle in the game, which is loaded with references to — and vehicles based on — other Konami properties.

An entire racing game in the style of Gradius, however, featuring vehicles from the series? That would have been something entirely new. Whether adding the Vic Viper to Speed King is what inspired Vic Viper: Battle Racing, or it was something done because a team at Konami was already working on that game in some way, is unclear, but the point is that they were very much in the headspace of Wipeout x Gradius in 1995.

We don’t have video of gameplay of Battle Racing, given it was shown at a trade show 30 years ago in an incomplete build and given the briefest of writeups from a couple of publications. We do have scans of those publications, however, so let’s dive in. Electronic Gaming Monthly wrote:

And then there is MAXIMUM: The Video Game Magazine, which seemed a little confused about what they were even discussing, given the magazine had a photo of the Vic Viper cabinet with the name fully displayed and legible, but described what sounds like a different game in the text itself? At least they had photographic evidence:

A scan of p. 114 from issue No. 2 of MAXIMUM

You’ll notice there is very little actual information about how Vic Viper: Battle Racing plays, other than that there are multiple vehicles to choose from, it’s futuristic a la F-Zero and Wipeout, and that EGM felt it was “fun to play.” MAXIMUM seemingly incorrectly described it as a “shooter,” so we’re either not getting any additional information there because of some confusion in either writing or editing, or Battle Racing shared some DNA with the as-of-yet-unreleased Extreme-G series from Probe, and, to align it with Gradius in more ways than “hey here’s the Vic Viper,” it also featured some kind of shooting element in the racing. Hey, it was subtitled “Battle Racing,” so that’s not a stretch.

Sadly, the one gameplay screenshot does not clear things up very much, and that’s not a pun about how muddy said screenshot looks.

Image credit: Gradius Fandom

What’s health, what’s speed, what’s ammo there? Why does the screen say “Warning” — is it because you’re approaching something dangerous, or another racer, or because you’ve got incoming fire to dodge? Maybe it’s the turn — there is an arrow signaling left in this tunnel, after all — but yeah, this doesn’t fully clear things up in terms of what the actual battle racing is made up of. A shame, but it feels fair to educated-guess your way into “Konami was maybe going to do Extreme-G before Extreme-G did,” at least. Maybe just don’t take that as a definitive and absolute conclusion.

Luckily, there is one more screen out to stare at and wonder, and that’s the vehicle select. Here, you see ratings for maximum speed, acceleration, turning, and — here we go — attack and defense ratings. A main weapon and a subweapon are also featured on the right side of the screen, as well as an overall rating — the Vic Viper shown below is described as having “Well Balance” [sic]. Again, whether it actually plays like or resembles Extreme-G is left to the imagination, but the “battle racing” part of Battle Racing is that much clearer after this — you aren’t simply colliding into other vehicles here and calling it a battle. You have armaments, plural.

Image credit: Gradius Fandom

What is known for sure is that it’s a bummer that Konami didn’t finish the game and release it. The soundtrack was completed, though, and we know this because the only other sign of life for Vic Viper: Battle Racing after November of ‘95 came in 2011, when the music for the game was released as part of Konami Shooting Collection, a 10-disc compilation of tracks from Konami’s vast shooter history. Seriously, how far along did they end up getting this game before pulling the plug?

I’d say “maybe Konami can release it in the present somehow,” but their track record for bringing back games that actually do exist isn’t exactly stellar, and it’s not like Gradius Origins was even all-encompassing — an excellent start, yes, but there is so much more Gradius out there to the point that it’s very unlikely this ever sees the light of day in any form. That might depend entirely on how intrigued M2, which handled Origins and is responsible for the last two original Gradius titles, is about this piece of unfinished media, of course. But even expecting something of that is a bit much, and more wishcasting than anything else — M2’s schedule is already seemingly overloaded, considering games and projects they announced years ago are ongoing and unreleased, while they continue taking on new contracts, and again, Konami would have to sign off on anything happening in the first place. Hamster isn’t in the business of releasing prototypes via Arcade Archives, either, so where does that leave us? Reading about Vic Viper: Battle Racing, mostly, and maybe a little bit of wishing that you could go seek that out, too.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES was a hybrid 2D platformer and free-roaming beat ‘em up, overflowing with personality and weirdness. Not “weird” because wow look how Japanese this is, as some critics used to get about this series, but “weird” as in you’re rescuing a princess because a clan of cat ninjas failed to protect her, and you use a pipe as a weapon. And not the kind of pipe used in plumbing, either. It’s one of the best games on the SNES, but despite what Konami’s international release schedule indicated, it wasn’t the lone Mystical Ninja game on the console.

Well, it was the lone SNES release, but in Japan the system was known as the Super Famicom, and Mystical Ninja was Goemon. A sequel arrived in 1993 — five years before the first N64 sequel to Mystical Ninja came out in North America — known as Ganbare Goemon 2: Very Strange General McGuinness. This ditched the hybrid gameplay of the first for a different kind of hybrid play: now instead of having the free-roaming beat ‘em up sections, it opted for more of the platformer stages, introduced a world map to choose levels from, and oh yeah, now you have a mech. The mech battles were fought from a first-person perspective and utilized the system’s Mode 7 tech for faux 3D, and the aforementioned “weird” ramped up. Like, way up.

As I wrote about when covering that game:

Whereas the villages were full of enemies in the original Mystical Ninja, in its sequel, they are safe havens you visit to stock up on items, rest, and learn more about the world. Which is being brought up here because in the sequel to that game, Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Jūrokubē's Mechanical Manji Hold, Konami changes things up again. The villages are safe havens once more, but they’re part of a larger open-world — gone is the world map that lets you select levels from Ganbare Goemon 2, and gone are the idea of explicit stages, replaced instead by locations within a world you must traverse on foot. There are specific stages within this larger area — like an enemy stronghold you must invade — but you get to it like you would in, say, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and its exterior is part of the larger world rather than some separate entity. Golvellius is another comparison point here, as far as action-adventure games go, especially given that Konami doubled down on doing things differently.

Image credit: Mobygames

The mech battles with Goemon Impact are still here, and there are other new segments, as well, such as one where you ride on mechanical walkers as a team, and have to control both the unit as a whole and individual walkers in order to avoid attacks coming at you from behind in chase sequences. There are isometric RPG sequences, one-on-one fights… classic Konami loved building games that utilized specific strengths and capabilities of the console they were on, and Goemon was no exception to this.

Some of the traits of the Goemon games you were used to are gone here: taking damage no longer shrinks your weapon’s power and range, so you don’t have to concern yourself with finding a ton of weapon upgrades, and shopping is now for single-use protective items rather than an entire stack of armors and such to better protect said weapon upgrades in addition to your health, while you can buy just the one recovery item at a time. All of this deemphasizes combat in comparison to the previous two games, but it’s not as if Konami just left it at that. There’s more focus here on exploration and environmental puzzle-solving, on platforming and secrets, and that’s all accomplished by way of having you choose not just one character to play as, but instead, an entire team of four at once. You can swap between characters at any time, and each has a skill that will make them the only choice for specific sections of the game or puzzles, in addition to having different movement speeds.

Goemon can charge up a coin throw so that the projectile goes through force fields and walls, which lets you reach switches on the other side, and his magic power is basically a rage-boost to his attack power, though it makes him susceptible to additional damage. Ebisumaru’s powered up secondary attack is a shuriken that bounces off of walls, and his magic power lets him shrink to fit into spaces he normally could not. Clockwork ninja Sasuke has returned, and he can throw fireworks that serve as bombs that allow for environmental destruction, opening up some paths you can’t otherwise access, while his magic attack fires off eight fireballs. Then there’s Yae, who, like Sasuke, moves fast and has a bazooka as a secondary attack. That has no special power, but it is a bazooka. Her magic power allows her to turn into a mermaid when underwater, which in the overworld means an ability to swim under bridges in the way and access new areas, and in-stage allows for fast movement and swimming underwater that none of the other characters can do.

In addition, Ganbare Goemon 3 still has multiplayer, with a "mimicry” ability that lets you play as two of the same character instead of everyone fighting over who gets to be Yae or Sasuke when you don’t specifically need Goemon or Ebisumaru’s powers. And don’t worry, Goemon 3 added some weirdness specific to it, while retaining the same kind of offbeat, oddball nature of its predecessor: there’s a laugh track during the cutscenes, for some reason, and the premise of the game is that the Old Man inventor — the guy the walkers and Goemon Impact mech came from — came up with a time machine, tried to use it to go pick up some women, and instead ended up in the future kidnapped by a French nun who looks like Ebisumaru and realized she could force this guy to invent a bunch of weapons for her, which she would then use as an assault force in ancient Edo to conquer it. Don’t worry, you can get yourself to the future — to Neo Edo — by way of Goemon Impact, which is also a time machine, because why wouldn’t it be?

You can’t just ignore NPCs in towns, as they are more than just a source of some additional dialogue or humor. They exist to give you hints as to what’s going on in their neck of the woods, or to point you toward your next goal. There are fortune tellers, too, and they aren’t subtle, but they do cost you some cash. Between this style of village, the various forms of gameplay, and the full cast of distinct characters being available to use, Ganbare Goemon 3 is the one that starts to feel the most like the future Goemon games that would get international releases on the N64. One went so far as to go 3D instead of 2.5D with its gameplay, but, like with Zelda, that switch is easy to see in retrospect as an easy fit for the series.

If there’s a significant problem with Ganbare Goemon 3, it’s that it still, to this day, does not have an official release outside of Japan. Like with Ganbare Goemon 2 — and Ganbare Goemon 4, which is known as Ganbare Goemon The Glittering Journey: The Reason I Became a Dancer rather than Ganbare Goemon 4 and then a subtitle — it remains exclusive to the Super Famicom. Which is a serious problem given the above about not being able to ignore NPCs in towns: you need to know where to go next here, given this is an open-world you’re traversing, and not a stage-by-stage setup where you pick the next destination on a map because it’s next. You also miss out on all the humor — and there is lots of it — and personality that Ganbare Goemon 3 is stuffed with, which is a shame. The gameplay is great of course, but it’s all the rest of the package that makes Goemon Goemon; missing out on it because of a language barrier drops things down in quality by a not-insignificant degree. Untranslated Goemon is still a fine experience because Konami was on one with level design and gameplay, but it will feel less like Goemon. And we should have more things that feel like Goemon out there to experience. (Thanks, Bakeru.)

