VALIS 最近的评测

Wow, what a ride. As a huge fan of '30s-'60s cartoons, comics, and comic strips, it was always going to be easy for me to find things to like about this game, and thankfully it overshot those expectations by a good degree.

To start with, I really wouldn't call this a boomer shooter even though it's frequently mentioned. It really reminds me a lot more of one of those top notch PS2 platformers like Sly Cooper, Jak & Daxter, and Ratchet & Clank where both the varied gameplay and attention to art and voice acting were about the best out there. FPS is the main gameplay mechanic but there's a lot, and I mean a lot of platforming here. And exploration. There is an endless amount of collectibles, secret rooms, hidden pathways, objects that look innocuous but do something important, and all that fun old video gamey stuff.

The voice acting, art, and level design are just incredible, as good as anything I've seen since that heyday of PS2 platformers. I often mention in my reviews I usually don't care much about stories in games, but I'd sit down and watch a two hour animated Mouse P.I. movie tomorrow if given the chance. The voice acting is about as good as I can think of, and while a lot of characters have that "Noo Yawk woise guy" accent, there is a lot of variation and detail in there. The overstuffed politician Cornelius Stilton's breathy stutter, Tammy's cute but wise tough gal squeaks, reporter Wanda's droll, cynical monotone, Vivian's fancy French accent which drops to a basic "just another mouse from the block" accent when called out about it... incredible. So good. Here's hoping someone out there makes a youtube of all the cutscenes so I can put it on my headphones at night and fall asleep to it with a grin on my face.

Not everything is rosy in Mouseburg, though, as around the 15 hour mark in my run, the game overstayed its welcome. The final 1/5th or so is a step down from the heights it was reaching, almost like they were told "no no, this needs to be five hours longer" and they slipped away from their clever and knowing hardboiled noir world of weary detectives and femme fatales and starlets with big dreams and cynical but kind hearted bar owners to pursue an ill fitting story about brown shirted fascists with some distracting modern references (fake news, tariffs, etc.) that feel beneath the rest of the material and pull you out of the setting. The noir villains had humor and humanity and personality, the brown shirts are just angry and loud. Partly due to the length of playtime at that point, but an amusing, engaging story became dreary. The gameplay as well became something akin to "have the player do what they've been doing, but like 10x as much at once." A bowl of ice cream is delicious but a gallon of it isn't. There were several big set piece boss fights I thought might have been the end, and who knew there would be five more of those.

Also, the game commits a cardinal sin in that it's loaded with collectibles and secrets and reasons to go poking around every corner, but areas close off behind you at certain points in levels and you usually don't know when that's going to happen, and you can't revisit levels at all once you've finished them. That is just a mistake, flat out. Of the game's probably 200 collectibles, I missed most of them by just a few. Like 32 of 35 comics, 33 of 35 baseball cards, just missed upgrading all guns by like 3 schematics total, etc. And I guess that's it. Either play through a new 20 hour game and try to find everything this time or just live with the misses. It shouldn't be like this, but it would be a tough thing for them to fix at this point.

So, just a little bit of shine off the gem that is Mouse P.I. For Hire, but it's still about as good of a cartoon action-adventure as anyone has produced in many years, Nintendo included. Even in this 20,000 new games a year digital age, this is going to be remembered and talked about for a long time.

What an unusual and cool thing that in the space of a week, two games that seem beamed straight from the prime Amiga days dropped on Steam in this and ChainStaff. My cupboard is suddenly full with early '90s styled psychedelic action games! ZPF technically came out as a Genesis/MD homebrew cartridge last year (still available), but it's nice to see the game get an affordable Steam release for those who don't want to spring $60 for the box, manual, and cart. However, if you do want that Genesis rom (which has been slightly altered here) to throw on a cheap handheld for toilet ZPFing, it's available in this game's install folder. It's a couple folders deep, look for the .bin.