Image credit: Romhacking

There are unofficial translations of Ganbare Goemon 3 out there — in English, Dutch, and Spanish — out there at least, but you have to be 1) the kind of person who would emulate games and 2) the kind of person who would emulate games you have to patch with translation mods to either know that or bother to experience it. And there are more people out there who would do both of those things than just me, of course, but Ganbare Goemon 3 deserves a larger audience. One that, say, just owns a Switch or Playstation 4 or 5 or has a Steam account, and can play the newly translated game as part of a collection of classic Goemon titles on any of those platforms in the present.

Given this is Konami we’re talking about, though, the likelihood of this happening is practically nonexistent, and that’s probably giving them too much credit, even. Which is a real shame, since more people out there will simply read about Ganbare Goemon 3 in English rather than get to experience the game itself in that language because of Konami’s tendency to just… not. Sure, The Legend of the Mystical Ninja was a sales failure abroad, and while the two N64 games in the series were relative successes, very little of that had to do with the international market. But still, enough time has passed — and enough people have learned of Goemon games now — that you would think that Konami would have a change of heart and get this out there like they have with other series like Castlevania and Gradius — it’s not as if Gradius was ever an international sensation, and all, and yet those games have come out again and again in this era of games. Alas, that’s not the case for Goemon, so we’re forced to let unofficial translations do what they do best, which is to fill in the gaps that even corporate “preservation” will not.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Bonk’s Adventure isn’t Bonk’s Adventure. Well, it is Bonk’s Adventure, but it’s not that Bonk’s Adventure. You see, when Hudson Soft released Red Company’s platformer to other… platforms… they didn’t just port over the original PC Engine/Turbografx-16 game. Instead, new games were made, in the same vein as the game it was named after, but with original levels, bosses, and abilities. Hudson loved to be confusing about this stuff on the Game Boy — remember, the portable Adventure Island is actually a port of the first NES sequel to that game, not Adventure Island itself, and Atomic Punk is just Bomberman despite that name, but it’s also not the Atomic Punk (that is also Bomberman) that you’d find elsewhere. Bonk’s Adventure being its own game that’s along the lines of the Turbografx game of the same name is an improvement, but we also could have used a subtitle here, like how Mega Man on the Game Boy debuted with “Dr. Wily’s Revenge.”

Which hey, this is only a problem outside of Japan, too, since there the game is called “GB Genjin” to show that it’s clearly a different game than PC Genjin, named such because it was on the PC Engine, and Bonk was meant to be a mascot for the system. For the Famicom edition of Bonk’s Adventure, the title was changed to FC Genjin. It’s really just the North American and European releases of the Game Boy game that sew confusion — in Europe, it’s not [Platform] Genjin or Bonk’s Adventure, but B.C. Kid, and named such both on the Turbografx-16 and Game Boy.

Since this is a Game Boy game we’re talking about — and that is the subject here, not any of the other versions of a Bonk game of this name — and a platformer from over three decades ago, it’s going to feel a little short to those used to more modern platformer conventions. You can take down its six worlds in one sitting, but more important than that is that you'll likely want to if you're fine with that kind of quick hit.

You're not going to play this and think that it goes toe-to-toe with console contemporary platformers — this isn't Super Mario World. But it is Super Mario Land, or Kirby's Dream Land, or various Sonics on the Game Gear. Just well-suited fun for a system you could take with you on the go, that never quite reaches the heights of its more robust console cousins, but is certainly up for the task it’s been designed for.

Image credit: MobyGames

Despite the less powerful hardware behind Bonk’s (Portable) Adventure, the animations of the titular Bonk remain top-notch. The eyes bugging out, the new looks when he gets powers, when he takes damage — it all sings, and is detailed. Sure, it’s not as robust graphically as Bonk games on the Turbografx-16 — especially the backgrounds, which here are sometimes extremely simple or even just solid colors. But it all fits the platform and its expectations: the Game Boy titles with absurdly high-quality art are notable exceptions for a reason, and as this game already has some slowdown on occasion when there's a lot going on, Red Company and Hudson had their priorities in order in terms of what they were going to spend time on and show you.

Plus, you only have so much time to admire the view. Launching yourself like a rocket that has to travel in an arc to hit a target literally head-on remains so weird but delightful, as does biting your way up the side of a wall, and Red Company nailed all of those animations and looks. That’s what will stick with you, more than that those mountains in the background have little in the way of variety or texture to them even if some of the others very intentionally do.

If you’re not familiar with Bonk games, the platforming might seem odd at first — how do I reach this spot, it’s too high, or this one, it’s too much of a gap, why is everything seemingly so slow — but that's because it handles very differently from other games. Midair flips! That's the separator here, and what you spend a lot of time doing. You jump with that button and then use the attack button, repeatedly, in midair to prolong your airtime via flips. You also bounce off of the tops of enemies mid-flip to reach new heights, or to get to platforms or items that are higher up than you could possibly make your way to in a more standard way. You have significant control over the flips, too, to the point that you can pretty easily swap between head down and feet down — Bonk isn’t doing a complete flip with one button press, but instead half of one. Flip flap? Flap flip? You get the idea. Also it remains funny that you can bump into enemies from below — assuming they're not protected there — to damage them, because Bonk's head is his weapon. Don’t jump on their heads or weak spots, this isn’t Mario. More like a reverse Mario.

Bonk's Adventure is also a game where, even though you're a cave man obsessed with eating chunks of meat you've found on the ground, you will face off against enemies such as: a dinosaur tank, a submarine firing torpedoes, a shark that flies and looks like the front half of a jet, and so on. You’re trying to defeat a technologically advanced lizard-man and his dinosaur army, which includes dinosaurs wearing eggs on their head as armor and masks while wielding axes, and also the aforementioned mechanical monstrosities designed after dinosaurs. And enemies that perform archery but only underwater, for some reason.

You’ll start with just three heart containers for life — and lose fractions of the heart housed in those containers when you take damage, not full hearts — but can add more if you collect the two additional pickups — which show up as grey heart containers — in the game. One is in the second “Round,” to use the game’s parlance for worlds full of interconnected levels that just have transition screens, not map-based level selection, and the other in the third. You retain these new containers when you die, but only the first three refill when you resume play. As for coming back to life, you simply press start to do it, and Bonk will go from passed out on the ground to up and at ‘em. There's no restart screen or whatever, just continue on if you have the means, and time it so that whatever killed you isn’t hovering above your almost-corpse waiting to injure you again.

Bonk has a couple of different pick-ups that power him up, too. They’re temporary, but allow you to take another hit and perform some different abilities to take down foes. The Rock-Head Bonk creates a concussive wave when you headbutt the ground, damaging the enemies caught within it, and the blast, though unseen, is large enough that it even can impact enemies in the air that are within the radius. That’s acquired with a small piece of meat that moves Bonk’s power level up one stage. A larger piece of meat bumps him up two levels, gives him temporary invulnerability, and grants him the Invisible Screamer power. Here, Bonk straight-up just screams words at his enemies, and those words cause damage. He’s not saying mean things, though: the text just reads “WOW",” which apparently surprises his foes to death. Then again, if a furious-looking cave man ate some meat in front of me and then screamed “WOW!” as loud as he could while running directly at me, I’d probably at least fake my death to see if that’d get him to keep on going by.

There is food to collect, which gets you points, and also smiley faces. These give you points after every completed Round, but only the ones you collected on a single life. So you can pick up and go without penalty in terms of progress after a death so long as you have extra lives, but you do lose point bonuses for your deaths. Points are only for your own amusement, though; extends come through pickups. Which means this only has to bother you if you’re challenging yourself or some goal you’ve come up with — these smiley faces lack the same level of importance that they had in, say, Bonk’s Revenge, where the number of them you acquired played a role in acquiring extra lives or a larger health pool post-level.

Image credit: MobyGames

You will also want to keep an eye out for small flowers tucked away in the levels, as they carry you away to a bonus stage. There are three types of bonus stages. You utilize flips to pick up as many food items — and therefore bonus points — as possible in between platforms, and if you fall, the bonus area is over. Another has you performing as many flips as possible on your way down from a high-up jump, but you have to land on your feet, not head, in order to actually score any of the bonus points. And the third has you climbing up a wall as high as you can in just 10 seconds, where said climbing is done not with Bonk’s arms, but with his mouth, as is tradition for the slightly deranged character.

There are six Rounds to get through, each distinct not just in visual style but in design and traversal expectations. For example, the first Round is more standard, horizontally-based and focused on precision jumps and mastering of flips, as you have a whole bunch of bouncy clouds to traverse if you plan on getting any of the pickups. The second is much more vertically oriented, and will have you utilizing Bonk’s ability to climb view chewing, while also swimming up waterfalls to reach higher cliffs. The third Round is primarily underwater, so you’ll spend a lot of time swimming and bonking with different timing considerations than you’d have while flying through the air to deliver headbutts.

Image credit: MobyGames

Round 6 is its own stage, but also a boss rush of the four Round masters faced previously — not a typo there — as well as some new bosses, including the final one. It will take you less than two hours to get through the game, even if you take your time mastering jumps/flips to pick up as many items as possible and explore for bonus areas. It goes by in a little over an hour if you’re either familiar with it all or just blow through without bothering to pick up all those smileys for points or take things carefully and slowly so as not to avoid putting your potential bonus points at risk by dying. That feels about right, though: Bonk was always more focused on a good time over a long time, and that tradition carrying over to its portable iteration during an era when that did mean a game was smaller more often than not checks out.

If you're looking to experience just a single Bonk game, then you want Bonk's Revenge for the Turbografx-16, as it’s the most robust, well-rounded, and enjoyable one of the bunch. If you're looking for more Bonk beyond that system's offerings, though, Bonk's Adventure GB is a nifty diversion that fits in well with the platform's library of portable versions of existing console franchises. Of course, you can’t do that without emulating the game in the present, since it — like so many other games from Hudson that Konami now has its hands on — just isn’t available in the present, not even via Nintendo Switch Online.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge isn’t a bad game, necessarily, but it’s not a good one, either. The Game Boy debut for the Blue Bomber inessential, something that only Mega Man completionists need to bother with in the present. Mega Man II took a couple of steps forward but at least as many backward, resulting in the same situation. Mega Man III took the better ideas from both titles to make something that, while still inessential, at least felt like Capcom was doing more than cashing in on the Mega Man name as quickly and inexpensively as possible: the game still has its problems with cheap, frequent deaths, but otherwise it plays as if someone actually took their time trying to make Mega Man work for the Game Boy.

Mega Man IV, though? That’s a good video game. The level design is a step up from anything in the previous three titles in this portable series, the cheap deaths are at a minimum because of it, and the only thing that feels overtly recycled is the fights with the robot masters, which here are pulled from the NES games Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 5. There’s frequent slowdown, but it always feels like it’s because the game is pushing the hardware and trying to do something that makes it worth the dip in performance. And there is enough here that stands out and is different — there’s an item shop! — that Mega Man IV feels like its own thing instead of just a way to reuse some existing bosses in a handheld game. Like Capcom wanted to actually build something here, and not just go “here’s some Mega Man you love Mega Man buy this new Mega Man, it’s new sort of.”

This is also the only time where the Game Boy recreation was anywhere close to the NES games that it pulled from. Granted, Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 5 aren’t exactly the most beloved entries in the series, but the fact it’s a discussion at all works in Mega Man IV’s favor. This also served as the final time that Capcom would borrow from NES games for their portable cousins: the next entry in the Game Boy series, Mega Man V, would be wholly original rather than half-recycled. It took four tries to get it right, but they got there

Image credit: MobyGames

Capcom did not get there alone, though. While the game was produced by Tokuro Fujiwara (director of Bionic Commando, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Sweet Home), who had also served in that role in the other Game Boy entries, and Keiji Inafune was the artist, Minakuchi Engineering was the game’s primary development studio. Minakuchi Engineering was responsible for Dr. Wily’s Revenge and Mega Man III, and would, post-Mega Man IV, also develop V and the Sega Genesis Mega Man compilation, The Wily Wars, before being given the reins for another original in Mega Man X3 on the SNES. It’s safe to say that at this point they were familiar with how Mega Man worked, and it showed in the final product.

Much of Mega Man IV is what you would expect, in that you traverse stages light on health powerups and extra lives, trying to get to the robot master at the end with as much health left as possible. If you have the power-up that is said robot master’s weakness, that fight against them can be over in mere seconds, depending on how effectively you deploy it. You do need to learn attack patterns and how to utilize these powers, though, and being able to take a hit or two would help you, as well. Things are less forgiving in Dr. Wily’s castle, since you have the second wave of robot masters to go with a number of mid-bosses, which also includes the last of the three “Mega Man Killer” robots, Ballade — rather than robots turned toward the purpose of defeating Mega Man, Ballade and the other Mega Man Killer bots were designed specifically with that purpose in mind.

Rush is here, giving you the use of the skills Rush Coil — basically a trampoline for reaching higher platforms or items that are otherwise out of reach — and Rush Jet, which lets you fly forward. You receive these Rush powers from two of the robot masters: Coil from Toad Man, Jet from Charge Man. So, you can pick which robot masters you want to fight based on not just which powers you want to get for Mega Man to be able to fire, but also for the fastest access to Rush’s abilities. Toad Man is one of the first four bosses you can choose from, while Charge Man is in Dr. Wily’s Castle in the second round.

That’s convenient enough, since Toad Man is easy to defeat with just the standard Mega Man shot, so you can start there, then move on to Bright Man, who is weak to Toad Man’s screen-covering Rain Flush, then you can fight Pharaoh Man with Bright Man’s Flash Stopper, and Ring Man with the Pharaoh Shot. And yes, Mega Man IV isn’t perfect, but when you’re pulling from a game with “Pharaoh Man” and “Toad Man” in it, well, you can only blame so much on the game doing the recycling. In the second wave of levels, you can take on Charge Man with Rain Flush, too, so it’s easy enough to kick that group off with an advantage that will let you pick up Rush Jet, too.

The reason to prioritize Rush Coil and Rush Jet in your battle plan here is not just to get it out of the way, but because they have specific uses for collecting items. The first four levels each contain a letter from the word “Beat" to collect, and when you do, you get access to Mega Man’s robo-bird pal, Beat. First introduced in Mega Man 5, Beat will fly around attacking basic enemies and making your life a little easier because of it. Not an essential get, but a nice to have. In the second half of the game, you’ll need to collect a different set of four letters, which spell “Wily,” in order to unlock all the gates at the start of Ballade’s stage.

Image credit: MobyGames

After completing Wily’s castle — which will see you get through Stone Man, Charge Man, Napalm Man, Crystal Man, a mid-boss, and two instances of Ballade, you’ll then go to space and Dr. Wily’s ship, where he and some additional bosses — as well as rematches against the eight robot masters — await Mega Man. Mega Man IV is heavy on the boss fights, but you do have access to a whole bunch of items, at least. The item shop, which is located in Dr. Light’s lab and you have access to after you complete stages, is full of myriad options for making your life easier, from Energy Tanks that will fully refill your life once in a level, to a W-Tank that does the same for your special weapons, to extra lives, and even the “Energy Balancer,” which will fill up whichever special weapon has the lowest amount of energy left when you pick up a refill in a stage, instead of going to whichever one you have equipped at the time. You can also find some of these items out and about — there’s a small energy tank you can find in the wild, too, four of which make a full energy tank, so a combination of exploration and purchasing can get you there as needed — but there’s a heavy emphasis on this item shop for keeping Mega Man well-stocked.

To buy these items, you need P-Chips, which are a pickup found just lying around in levels, or acquired from defeated foes. You will have a healthy supply of them so long as you keep fighting through, and while this all means there’s a little less to find out in the levels themselves, with the idea being that you’ll buy stuff, it does let you tailor your experience a little bit more. Don’t think that you can be wasteful, though, just because you can purchase extra lives and energy tanks: you still want to learn to avoid taking damage, because it’s not as if there is an infinite supply of P-Chips out there for you, and having to deal with the boss rush late — and multi-stage Wily himself, of course — means you’re going to have a need for refills.

If there’s one real knock against Mega Man IV that keeps it from being anywhere close to the best of its cousins on the NES, it’s that the level design, while a major improvement from its Game Boy predecessors, doesn’t offer up anything particularly noteworthy. What’s here works, and there aren’t any major complaints in terms of quality — cheap deaths, as said, are at a minimum, and there are some cool moments, such as with you needing to shut off the lights and limit your visibility in order to make platforms appear, and the rivers of sand that attempt to carry you along to your room, both of which can cause slowdown because of how much is going on on-screen at those times. But there is a lack of true “wow!” moments, for lack of a better descriptor, making Mega Man IV more of a workmanlike experience. It’s significantly better than its predecessors, but there are much better Mega Man games out there, too, even if only one of those exists on the Game Boy alongside it.

Still, if you were to search out just one of the first four Game Boy Mega Man games, all of which recycle concepts and bosses from the contemporary NES games, this would be the one to go for — there really is no need to revisit Wily’s Revenge, II, or III if you’re not specifically trying to get through everything. Mega Man IV would give you the best version of that experience, and then you could follow up with V, which again, is a completely original adventure, rather than a combination of new with reused designs and bosses. And seeking out IV is pretty simply these days, so that helps.

Mega Man IV originally released on the Game Boy in 1993 in Japan, North America, and Europe in 1993, and wouldn’t come out anywhere again until 2014, when it was released on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console — part of the reason for the large gap in between there is because Capcom canceled the collection they had in the works for the Game Boy Advance, which would have featured full-color versions of the five Mega Man Game Boy titles, as well as bonus history and art features. The 3DS digital shop is now closed down, which temporarily cut anyone off from experiencing these games in the present without original hardware and the secondhand market, but Capcom put all five Mega Man Game Boy titles onto Nintendo Switch Online in 2024, so they are at least available somewhere in the present, even if they still aren’t able to be purchased. And because of the possible filters on the Game Boy NSO channel, you can get a Game Boy Color-esque experience for these games, rather than the monochrome, green-tint of the Game Boy screen.

Perhaps it’s the overall quality of these games that keeps Capcom from releasing them for purchase in a collection, or even in the form that was once promised back in the GBA era, because they basically re-release every Mega Man and Mega Man-adjacent series in a bundle these days. The Game Boy titles and the trio of Legends-universe games are still waiting for their moment, though, but again, at least you can experience the Game Boy titles in the present, if you have a Switch and an NSO account. It’s not ideal, but it’s more likely to get people to dive in than asking them to emulate, especially when you consider that these games are well over 30 years old now, and basically hidden away by Capcom in the intervening decades outside of being plopped onto the 3DS — how many potential players even know they exist, compared to the series’ that Capcom perpetually makes available each new console era?

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Pong was obviously huge for Atari — that’s underselling it, by quite a bit — but that game was far from their only important contribution to the success of arcade games. In 1974, Atari released racing game Gran Trak 10, which was responsible for a couple of significant firsts in the industry. Namely, it was the first-ever arcade racing game to use cars — Space Race, also from Atari and released in 1973, used spaceships — while the Magnavox Odyssey racer, Wipeout, was a tabletop/console game that used light as representation for a vehicle. There had been racing games in arcades before, but they were electromechanical in nature, not full video games.

The second innovation is more of an “as far as we know” item rather than a definitive one, but Gran Trak 10 is believed to be the first game to utilize integrated circuit-based read-only memory — aka ROM — rather than diode-stored graphics. The “as far as we know” is because sources differ on this: Tank, an Atari-adjacent game, might have been the first game to do so, per the April 1995 edition of Next Generation magazine, which profiled Atari’s then-resurgence, but the books Racing The Beam and Atari Inc.: Business is Fun both cite Gran Trak as the source of this change in technology. Regardless, Gran Trak does have the first arcade racer with cars thing going for it, which is no small occasion. And even though it caused significant financial trouble for Atari by succeeding — someone did a poor job of accounting and each cabinet sold actually cost Atari money, and a three-month delay in production owing to having to redesign the cabinet caused a $500,000 shortfall — this did result in them merging with their subsidiary, Kee, which Atari had previously leaned on to make cloned versions of their games to work around whatever exclusivity deals arcade distributors cooked up. The aforementioned Tank was actually a Kee title, but released at the same time that the two were merging.