This is a fast, fun, eye-searing horizontal shmup with wall-to-wall old school coolness like mechs and floating eyeballs and lots of trippy body horror with the backdrop of some incredible chiptunes. It's also like someone turned the saturation knob up to 11, and while I like it, it wouldn't be the worst thing to be able to pick different or more muted color palates. But there are programs like ShaderGlass and ReShade and Magpie you can quickly throw over the screen and tinker to your heart's content. If I'm looking for games to compare it to, Lords of Thunder immediately comes to mind, the fantasy metal horizontal shmup from the Sega CD and Turbo CD.

ZPF has six levels (plus some hidden stuff) and either no continues, or you can buy continues in the shop. Every destroyed enemy drops coins which auto-collect, no need to catch 'em, and that's what you can spend in the shop between levels. It adds a neat layer of strategy as you usually have to pick one or two items out of about a dozen. Full shot power, add 1 life, 2x coin collect, or how about the very expensive and usually out of reach 1x Continue? You can gamble that you'll be able to collect full shot power in the upcoming level, but it's pretty crucial to start a level with it, too. The 2x coin collect is always a smart and affordable choice, but of course don't buy it before the final level.

Adding to the strategy is your choice between three ships which all play reasonably different from each other. Gladius is probably the safe bet to start with, weaker shot power but rapidly fires in a triangle formation, clearing the many enemies that come from above and below. Then once you get used to the enemy patterns you can try one of the other ships.

Really could use public leaderboards and some of the achievements are currently broken, but this is still a solid, eye-watering, old school time for a slim $10.

Super Stardust HD from 2007 is one of my all-timers, so anytime I see a game in that style I'll be sure to grab it as long as it doesn't look like complete junk. I love twin-stick shooters and there's something extra cool about having a rotating planet as your playfield.

Thankfully Zaxoid is not complete junk, in fact it's quite good. There are two game modes in it, your typical modern action roguelite mode and an arcade mode, but I can't really figure out the purpose of the arcade mode. It's like a stripped down action roguelite mode where you still collect gold and buy upgrades but only for your ship and not the city. And the store page says there's leaderboards in the game, but where? A high score mode with public leaderboards would be great and keep me coming back for play sessions every now and then.

The action roguelite mode is the meat of the game, and it's done rather well. There are two fail points, your ship and your city, so lose all the life of either and it's game over. When you accumulate enough gold you buy upgrades for one or the other. The ship has the usual stuff, better bullets, speed, larger collection area, etc. The city can see you buy turrets to help with defending itself, energy pods, a healing pad for your ship, and quite a bit more. What keeps this mode interesting is how many potential upgrades there are, which you unlock at a steady pace as you progress through the game. For ship and city combined there must be over 30 at a guess. Maybe even 50.

There's one area I find lacking though, and that's sound effects. There just aren't enough of them. Your ship will make a thrusting noise when you dash, but makes no noise when you move around. Shooting makes the same basic pulsing sound, and missiles have no sound. Hitting enemies doesn't make sounds except for bosses, and you roughly get the same explosion sound for every ship you destroy. A little goes a long way in bringing detail and color to a game, especially an arcade game where often every sound can also be a gameplay helper. Let me hear those missiles woosh!

What in the world is this game that dropped out of nowhere in the middle of the week looking like a cross between the Amiga's Shadow of the Beast and a Yes album cover?! You can find a lot of interesting artwork in the indie scene if you have the patience to dig through the stacks, but games that look like this aren't very common. It's also uncommon that the game turned out to not only meet my lofty expectations but surpass them by a good distance!

Speaking of Amiga games, it's actually Turrican that ChainStaff reminds me of the most and its side scrolling run & gun mixed with a sizable dose of exploration, verticality, powerups, secrets hiding in plain sight, and all sorts of gooey aliens and floating eyeballs and flying bug monsters and cliff edges overlooking the void. I'd still love it if ChainStaff were just an imitation of some classic games in a Roger Dean art style, but that it brings a classic feel while managing to be its own thing entirely really makes it special.