It was 1974, though, so Gran Trak wasn’t in color, and was fairly limited in some ways: the pedals were digital, not analog, so you couldn’t apply different amounts of pressure to change your speed, the steering doesn’t feel quite like racers would come to feel over time, as it was basically used just for actual turns, and there is just the one track to get through. Gran Trak 10 was also a single-player game, with Gran Trak 20, a later version, a two-player variant. This isn’t meant to downplay the important or enjoyment of Gran Trak, either, but to point out that Atari had plenty of space to improve and refine racing games. Which they did, by introducing Sprint 2 in 1976. This was developed by the Kee portion of Atari, and the “2” did not denote a sequel but how many players could join in at once. In 1977, Sprint 4 and Sprint 8 arrived, with Sprint 1 following in 1978. Whereas Sprint 2 was also a black-and-white game, 4 and 8 were full color, raster editions of the game.

Image credit: MobyGames

Sprint 2 had a significant innovation contained within, which was to program “intelligence” into the cars so that they weren’t just following a predetermined path. Instead, cars adjusted to the tracks and their conditions, which included how the player or players were performing. Next Generation interviewed then-COO and president of Atari, Dan Van Elderen, in 1997 (issue 24), who brought this up as a significant project that he had worked on during his time in the company as an engineer, with the “semi-intelligent manner” that the cars drove in, specifically, as what made it so.

Which brings us to 1986 and Super Sprint. Atari had developed a multiplayer top-down car racer over a decade before that, and then technological advances allowed for a smarter computer opponent, as well as color graphics. Super Sprint, then, was the culmination of that changing tech with Atari’s foundational knowledge of the genre, and the result was wonderful. The steering and acceleration all worked much better than with Gran Trak, the graphics were a significant leap forward from Sprint, and the default four-player setup with up to three humans controlling Formula One vehicles meant you always had a winner, runners up, and a clear loser. If you’ve ever played anything multiplayer before, you know there was some real pressure among friend groups to not be that loser.

There are eight tracks of varying difficulties, and you would just play them on a loop until you had somehow cleared 85 of them. They weren’t just repeating directly, though, but instead the speed and quality of the computer opponents increased with each return visit to a track, and the number of obstacles to overcome — as well as their difficulty — increased as well. Those obstacles? Water puddles that slow you down, of course. Mud puddles that cause you to slow down and spin out. Oil slicks that spin your car a full 360 degrees. Cones, but not regular cones: exploding cones. There are tornadoes, too, which the manual describes as “like a moving oil slick,” which is against all odds an accurate take. Last are hydraulic poles, which raise and lower to impede your progress. You also have to deal with doors opening and shutting at random intervals, which opens and closes potential shortcuts depending on which it is, and oh, walls. Don’t crash into walls. Unless you want to explode by ramming into one at too high of a speed.

The concept of Super Sprint is fairly simple: you want to complete five laps before any of your opponents do. That’s the game at its most basic. Using the steering wheel, you’re going to take some big turns — bigger than you think you have to — in order to get around corners. You’re going to look pretty animated spinning that thing around to make your way around a track. And there are all kinds of turns to make, too: making them efficiently is the key to finishing in first as the difficulty arrives. Too many wide turns, and not hitting the “groove” of the track that lets you make it through the quickest, will result in the computer eventually trouncing you, never mind your pals who have discovered the proper way to get through.

Image credit: MobyGames

There is more going on in Super Sprint than “just” that, however, and that’s not just a reference to the aforementioned obstacles. There are occasional shortcuts from track breakdowns — gaps in walls, spaces to drive over grass to skip a turn and plow forward, etc. — and they’re often difficult to access for one reason or another. The kind of thing that can actually make you fall further behind if you don’t hit the opening just right. There are also wrenches that randomly appear on the track, and you’re going to want to pick them up. The bonus points that appear are fine and all, but don’t go out of your way for them — the manual for the NES port even states that, “You get the highest scores by staying in the race.” Which is true, since there are post-level point payouts, as well as checkpoint bonuses you score again and again by simply getting through the course. If you can snag the bonus points, do so, but don’t risk slowing down or adding to your time to do it.

Wrenches, though. Wrenches are used for upgrades in between races, to achieve one of four goals: maxing out your car’s traction, its acceleration, its top speed, or, to simply add bonus points to your score. You only want to do the last of those things after you’ve already souped up your vehicle. You might do fine at first without upgrades, but remember: your opponents are going to get better at this as you revisit the tracks in a loop that isn’t endless but will start to feel as such. You are going to need higher top speeds and better acceleration, and remember the thing about the big turns? You need that traction upgrade, too, to help counter the significant understeering that, again, was very much for the show and feel of turning the wheel rather than anything resembling realism.

The NES port kept the upgrade system of the arcade original. Image credit: MobyGames

A later edition of Super Sprint would also be released for arcades, known as Championship Sprint. It’s practically the same game, just with new tracks and a two-player cabinet instead of Super Sprint’s larger three-player version. If you want to play either in the present, legally, well, you have to go back to the Midway Arcade Treasures collection, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, respectively, to do it. Not everyone has an Xbox, GameCube, or Playstation 2 still hooked up in their home, however, so that’s not exactly a simple solution. Oh, and steering with the analog stick isn’t recommended, either, if you’re trying to perfectly replicate the experience of a steering-wheel based game with intentional understeering. It’s touchy. But alas, that’s what those compilations had to work with.

There are successful home editions of Super Sprint. The Atari ST port is a beauty that does an excellent job of replicating the visuals of the arcade original. It’s not a 1:1 conversion by any means, but it manages to retain more than just the gameplay, and at least keeps the spirit of the visuals. Tengen would release a port for the NES as well, which was a significant visual downgrade, of course, but had its steering recalibrated for a D-pad, and as a result is significantly more enjoyable to play — and master at a high level — than the Midway Arcade Treasures ports.

The NES edition allows you to continue after failing to finish in first, but your points do reset. Luckily, your wrench upgrades carry over from one continue to the next, so your score is the only real victim here — it’s not like the game then asks you to Gradius Syndrome your way through a late-game track without any of the upgrades that got you to that point to begin with. Like with Championship Sprint, the NES port is just a two-player game maximum, which makes sense given that’s how many controllers you could plug into the console at a time, anyway.

Image credit: MobyGames

The NES edition does play a little differently in a few ways since it can’t 100 percent replicate the arcade experience. For instance, sometimes it’s fine to hit an oil slick if you won’t crash into a wall from it or see yourself fall behind, since it clears said slick and resets what’s on screen — maybe a wrench cycles in, maybe some point pickups. The game is missing the helpful directional arrows, so now you have to either guess correctly which way the road is actually going, or follow a lead car on the first lap to see for yourself which way to go before plowing ahead.

One thing the NES game has going for it — other than that you can play it at home — is that the car’s engines make a satisfying hum sound as your car is moving: in the arcade edition, sound effects for power-ups and spin outs and crashes are the ones that were designed to draw in players overhearing others playing or the demo mode. At home, though, it’s that engine hum that dominates. It actually feels a little weird without it, when you go back and play the arcade version through, say, Midway Arcade Treasures, where you also lack the steering wheel and have to maneuver via analog stick. At least if you come upon an actual cabinet — I did have the chance to experience the game that way at the American Classic Arcade Museum — you get the steering wheel experience. Big turns, baby. The biggest.

Championship Sprint was not the end of the line for the Sprint series. Badlands was a post-apocalyptic two-player variant released in 1989. And in 2024, Atari revived the series for NeoSprint, which ups the limit to eight cars and increases the features and modes — a campaign! a tracker builder! — while retaining the overall simple gameplay. Unlike Super Sprint, you can get this one in the present, and pretty much anywhere: it’s available on Steam, Switch, Playstation 4/5, and Xbox Series S|X.

Still, though, it would be something if the actual Super Sprint could find its way back to your living room in the present. Atari has certainly been keen on revivals and re-releases, but Warner Bros. owns Midway and its game catalog now, which complicates matters both in terms of Atari actually getting its hands on these titles for themselves in the present, or for someone like Hamster to come in and get these western arcade titles out on the Arcade Archives service. It’s good to have hope, though. And also emulation, when the former doesn’t pan out.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

I played a whole bunch of baseball video games as a kid. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do when you had a Super Nintendo — the system was practically lousy with them. There were 21 different baseball games for the SNES, ranging from licensed to unlicensed, with real players or cyborgs, published by Nintendo themselves, or even just featuring you as a relief pitcher. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball is the one I actually owned as a child who could only get so many new video games out of his parents in a year, but plenty of others popped into the house briefly as rentals.

What they tended to have in common is an arcade-style play. Exaggerated animations, fast-paced, constant pitching and swinging, and not necessarily realistic sound effects. The aforementioned Ken Griffey Jr. Presents was a masterclass in all of that, with its caricatures of players, “Oh come on!” yell at the umpire by those players, the sound the ball made as it traveled, the music, the animations. It was also representative of an era that has, at this point, practically vanished in favor of simulation and realism.

I picked up a Genesis at the tail-end of that system’s lifecycle, thanks to a cousin who was getting married and either because video games were not going to be part of his life anymore or because he was moving on to a 32-bit console. His whole collection came with it, and World Series Baseball was one of the included games. It was apparent, immediately, that this was a different baseball game than the many that I’d been exposed to by that point. You no longer had that zoomed out view from behind the plate (or, in the case of something like the Bases Loaded games, from behind the pitcher, aping how the games look on television), but instead were zoomed in, from the catcher’s point of view. You couldn’t make out the entire body of the batter, but could see him leaning over the plate, and instead of more of a top-down strike zone where left and right of the plate were the only considerations you needed to make, and you manipulated the ball’s movement and speed with the D-pad as it traveled toward the batter, you now made these decisions of pitch placement, type, and speed before ever throwing the ball, all via menus.

Image credit: MobyGames

An announcer was part of the proceedings, too, with the play-by-play commentator for the San Diego Padres, Jerry Coleman, digitized and with his phrases stitched together into something that was supposed to approximate the action on the field. There were only so many phrases, and it had the kind of stilted sound that you could expect from a Sega Genesis game slapping a collection of soundbytes together into a sentence as needed, but it was also commentary! The crowd reacted to plays, the bat was meant to sound realistic, the ball traveled with a speed that felt realistic, which allowed Coleman’s call of “He blasted it to center, way back, to the wall! It’s gone! Home run!” to feel accurate to real-life dingers in terms of how long it took to happen and what you’d expect to hear while seeing it.