The titular ChainStaff weapon is what really makes things unique here, it's an odd and powerful tool that is frustrating until you get the hang of it, but once you do the game really opens up. You can shoot it like a arrow, or use it as a bridge, or as a shield to block enemy bullets, or as a platform you can ride and control, or as a prop to keep things from falling on you, or as a grapple and swing, and so on. And you will need to. Like I mentioned above when talking about Turrican, ChainStaff is fairly exploration heavy. Not only are there secrets and powerups and other things to find way up there or way down there, the path to other levels (of 9 total) are often hidden. You sometimes... most times don't unlock the next level by just beating the boss but you have to explore and find the hidden path that will take you there. Yet another aspect that plays into the spacey, mystical vibe of the artwork. Seek and you shall find.

It plays the way it looks, like a double LP gatefold prog rock record. Complex and deep and heady and it might take a few spins to get the hang of, but once you do it feels like a nearly bottomless well of discovery and creativity. Fantastic game.

The debut from Tribute Games, who technically released this the year before (2011) as an Xbox Live Indie Game, and would go on to make quite a few retro classics over the next 15 years, including the widely acclaimed TMNT: Shredder's Revenge. They started out strong as this is a low key gem of a game, combining the old school brick breaker with the 8-bit RPG. But really it's only RPG in setting and dialogue, the game is a level-based Arkanoid clone with a couple replenishable powers and a few you can buy in the shops and use until you lose a life. It's not complex but adds enough of a twist on the old formula to keep things interesting.

Controls well enough with gamepad or keyboard but mouse is the way to go here, moving from one end of the arena to the other can be about as fast as you want it to be, and it's much easier to make fine movements for aiming. Lovely NES style pixel art and music although I wish there was more music, it gets repetitive fast. The last stage can be a little tricky but I found the game easy, completed in 3 hours and with 15+ lives left when it seems others had a far tougher time, which I attribute to mouse vs. gamepad or keyboard. Use a mouse.

A quick review to call notice to this being on sale for a tiny $2.49 right now. It's a hell of an interesting sci-fi racer, its development has just been in limbo for quite a while. Quite a while. When you see "The last update made by the developers was over 6 years ago" on the store page of course you're going to think this is as dead as dead gets, as I did. But not so! At least, probably not so. A developer's account still hangs around the game's Steam forum and says the studio is picking up contract work to hopefully keep the lights on, but updates have been made and maybe there's a 1.0 someday. But no guarantees, certainly. Worth the two fiddy gamble from my perspective just in case the updates start happening again, and what's here now is worth a couple bucks anyway.

Briefly, it's a 360 degree tunnel racer like Gravity Chase or Velocity G or the underrated Gamecube exclusive, Tube Slider. But being fairly early in early access, there's only the framework of a full game here -- a few various race types against AI bots on what looked like 18(?) different tracks, online races which I assume don't work, and a fairly lengthy tutorial. Speaking of the tutorial, one of the games downfalls is there's just too many controls at work. You can accelerate, and use a speed boost, and unlock your dampers for more speed (so you would be holding 3 buttons at this point), or wait until your plasma something or other is charged up for a lightspeed blur of speed. There's regular steering, and counter steering, and a gravity indicator, and ways to flip your vehicle, and on and on too much. It doesn't need all this. If they're ever going to work on it again, they should pare the controls down a bit.

The racing is incredibly fast, some of fastest racing I've ever seen, and the neon cybertubes you race in are cool as hell, especially the less realistic stylized series of tracks. Again, just a framework of a full game but an interesting one with a lot of potential, a neat curio to have in your library for a couple bucks. And who knows, maybe Cybersanta delivers a 1.0 some day.

In the description I read "a fast-paced boomer shooter inspired by the classics DOOM and Shadow Warrior" and got excited, but seemingly didn't let this part linger in my mind long enough: "prepare yourself to face hordes of akumas/yokais that are attacking and creating chaos in your village."

I didn't think it was going to be much like either of those '90s classics for a mere five bucks, but really it's nothing like them at all. Akuma's Bloodrain is a horde/arena shooter, that frequently used genre in the Steam bargain bin I'm rarely a fan of. At least there are a few things going for this one over some others, like the ability to shoot or slash, and you can also jump, dash, and jump-dash. Aim is crucial as the more enemy you have in your reticle, the more damage it takes. Also at the end of every wave you can choose to replenish health, shield, or just go straight to the portal for extra score. These things set it apart from the pack a little.

Runs well enough with a fair amount of graphics and control options. EDIT: Originally this paragraph was about a level (level 4) that was poorly laid out with lamp poles and trees too close to the walls making it so you constantly get trapped between the objects and can't wall hug, and as you can see with the conversation between me and the developer here and in this game's Steam forum, they responded quickly and fixed it up in under a day. Nice work! Now I can recommend this game more enthusiastically.

You love to see amateur games like this. It's not flashy but everything is done well from the classic 16-bit looking art to the controls to the music. There's also a decent amount of enemy variety, more than in some "big" AA-level beat 'em ups of recent (*cough* Marvel Cosmic Invasion). There are a lot of moves at your disposal including punch, jump, jump kick, grapple and punch, speed dash, speed dash kick, and a special three-tier powerup, which is basically described as lightning fists. About an hour to complete 10 levels all with nicely varied backgrounds including a driving level. Though they're all single plane, no elevation is present but there is an elevator level because there has to be an elevator level in a beat 'em up. It's the law.

A really solid beat 'em up that plays fast and controls well, I'd just love to see achievements and button config. There's a listing for button config in the options menu but it doesn't do anything.

Given what the bad reviews were saying I thought I'd like this well enough, and that's about where it landed with me, "well enough." Most of the bad reviews were focused on story, and while I've played all the Kains over the years including a couple of them recently, like most video game stories I didn't pay close attention. This game is story heavy for a combat platformer (it's not really a metroidvania -- no maps, no upgradable skills, no backtracking), and in there there's a lot of stuff about revenge, time paradoxes, curses, lots of mysticism -- it's a decent yarn at a distance, but to hear this story is a retcon of past events, I see why people are upset. Retcons are never good ideas. Hard to think of a single one.

The sidescrolling gameplay can be entertaining but also has a good number of flaws. You switch between different characters depending on the level, Elaleth (the new girl), Raziel, and Kain himself, and each has different powers and strengths. The combat is fairly bland until later levels when the enemies are quicker and more defensive. The platforming is kind of a nightmare. Two of our three characters get harmed by fire, in fact fire is some of the worst damage you're going to take in the game, and there are torches and little wildfires everywhere. Torches are more your enemies than the enemies! And all three of our characters in spite of living multiple lives over thousands of years die instantly once a single tootsie touches water. What is that? Yeah, it's Castlevania-ish, and this game also has a huge thing for annoying, wobbly bats like Castlevania, but the fire being huge damage and water being insta-death just feels cheap here, like they didn't have enough time to develop clever platforming sections so just made everything kill you.

The artwork is nice at times and jarring at others. I think there's four, maybe five different art styles at work here (though the same pixel art through the gameplay sections), and they're hit or miss. A few cutscene sections have this incredible PS1-era looking CRT art and I really wish the whole game was made in that style. The pixel art used throughout the game is decent enough, they certainly never try to do too much with it as this has the feel of a budget game through and through, but the lighting effects are nice and so are the blood splatters.

In all I think it juuust limps over the finish line in terms of being recommendable or not, but I could see myself on another day coming back and changing this to negative. I think it's worth $15 if you're a fan of Kain games or Metroidvania-likes, but also realize it's just a budget game. There's not a lot of depth to the gameplay or overall length (3-4 hours), the art is fine but no big deal, everything about it is like supermarket generic brand Kain.

It was a decent game, nothing amazing but a bit of a competitive twist on Pac-Man as you had to complete various objectives before your opponent (which usually was bots since of course an online-only Pac-Man game never really took off) in a series of interconnected mazes a lot like the old arcade/Colecovision classic Pepper II. Then with points earned you could unlock different modes or put different hats on your Pac. Cheap, cute, worth a few bucks and an occasional play. It's always nice to see new Pac-Man art. For me, Pac-Man is video games' mascot, not Mario.

And now it's nothing, just rapidly fading memories because live service is a garbage way to make video games. Ptoo on your grave.