The scoreboard had animations after each play, too, reacting to whether your player struck out or struck out an opponent, hit a home run, etc. Next batter info was also displayed on the scoreboard, again trying to show an air of authenticity, and the game was not only licensed by Major League Baseball itself, but also the Major League Baseball Players Association — the league and the union were not necessarily on the same page when it came to licensing in games 30-plus years ago, and given they were in active and incessant labor battles at the time where raising additional money to fight those fights was important, well, you saw a whole bunch of games that had just one license or the other. World Series Baseball on the Genesis was the first to have both, and until Triple Play ‘97 on the Playstation — released in the summer of 1996 — it was the only baseball game franchise to do so. That might not sound like that much time passing, but in those two-plus years in between the first World Series Baseball and EA’s entry in the field, over another dozen baseball non-World Series Baseball titles were released — it was truly a different time.

There were just 28 teams in MLB at the time — the Florida Marlins (now Miami Marlins) and Colorado Rockies had just been introduced to the league in 1993 — and all of them were included, along with all 700 players on the big-league rosters. Actual logos and actual stadiums were there, and while uniforms were not — one sacrifice that seems to have been made in order to get these advanced-looking and regularly large sprites into the game, along with all of the voice clips, was to have uniforms be designed like they were from a century before, with whites vs. grays — it didn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, because check out how well these sprites all animated.

It’s not just that you could pick pitch type and pitch location from a menu, but there were a plethora of pitches to choose from, at least for the time. Charlie Hough and Tim Wakefield’s knuckleballs were included, as well Norm Charlton’s nasty screwball. You had a more basic (and accurate) three-pitch selection of fastball, change-up, and a breaking ball — either a curveball or a slider — for most pitchers, but depending on the pitcher, you could also have access to a split-fingered fastball, sinker, or, as mentioned, screwball or knuckler.

You had to think in three dimensions with your pitch location, since these balls had specific movement patterns they would follow, that would also change a bit depending on whether you chose to throw them slow, medium, or fast. A slider from a right-handed pitcher, if you want it to enter the strike zone after appearing like it was going to be a ball thrown inside, had to aim for where you wanted the break to happen — left and outside of the zone — not where you wanted it to end up. A sinker, if you want it to drop out of the strike zone, has to be located in the bottom quadrants of it somewhere, before it does its thing and “sinks” out of the zone and away from the batter’s swing. A knuckleball’s location is mostly about prayer. Velocity and location are worse as a pitcher tires — you have to use relievers here, and even warm up the pitchers in advance before you throw them in, to get maximum effectiveness from your pitching staff.

Image credit: MobyGames

You can play an Exhibition game, a Home Run Derby — that’s not a joke about how easy it ends up being to hit home runs in any game mode once you get the hang of the swing mechanics and timing, but it could be — take batting practice with specific setups for handedness and such, or start an entire season, which can be set to have the new six-division format of 1994 or the more traditional four-division setup of just East and West divisions in both of the American and National Leagues. You can also set season length to 13, 26, 52, 104, or a standard 162 games. There’s no franchise mode, but hey, it was 1994. Being able to play a full-length season was sometimes in question at this time, never mind one with all of the real players and all of the real teams in real stadiums. Difficulties range from Rookie, to Veteran, to All-Star, with higher velocities for pitches — which makes it more difficult to time them for hitting as well as locate them as a pitcher — as you go up that ladder, as well as a smaller hit box, especially as you focus on a power swing over a contact swing for the hitters. Stats are tracked within a season, and immediately, too, as their new numbers will begin to show up and update throughout the first game you play.

Now, this is all stuff that seems normal today, in a world where MLB: The Show is the dominant franchise — as well as the only licensed one, given Super Mega Baseball deals with fictional players and retired ones — and has itself existed for nearly 20 years now. World Series Baseball looks and feels pretty rudimentary in comparison to what we have available in the present, but this was a massive shift at the time — baseball games, to that point, were all working off of the same basic premise of how these titles were supposed to look and feel, with the big point of disagreement being about whether the camera should be behind the pitcher to emulate a television broadcast or not. World Series Baseball threw a literal new dimension into the mix, and essentially signaled the shift to the kinds of 3D experiences that the systems of the 32-bit era would focus on, which in turn led to even more refinement on the N64 and into the next era of consoles beyond that.

You can watch pitchers warm up in the bullpen! Image credit: MobyGames

World Series Baseball changed the game in more ways than just managing to somehow unite MLB and MLBPA licensing at a time when the two sides were, understandably, at each other’s throats. I’d get into how MLB’s owners and commissioner engineered the 1994 strike so that fans would be mad at the players instead of the owners over a work stoppage like with the 1990 lockout, but that’s a detailed conversation for my other beat — the point in this space is that the two sides agreed to something that would benefit both of them at a time when they were basically incapable of doing that anywhere, when interim commissioner Bud Selig was plotting to scale back basically everything the PA had achieved in the previous three-ish decades of collective bargaining even if he had to act in unilateral, illegal ways to pull it off, when both sides granted their license to game after game but never together, because licensing itself was part of the battlefield between the two. That’s not as immediately notable when you pop the cartridge in and hear Jerry Coleman’s voice come through your speakers, or notice how much different World Series Baseball looks and feels compared to the competition of the time — or how much it is clearly the prototype for the direction baseball video games would go — but it’s just as vital to the history and legacy of baseball video games as the rest of it.

Sega would produce a number of World Series Baseball titles. A 1995 sequel, also known as World Series Baseball, released for the Sega Saturn, and came out in Japan on the Game Gear as Hideo Nomo’s World Series Baseball. World Series Baseball ‘95 had Game Gear, Genesis, and 32X releases, with the last of those titled World Series Baseball Starring Deion Sanders. World Series Baseball ‘96 released on the Genesis and Windows, while World Series Baseball II came out for the Saturn in 1996. World Series Baseball ‘98 was also a Saturn title that somehow had a Genesis release despite it being 1997, and then the franchise would begin its shift into the 2K era, in terms of naming conventions, with the Dreamcast: World Series Baseball 2K1, 2K2, and 2K3 were the final three games in the series, with Visual Concepts handling development of the last two, which were multiplatform given Sega’s transition to third-party development and publishing. Visual Concepts was acquired by Sega in 1999, and then sold off to Take-Two Interactive after Sega exited the sports market. A disappointing end for those who loved what Sega had going on with both their Sega Sports and 2K lines.

The end doesn’t take away from what was accomplished by Sega and World Series Baseball, however. It was hugely influential in a number of ways, from the actual gameplay and its presentation to the business model behind it, and whether you have played it yourself or not, you have at least experienced its legacy in the three-plus decades since its arrival.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gradius games have a habit — and this is not a criticism — of doing the same sort of stuff constantly, with callbacks big and small and the kinds of gameplay and design elements that you’ve seen a bunch of times before showing up anew. It’s not to say that they are often rehashes, but there is an expectation of the kinds of levels you’ll face, or some of the enemy types, or the overarching structure of a given stage will be pretty set in stone, with the first half being a segment for powering up and the second being focused on the actual unique challenge of the thing.

This concept was so strong in these games in general that part of the success of Gradius Gaiden was the tweaking of this known setup to play on expectations and delight with little surprises here and there. It’s just how Gradius games are; fans came to expect it. And it also made the release of Nemesis on the Game Boy ripe for the kind of design that plenty of portable versions of arcade and console series had already gone with, which is to say that you could have slapped a “made out of 100% recycled materials” sticker on the box. Just like the Mega Man games on the Game Boy were made up of basically bits and pieces of the NES games stitched together, Nemesis was elements, stages, and music from various Gradius titles that preceded it. Nothing wrong with that, as the idea was “here’s Gradius, but portable,” and that was a novel concept at the time. But there was room for something wholly original, if Konami wanted to go that route.

Which is where Gradius: The Interstellar Assault comes in. It’s not only original material from the ground up, but it’s fairly different from Gradius in general in terms of design. You have the same basic setup, with some slight weapon customization to choose from before you begin, in terms of what kind of missiles, double shot, and laser you’ll have available, and the power-up bar works the same way it always does in the Gradius — not Salamander — titles, with the RPG-inspired character build equivalent for an STG in place, that allows you to prioritize specific weapon types, ship speed, options, or even shields. You’ll see some recognizable foes — there is, of course, a ship with a core, and you have to shoot it — but otherwise this takes on an approach to level design and level continuity that is unlike any Gradius that had come before it. It’s surprising to see in a Game Boy title, even, but given the limitations of the platform, this uniqueness was likely because it was on the Game Boy more than anything — it was a way to stand out both for the series and on the platform.

The Interstellar Assault even starts out different, out of the gate: an unseen enemy destroys the capital ships flanking your comparatively tiny fighter, the Vic Viper, and then starts chasing you. You aren’t destroying a bunch of enemy ships in this section, but flying for your life, navigating, eventually, a series of caverns that you hope will allow you to escape this enormous vessel that is crashing straight on through some of this rock like it’s nothing.

It turns out that this is the first “transition” to a stage — you will escape that ship, and then play Gradius like “normal” after that — and that The Interstellar Assault is loaded with those, and they’re all wildly different. After you complete the first stage and are feeling sufficiently powered up, you begin to head to the second one like you normally would in a Gradius title, and then whoops, you’re caught in some kind of tractor beam. One that also wiped out all of your upgrades as if you just died. You’re brought inside the massive ship, powerless, and have to fight your way out from in there while powering your ship back up with the upgrades found inside.

The other transition elements are more visual than anything, unlike the first two in which at least part of the stage is built around them, but they’re impressive, and basically Konami showing off what they and this 8-bit, monochrome system are capable of. The best of the bunch comes after you fight the one recognizable enemy from the series’ past — you know, where you shoot the core. Check out this transition, where, as it becomes clear that you’ve defeated the monstrosity, it begins to fall from orbit, so you begin to descend in the Vic Viper as well, until you end up on the surface of a planet to continue your assault.

Look at the flames signifying reentry into the planet’s atmosphere on the Vic Viper! The stars giving way to clouds! The slow disintegration of your helpless foe, which was too weak from battle to protect itself and broke up in the atmosphere as you continued to descend! Konami didn’t need to make that kind of transition on the Game Boy — they could have easily faded to black, or just had you continue forward after the ship exploded, but they went all out here to create something memorable despite the system’s graphical limitations.

These segments stand out even more when you realize that The Interstellar Assault is limited to just two options to accompany the Vic Viper — too many shots and sprites on screen would likely hamper performance or drop it to zero, same as with the NES ports of Gradius games — and the ship itself doesn’t animate when it moves. Konami decided to find other ways to make it all look sick as hell, as the platform allowed, and they succeeded.

Trapped!

The Interstellar Assault is a short game, at just five stages, and it’s not particularly difficult as far as Gradius games go. The emphasis seemed to be on making this portable in every possible way — a pick up and play entry, where you could complete a run in the time it took your parents to drive you from Point A to Point B, or while you were sitting around somewhere just hoping to waste 20 minutes. That’s not to say it won’t challenge you whatsoever — it is Gradius — but if you can dodge and avoid running into walls in the process, you should be able to stay powered up for the most part throughout, and clear it with relative ease.

While it was known as Gradius: The Interstellar Assault at release in North America, it was Nemesis II in Japan, and Nemesis II: The Return of Hero in Europe. Possibly the most Gradius thing about The Interstellar Assault is a naming convention that no one can agree on depending on where you live, that makes little sense to everyone for different reasons. And it gets more confusing later on, too: in 1997 and 1998, Konami would release a bunch of their Game Boy games in compilations designed for the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Color, first in Japan but then in Europe a few years later. The Interstellar Assault was one of the included titles — as was Nemesis — but they were renamed. Nemesis became Gradius, and Gradius: The Interstellar Assault became Gradius II, with its European title appending “The Return of the Hero” as a subtitle. There was already a Gradius, obviously, and there was already a Gradius II and a Gradius 2, but that didn’t stop Konami. Nothing can stop Konami from further complicating the naming scheme of Gradius when given the opportunity.

Missiles, options, and lasers, oh my.

Hell, they’re still at it: the Gradius Origins collection, released in 2025, had one new game in it, Salamander III, which kills me to type since its predecessor is styled Salamander 2. Just make up your mind, Konami!

Gradius: The Interstellar Assault was re-released on the Game Boy portal of Nintendo Switch Online, with the option to play it with its Game Boy Color/Super Game Boy appearance — seen in these screenshots and video, which you probably guessed given that it didn’t have that monochrome appearance to it, even if it’s not full of bright colors like Gradius typically is. Nemesis is not there with it, but if Konami was just going to release one of these Game Boy Gradius titles, then they made the right call: there’s nothing wrong with Nemesis, as said, but it’s just unexciting, as it’s Gradius but watered down a bit for the platform not just visually, but in its scope and gameplay, too.

The Interstellar Assault couldn’t be Gradius exactly as it was known on more powerful platforms, so instead, like with the ports of various Gradius titles to the 8-bit NES, Konami tried to figure out how to make it work for the Game Boy without compromising it, turning it into its own thing. Since this was an original effort and not a port, they could lean into further into it, which is why there is such emphasis on these transitional stages and unique gameplay experiences, such as the opening chase scene where you’re outrunning a massive enemy vessel and dodging asteroids. The Interstellar Assault might not be an essential addition to the Gradius canon in the way some other non-arcade originals ended up being, but it’s still a worthwhile experience that won’t take veterans of the series very long to figure out and complete.

If nothing else, just check out that reentry sequence again — it’s truly sick work for the intentionally underpowered Game Boy.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

When Klonoa made the switch to handhelds with 1999’s Moonlight Museum on the WonderSwan, the gameplay also saw a significant shift. Gone were the action-oriented portions of Klonoa that people had experienced in the original Playstation title, Door to Phantomile, replaced with far more emphasis on the puzzle-platforming elements of that game. It was slower paced — which was saying something, since Door to Phantomile wasn’t exactly Sonic the Hedgehog to begin with — but the switch worked splendidly, as Moonlight Museum is a joy to play.

This was a very intentional design shift by the team that produced Moonlight Museum: series creator Hideo Yoshizawa explained to Jeremy Parish at 1UP back in 2013 that, “At the time of the Wonderswan game, I'd actually put together two teams, one working on Moonlight Museum and one working on the PlayStation 2 Klonoa 2. One was more focused on the puzzle elements and the other was more focused on action.” The Playstation 2 game, Lunatea’s Veil, was certainly more action-oriented, but also suffered a bit for having stages that were just far too long for the goals you had to accomplish within them. Moonlight Museum, in comparison, was a puzzle-based and breezy affair: you moved slowly in order to figure out your order of operations and what needed to be done, but the levels were short, tidy affairs that allowed you to keep moving and feeling like real progress was being made.

The problem with Moonlight Museum is that it was a WonderSwan exclusive, which means it only released in Japan — that’s not a problem for those in Japan with a WonderSwan, but given that the game utilized the system’s ability to switch from a horizontal orientation to a vertical one, from level to level, it was a difficult one to emulate. So, for many, the first entry in the series on the Game Boy Advance was their introduction to portable Klonoa. While Empire of Dreams lacks the orientation switches of its predecessor, it bumps up the action slightly from Moonlight Museum while still being very much a puzzle-platforming-oriented title.

It’s a great one, too — once again, with levels that feel as if you’re breezing through them without just walking from the start to the finish, given they require you figure out how to traverse them in the first place. While Moonlight Museum was developed by a team at Namco, Empire of Dreams was outsourced to Now Production, though, Yoshizawa remained on the project as one of the game’s writers.

Even if you don’t think you know Now Production, you do. They have been around since 1986 and remain in operation to this day, and primarily perform contract work for major Japanese publishers like Namco, Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, Taito, Sega, and, decades ago, Hudson Soft. They were responsible for Adventure Island II and III on the NES and New Adventure Island on the Turbografx-16, developed some of the Namco Museum titles on the Playstation, were the development studio that co-developed Katamari Damacy, We Love Katamari, and Beautiful Katamari, as well as the Wii’s The Munchables, assisted Namco on the Mario Baseball games on both the GameCube and Wii, handled Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut on the GameCube, and have handled ports of arcade games, remakes and remasters, as well as original sequels to existing franchises and portable editions of console series, most regularly for (Bandai) Namco. Now Production got the keys to Klonoa’s handheld titles for both Empire of Dreams and its successor, Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament, as an example of their being asked to continue existing franchises, and on handhelds. And they certainly showed off why Namco so regularly entrusted them with Empire of Dreams.

The setup is similar to Moonlight Museum, in that you have three required MacGuffins to collect in each stage, as well as 30 optional gems to pick up in each of them. Once again, you can play the entire game with just two buttons, which Yoshizawa saw as vital in his game designs. Per that same 1UP interview: “The way I see it, human beings can only handle two buttons, when they're really concentrating. My policy is to use two buttons maximum for any game. When I was working on this, it used three buttons, and it was annoying me, because I wanted to make it use two buttons in the first place. I think it's the most attractive way to do it. If there's only two buttons, the controls are very simple, but there's still a lot you can do with just two buttons.” It’s a very old-school, arcade-style thought process, to limit a game to two buttons, but Klonoa does a lot with little in this regard: you never need to turn your hand into a claw to pull off a complicated move, or press a whole bunch of buttons at once, which makes it approachable for even less experienced players without compromising its overall depth of gameplay.

There are five worlds, each with five standard stages, another two of a set type in each, and, unlike with Moonlight Museum, a boss fight at the end. While the standard five are just Empire of Dreams’ regular platforming stages, which get more complicated and continually introduce new wrinkles as you go, those “set type” levels are (1) a snowboard level sans snow that tasks you with collecting 100 gems across three areas, and (2) a forced-scrolling platforming stage that continually forms bottomless pits and tests your platforming reflexes and understanding of Empire of Dreams’ systems, while tasking you with collecting 100 gems across three areas, as well.

If you aren’t carrying a block of some kind, the forced airflow in these vertical spaces will launch you upward, just like the leaves their presence is signaled by.

Empire of Dreams — and Klonoa as a whole — can be distilled to this one thing: you grab stuff, and then you use it to jump higher. Snatch an enemy out of the air, hoist it above Klonoa’s head, then double jump by using said enemy as a springboard. Grab a block, do the same. After any jump, you can also float for a time, which lets you collect even more hard-to-reach bits or make your way up onto some platforms. You can also throw enemies and blocks, which you sometimes need to do to trigger switches both on and off-screen, the latter as a test of timing for whatever place you need to bring yourself by the time the object finds its destination. Some enemies are explosive, and have a timer letting you know as much: you have to get these living bombs to wherever they need to be, and yourself to where you need to be, before that timer goes off. Some blocks determine the direction these explosions will go in, allowing the effects of bombs to travel through walls or upwards or downwards toward switches, and others grab onto walls and allow Klonoa a new platform to jump on, or a way to vertically traverse a level from underneath. You need to grab enemies and blocks to cross bodies of water, or to block the flow of water from above to allow passage through a hallway, or as part of a complicated series of jumps where Klonoa is continually grabbing enemies or floating, grabbable objects to progress ever higher in a stage or to collect gems and key items. Including but not limited to actual keys.

The one complaint you could make about Empire of Dreams is that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but also, you want more of it. Not that it’s lacking, necessarily, but that by the time you complete the game’s hidden EX stages, you just wish there were even more of them, because the game has truly hit its stride by then. Empire of Dreams never feels overly slow, but more like it’s slowly adding complexities to the experience that you need to master in order to progress through the levels: each room is basically its own puzzle box, and those boxes get larger and more intricate as you go. Case in point: the pause menu has a “Retry” option, but it’s not for the stage as a whole, just the specific room that you’re in at that moment. You can screw up a platforming puzzle in a way that forces you to need to retry, and you can also just realize, hey, I think I want to try that again now that I have a feel for what this room actually entails. There is no penalty for doing any of this, either, other than a need to collect the gems in said room again.

Empire of Dreams is a visually impressive game.

The way it drip feeds these new bits and platforming puzzles and enemy types helps keep Empire of Dreams feeling fresh throughout, and the snowboard/forced-scrolling stages help break up the… monotony isn’t the right word, as it implies a harshness I don’t feel, but you get the idea. Everything flows better because those levels — or “Visions,” to use Klonoa’s parlance — exist. The return of boss fights is also welcome, even if the game doesn’t ask very much of the player in them. They have a little bit of a puzzle and patience vibe to them as well, which fits the game as a whole: rather than shoving all of the action in here, bosses are simply a matter of noticing a pattern and timing — three hits from a thrown foe, and they go down. Related: Klonoa also takes just three hits before dying, but you are not in much danger of that in this game. Notice the above screenshot again: that “49” in the bottom-right corner is how many lives I had at the time. There are extra lives everywhere if you want to bother to pull off the double jump or float to them.

Empire of Dreams takes places in between the events of Door to Phantomile and Lunatea’s Veil, which you can tell because Klonoa’s outfit has been given its update to what he’s seen wearing in the latter of those. He and his floating orb pal, Huepow, visit the Empire of Jillius, and are brought before the emperor for the most heinous of crimes: dreaming. It’s outlawed in this empire, for reasons that aren’t clear at first, but it turns out — spoilers for a 24-year-old game follow — to be a combination of “the emperor is upset that he was forced to become an all-powerful ruler instead of like, becoming a singer or artist or whatever and has decided to take it out on everyone else out of jealousy” and “some evil demon dude decided to capitalize on the emperor’s selfish reaction to take power in the kingdom and turn everyone who does dream into a giant monster in his army.” Normal stuff, really.

As punishment for dreaming, Klonoa is sent off to take care of these monsters — the emperor is caught between his feelings of jealousy and his desire to break free from this bad-news wizard who took advantage of those feelings, so has to send Klonoa out into the world under the pretense of punishment when it’s really about solving this particular case and making his way back to the castle to go, “hey, wait a second, you did this.” All of the worlds are themed in some way, and have very distinct visual differences: Empire of Dreams, like every Klonoa game, is a real looker, and while this isn’t 2.5D like its 32-bit Playstation cousin, it’s also very clearly not 8-bit like the WonderSwan entry, with Empire of Dreams deploying some very detailed backgrounds and sprites throughout, full of deep color. The soundtrack, too, sounds better than most Game Boy Advance titles: the balance for volume and depth of sound here is better than what you too often find on this system, where turning up the volume often results in your ears paying for that decision in some way.

It still has a little bit of that GBA harshness to it, which is a bit inescapable, but overall the music and sound are pleasant and add to the proceedings — Klonoa’s “Wahoo!” remains as charming as ever.

As said, you will want more Empire of Dreams when it’s over, which is where the EX stages come in. There are three of them, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but they are the longest, most difficult, and most intricate levels in the entire game: it will take you time to both unlock them and to complete them, so that there are just three makes a lot more sense once you’ve experienced them. You unlock one of the stages simply by completing the game, and another by finishing it without skipping any stages — Empire of Dreams is setup so that you don’t have to finish every level in order to progress, just enough to get the boss fights to pop in each world. The last of them is unlocked if you collect every single one of the optional gems in the game: there are 30 in each standard level, and 100 in each of the snowboard/forced-scrolling stages, so there are quite a few. If you bother to explore just as part of a normal playthrough, however, then this isn’t as much of a lift as it sounds like: on my first go through the game, I completed just one stage without first collecting all 30 gems, and the ones I missed were entirely because I didn’t go as far in one room as I could have before I solved the puzzle and picked up what was required of me there.

Empire of Dreams is a lovely continuation of the Klonoa franchise, that, while lacking the screen-orientation mechanics of its portable predecessor, makes up for it with quality level design, the reintroduction of boss fights, and detailed 32-bit sprites and backgrounds that remind you of what the GBA was capable of. It’s also available, as of 2025, on Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack subscribers, through the Game Boy Advance portal — Empire of Dreams was previously available through the Wii U’s Virtual Console, but that shut down in 2023 and also no one owned a Wii U besides myself and a dozen other people, anyway. Given the size of the Switch’s userbase, this is now the most people who have ever been in position to play Empire of Dreams if they choose to do so… and they should.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

G.Rev’s shooters are at their best when there’s a clear, central mechanic to figure out and master. In Under Defeat, it was the option — always with you, but with a cooldown and three different types that change the way you have to approach the game’s challenges, depending on which you have equipped at a given moment. It played into the game’s scoring system, which was very much for the sickos: Under Defeat could still be enjoyed simply as a survival game, if that was all you wanted to do, but a deeper appreciation for its systems and what was on offer was there for the taking, should you want to devote yourself to learning its deeper intricacies.

Mamorokun Curse — styled as Mamorukun Curse! — is a very different game than Under Defeat, in a number of ways. Rather than a gritty, realistic-looking take on the helicopter shooter, Mamorokun Curse features a roster of adorable anime girls. Instead of a scrolling shooter, Mamorokun has you walking around on foot, Pocky & Rocky-style, positioning yourself where you would like to and selecting the paths you feel like taking. The screen doesn’t automatically scroll, but you can’t backtrack, either — it’s actually pretty purposeful with how it locks you out after you’ve made a decision in this way, and you have to learn to account for this scrolling in your own movement in order to get the drop or an angle on certain enemies.

And yet, at its heart, Mamorukun Curse shares more in common with Under Defeat than it does not where it truly matters. Both titles have scoring systems that require you play in a very different way in order to maximize your points, and a mechanic that you have to master — and utilize in a very situationally-based way — in order to both survive and put up a high score. Just like Under Defeat, there is a whole lot more going on here than it might first appear — that is anything but a simple scrolling helicopter STG, and Mamorukun Curse is not “just” a Pocky & Rocky-type shooter. It’s very much its own thing, and you have to figure out what makes it different and makes it work in order to see and enjoy it all.

Mamorukun Curse first released in Japanese arcades in July of 2008, and then made its way to the Xbox 360 in Japan, as well, the following summer. North America wouldn’t get their hands on Mamorukun Curse until 2013, when an enhanced, digital release hit the Playstation 3. That was it for Mamorukun Curse, until Sept. 25 of this year: Mamorukun ReCurse! launched on the Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and Steam late last month, updated to include widescreen, multiple soundtrack arrangements as well as the original by Yosuke Yasui, and, like Under Defeat’s updated edition, twin-stick gameplay — a perfect and sensible addition to an overhead shooter with freedom of movement.

It’s the latest of G.Rev’s niche shooters to resurface in the present, and like with Under Defeat and Strania: The Stellar Machine, if you’re a fan of STG with some deeper systems, then this is one you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with. G.Rev, for those unfamiliar, was formed in mid-2000 by former Taito arcade division developers. They have developed a number of cult, niche shooters like Under Defeat, Strania, Kokuga, and Border Down, and co-developed others with far more mainstream attention, at least comparatively, such as Treasure’s Ikaruga and Gradius V, as well as Taito’s Dariusburst Chronicles Saviours, while handling the shoot ‘em up portions of IzanagiGames’ hybrid visual novel game, Yurukill: The Calumniation Games.

G.Rev is a small company — their website lists them as having 10 employees as of 2011, and it hasn’t been updated to say any differently since. This is how they end up co-developing on a number of titles, but despite the small size, there are still some big ideas here. And Mamorukun Curse — and now ReCurse — was designed around one of those.

The “Curse” part of the name is also the game’s central mechanic. You can shoot as you normally would in an STG — hold down the button or push the analog stick, in twin-stick mode, and fire infinite rounds in the direction you’re facing — but what you need to do is curse your enemies. Which you do with the press of a button that fires a special “curse” bullet. You can just fire off a single round of it with a quick tap, or hold the button for a larger, more powerful curse shot, and it has multiple uses.

Not a gritty helicopter.

The curse bullet can be used as a defensive measure: firing it erases other bullets from the screen temporarily. It can be used to curse your foes, making them not less but more powerful, increasing their difficulty — however, defeating a cursed enemy means you get more rewards from defeating them, which in turn racks up more points. Doing this against the largest, most difficult, most hard-to-kill opponents is a challenge you can set for yourself — they will fire off a bunch of suicide bullets in addition to their usual ones, giving you more and more to dodge, but defeating them while cursed will leave behind a ton of candy — yes, candy — for you to pick up, creating larger and larger scoring combos for you to benefit from.

And there’s one more wrinkle to the curse bullet that you have to consider: you can curse yourself with it. It makes enemies more powerful, but it can also make you more powerful — this won’t grant you a higher score, in the same way that cursing enemies does, but it does make you a walking anime girl of death for a brief period of time, and that might save your life on more than one occasion.

Here is what Nowa Kinugawa’s normal shot looks like in Mamorukun Curse, after you’ve powered it up a bit by collecting P-capsules to increase its power.

And here is what her shot looks like when you’ve cursed yourself so that your shot is on magical steroids:

That is way more bats. Way more bats. It’s overwhelming, how powerful you get when you’ve cursed yourself, but the effect is also brief: not only is a curse not permanent, but your curse bullet has a cooldown when you either curse yourself or charge it up for a more powerful curse of your enemies. You can’t just spam the curse, basically, but have to deploy it strategically, regardless of whether you’re doing it to enhance your scoring or because a ship has pulled up alongside you and has a dozen living cannons of various sizes that you have to wipe out before it can fill the screen with fire.

Through the curse bullet, you can balance survival and scoring, situationally, maximizing the latter by cursing smaller enemies to make them worth more and more points to extend and enhance your candy combos, and doing a better job of ensuring the former by cursing yourself whenever you’re feeling like you need a little boost to get by. Which can be constantly, too, given that the longer you live, the more points you’ll score, anyway. And it’s worth remembering, too, that Mamorukun Curse features timed levels: you can’t just burn your precious seconds making every single enemy tougher to score as many points as possible, because you’ll either 1) run out of time and lose or 2) give up a whole bunch of points you could have scored post-level through the remaining time bonus. Curse yourself, regularly, to push through levels more quickly without ignoring enemies at all to do it.

You don’t want to just hold down the fire button the entire time you play Mamorukun ReCurse, as tempting as it might be to do since your rank doesn’t increase simply by firing off your guns constantly. The reason for that is because there is vacuum-effect for collecting whatever candy you have caused to appear by destroying enemies, objects, or treasure chests in a stage, but it only activates when you let off of the fire button for a moment. This also allows you to better time your combos by stretching out your collection of candies to the last millisecond — let go of the fire button to collect what shows up to extend a combo and ensure you have more time to find the next batch, rinse and repeat, and see the points go up up up.

Rather than lives, Mamorukun ReCurse has you select three of seven characters for a playthrough, in whatever order you want them to appear. If they take any damage, they are knocked out, which then gives you the next character in line to use. You can recover your lost characters by picking up hearts that are hidden in each level: sometimes they are in chests, sometimes in hidden enemies that are found juuuuuuust out of the normal view of the game’s camera unless you head right towards it, and sometimes only on alternate side paths that lock you out of the standard one. You want these, regardless of whether you have to recover a fallen ally or not, as picking up a heart with everyone already healthy grants you 30,000 bonus points. And even if you don’t care about the points, necessarily, learning where all of these hearts are is to your benefit: you will need them on one run or another, especially as you play the game’s tougher difficulties.

The seven characters all handle differently, both in terms of speed and their shots. The character select screen tells you what their deal is at the bottom right. Mamoru Tomoka is “for novices,” and their shot type is “straight” — this works how you think it would, with a no-fuss straight-on shot that ends up five blasts wide when powered up. Mayuno Miyaki is also a straight shot, but hers are for advanced players, as they have a different shape and movement than Tomoka’s rigid setup. Kinya Narai has a wide shot, designed for novices due to it being more forward-facing, while Benigo Higadera’s wide shot is spread even further and meant for advanced players. The last three characters have more specialty arrangements, with Fululu Jigokudani’s shot described as “no holds barred” and “strongest” since it can lay a ton of damage on, and fast, on a narrower range, while Luchino Narugami’s two-way shot — narrow, forward-facing but with a secondary bullet sniping effect — is for novices. The aforementioned Nowa has a homing shot, with a weak center but enemy-seeking waves of bats fired on the wings.

Mix and match for your own playstyle — maybe you want one of Nowa or Luchino so you have that secondary homing or snipe with one character, and maybe you prefer the advanced wide shot of Benigo but the novice straight shot of Momura. Consider, too, that each of these characters has a different cursed effect on their main shot: you might find that you really enjoy Kinya’s variant on the wide shot, but do not love that his cursed effect dilutes its impact by firing it in all directions rather than at any particular target or direction. Or, you might appreciate that kind of eight-way assault, and so take him over Benigo when deciding which wide shot to take. And hey, nothing says you can’t just pick both, either.

There is a surprising amount of game here, if you aren’t familiar with Mamorukun Curse. Not only does the ReCurse! edition include the original arcade mode, but there is also a story mode with selectable difficulty, and a slate of challenges which range from single-stage scoring challenges to large slates that you must survive, with additional difficulties unlocking as you complete each of them.

Story, Arcade, and Netherworld Adventures — you have no shortage of Mamorukun ReCurse! to get through.

They all play a bit differently, too: in the story mode, you’re limited to five characters to choose from, but you can also pick all five. There are fewer revival hearts, but the ones you do find revive more than one fallen character — you’re going to have to master more than just a couple of characters in order to see the story to completion. The levels are all arranged differently depending on which mode you select, as well, so it’s not as if mastering the layout of the challenge levels prepares you for the story, or that even one set of challenge stages has you ready to take on another set of them. Hell, one of the challenges is just based around finishing in a hurry, not just because you only have a little bit of time, but also because a grim reaper is chasing you around the stage the whole time trying to ruin your life by making fatal contact with you.

The best part? If you’ve got a favorite, you can spend most of your time within that specific mode, as each is robust in its own way. The challenge levels, especially, will provide you with hours upon hours of gameplay, as the various arrangements of these stages, and the differing orders and tweaks made to them, ensure that you’re going to have no shortage of things to do and master — the jump from easy to even medium as far as difficulty goes is a significant one, never mind beyond that. Mamorukun ReCurse has got that “one more play” thing going for it, in that you can always tell how you messed up and could have done better, so you won’t feel discouraged by the difficulty jumps so much as feeling you want to give it another shot — maybe this time with a different deployment of those curse bullets.

If you’ve played Mamorukun Curse in the past, there is plenty of reason to pick up ReCurse — the fact that it’s meant to be the definitive edition of the game, with the various modes and soundtracks and the widescreen and twin-stick support, means that you’ve never actually played the game before even if you have, as ReCurse certainly succeeded in its mission of being the version of Mamorukun Curse to experience. And now it’s on a far wider number of platforms digitally, with physical editions available for the Switch and Playstation 5, more people can experience this gem now than have ever been able to play any of its previous forms.

Mamorukun ReCurse! released on Steam, Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch, and Playstations 4 and 5 on September 25. A review copy for Nintendo Switch was provided by publisher City Connection and Clear River Games, and played on a Nintendo Switch 2.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Kerry Brunskill of Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

It's no secret that Sonic had a difficult time after Sonic 3 & Knuckles wowed everyone with its nigh-magical lock-on cartridge and the extended adventure contained within. Colorful mascot characters looked a bit passé in an era of licensed dance music, survival horror, and sexy heroines, and the few that survived had to be reimagined in 3D, as the '90s wouldn't accept anything less. 

The trouble is, 3D games with Sonic's extraordinary level of interactivity — jumping, swimming, climbing, interactions with slopes and slides, etc. — tended to be slow and methodical on 32-bit hardware out of sheer necessity. Tomb Raider. Soul Reaver. Heck, even Metal Gear Solid. There's a reason why so many characters had a thing for casual jogging back then. 

The idea of seeing Sega's blue blur sprinting through Saturn-generated polygonal zones at speed seemed to be an impossible dream, especially after so long and one protracted high profile failure.

And then Sonic R turned up.

Image credit: Kerry Brunskill

There are stone pillars and carved statues. An entire stage made out of transparent crystals. A city with its own enormous Sonic-themed pinball table.

And I'm not merely allowed to race past these objects at top speed either, all of the really interesting bits reserved for the sides of the track. I'm expected to roll and skid and leap amongst them, thanks to the game's bold decision to allow the cast to use their own two feet to get around — same as always.

Sonic can double-jump. Tails can fly. Knuckles can glide and climb. Even Amy and Robotnik's hover-capable vehicles are small and quirky enough to feel like an extension of their bodies.

Being able to explore these places in a more direct manner makes a huge difference. Seeing toes point downwards during a spring-enhanced leap and arms stretch out to glide conveys something more interesting than mere speed; there's personality, physical effort, and skill in these motions. 

I'm not just going fast when I'm playing well, I'm athletic.

Image credit: Kerry Brunskill

And I've got plenty of good reasons to hone my skills too, seeing as every stage is filled with unlockable doors, helpful shortcuts, (optional) poppable balloons, and hidden character-unlocking collectibles — collectibles I have to find and gather while racing, and then make sure I finish in at least the top three if I want to keep them. 

The stages containing these features are a brilliantly balanced mix of the familiar and the fresh. Resort Island certainly has that "Sonic starting stage" look to it, all pleasant greens, bright blue waters, and large, ring-filled loops, but it's definitely not Green Hill. It's not Emerald, Turquoise, or any other color of Hill I've already visited either. The fences, tilted curves, mountains, and odd mix of palm and pine trees are all its own.

The other stages run along similar lines. Reactive Factory for example has giant glass tubes filled with blue chemicals and lots of grey contrasting with black and yellow warning stripes — it's all a bit Chemical Plant…. but only a bit. There are also multiple submarines hanging around in the water, and the bright sun hanging in the sky above distant mountains gives it a brighter mood than the intense urban backdrop of the well-known Mega Drive stage.

Image credit: Kerry Brunskill

It's trying to move forwards without severing its ties to the past, and show off exactly what the Saturn can do while it's at it.

This game is a technical marvel packed with clever tricks. The title screen boasts a spinning 3D R so shiny it's reflective — fancy stuff for the '90s, right? But the really special part only happens if I absent-mindedly fiddle with the controller. The R tilts, twists, and even changes color as I prod buttons, confirming that this isn't smoke and mirrors, some clever animation timed to produce a convincing fake — this is all being handled by the console itself in real-time.

It's a neat effect that's used again on the loading screen (a plain Sonic head transformed into a metallic mirror this time) and then a race begins — and it's clear that the game can still show off even when it's displaying more than blank screens and static backgrounds.

Image credit: Kerry Brunskill

When Sonic R came out, there were three common ways to handle the far edges of 3D environments: 

1. Don't. Everything pops up at the acceptable furthest distance, as defined by the engine/programmers behind it. It's raw and blocky, but it's also crisp and clear.

2. Fog. Silent Hill famously took this idea and ran with it. Tenchu painted it black and made me believe I was sneaking around at night. A lot of other games just looked a bit weird and fuzzy.

3. Really tiny rooms. Also long corridors with conspicuous bends in the right places.

Sonic R chooses to instead flex its technical muscles and gradually fade everything in instead, polygons becoming more solid the closer they are to the camera. 

It looks amazing, and for Saturn fans, remains an inarguable counterpoint to all of those "the Saturn can't do transparencies" arguments that have never quite gone away. When presented this way the restricted view comes across as tasteful, deliberate — an artistic choice, rather than a necessary fudging of a technical limitation. 

Image credit: Kerry Brunskill

As fast as it is and as fancy as it looks, I sadly can't pretend that it's a well-balanced game. Some easily accessed alternative routes are just better than others, character abilities may be lore-accurate but they sure as heck aren't created equal, and as such if two semi-decent players are going up against each other then whoever picks Sonic will win unless the other person picks Super Sonic, in which case they'll win.

But these are easily ignored concerns in the face of all the good in here. I'm Tails, flying through a city at night. I'm Sonic, spinning through a loop at high speed and collecting rings as I go. Like the 8-bit Sonic games I love returning to, I know Chaos Emeralds are tucked away in awkward spots, waiting to be discovered. And like the Mega CD Sonic I so desperately coveted in my youth, a race against Metal Sonic is there for the winning.

It's 3D Sonic in every way my heart ever wanted, and I adore this bold, ambitious, and unique amalgam of the classic series' strengths.

Kerry Brunskill's childhood was spent playing European computer games, an interest which has blossomed into a love of the unusual, an adoration for the underdog, and an appreciation for the imperfect. What this means in practice is their social media feed is a jumble of everything and they sometimes stub their toe on a box full of arcade PCBs. You can find the online equivalent of this chaotic experience at Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.