Caoimhe’s reviews

🗨️ Comrade Girls, Shoot the Enemy, Vol. 2 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-09T18:45:00+00:00

My fucking god! These bitches gay! Good for them! Good for them.

Not sure how I feel about the twist with Olga. Will see how it develops as they get into Stalingrad. I’m sure that’s going to go well.

🎭 The Four-Faced Liar ★★★☆☆

2026-03-09T18:40:00+00:00

Cute vignettes of life with a local flavour. Did feel like it was winding up at one point only to continue dragging out resolutions for what felt a tad too long.

📺 The Boys S2 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-02T18:25:48+00:00

The colour palette didn’t feel as overly washed out as in the first series (or maybe I am just getting used to it?). It does get a bit much with the nihilistic violence and misery but manages to pick up before the end. Stormfront was a good villain though in the end felt like a bit of an extended aside before focusing back Homelander again. I do enjoy the little asides back to The Deep every once in a while to see just how badly things are going for him today.

🎥 Tank Girl ★★★☆☆

2026-02-28T21:57:42+00:00

Meandering, disjointed and filled with unfunny one-liners but also just a silly, fun watch.

🎥 Death by Hanging ★★★☆☆

2026-02-24T22:13:07+00:00

I really enjoy how giddy and enthusiastic all these men are to act out their deeply racist ideas of what Koreans are like. They crave that barbarism and project that desire onto those they view as the Other and use that as justification for the cruelty that they can inflict.

🎥 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion ★★★★☆

2026-02-19T07:43:32+00:00

A true believer in authoritarianism tries to prove that the system works. That it is just. That those who hold power are sincere in the promises of law and order, that those are not empty platitudes propping up thuggery and power. And he fails utterly.

🎮 Marionation Gear ★★★★☆

2026-02-15T20:57:46+00:00

Super fun little thing. Dozens of different mechs to pilot each with their own unique little toy control schemes on the touchscreen. Some more practical and straightforward, others more silly and gimmicky. Cars with a steering wheel and gear stick; missiles with their own multi-step launch sequences; a revolver where you have to load each individual bullet, pull back the firing pin, then pull the trigger; a steam-powered robot that is a beast in close combat but must be powered by pulling a lever to open the furnace doors, shoveling in coal, building steam pressure and then finally turning a valve to let the pressure out and power the arms (and don’t forget to close it again to build the pressure up for the next round).

Less endearingly the power creep throughout the game means that fun puppets you get early on are going to mostly stop being useful as you progress through the game and filling out your roster with upgraded versions takes a lot of replaying and grinding out levels, both to earn cash and also to get blueprints that drop randomly from specific missions. There’s also nothing in-game to indicate which missions provide which blueprints either so if you want something specific you’ll need to consult a guide. Late-game missions also become a chore with long slogs fighting waves of enemies that can, and often will, juggle you to death if they manage to knock you over once. And when there are too many robots in a level the frame rate really suffers. Even just trying to find where the next mission unlocked on the world map becomes a pain over time as it turns into a sprawling mess.

With regards to story, tone and presentation the game reminds me a bit of Advance Wars, with this seemingly quite small world culturally dominated by marionation gear¹—the game’s puppet mechs—the strongest of which of course end up piloted by a bunch of thirteen year olds to save the world from the horrors of traditional artisanal work being replaced by soulless automation and mechanised warfare.

The fan translation more literally translates the title of the game, 超操縦(Chōsōjū)メカ(Mecha)MG, as Super Control Mecha MG but I prefer to just call it Marionation Gear after the puppets. ↩

🎥 Conspiracy ★★★★☆

2026-02-15T15:36:58+00:00

Fantastic film. Harrowing to just watch the inevitable be laid out to these utterly contemptible men, squirming in discomfort not at what is being done but at how much they are being cut out of it. The ones so concerned about genocide being conducted unlawfully are possibly more contemptible than the ones straightforwardly excited to participate in mass murder.

🎥 Honey Don’t! ★★★☆☆

2026-02-14T16:43:11+00:00

Feels a bit more leering than Drive Away Dolls. Funny moment to moment but fails to sell the shaggy dog story with any kind of a punchline. The weird faux-period aspect of it is fascinating and I don’t know what they were going for with it. I didn’t even really notice people using smartphones when everything else was screaming retro. It took the MAGA sticker with the faux-period logo, a logo that I don’t think is actually used by anyone and was presumably designed for this film, to shock me into noticing the contradictions. In contrast the logo of the church felt like a more modern intrusion into the aesthetics of the film. I guess it’s one of those rundown cities that’s been left behind and slowly rotting away without hope of renewal, being preyed on by forces promising false hope. But it’s not like the film develops that idea much either.

🎥 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives ★★☆☆☆

2026-02-13T19:28:50+00:00

At least this one has jokes.

🎭 Milo Edwards: How Revolting! Sorry to Offend ★★★★☆

2026-02-13T17:15:00+00:00

Second time seeing Milo Edwards doing standup and while it was really good I don’t think it hit quite as strongly or consistently for me as the first one. This routine was, as he admitted himself, a bit more about parts of British culture in a way that wasn’t going to land perfectly for an Irish audience. But there was definitely enough general British cultural exposure here to get a lot of it and he had a decent grasp of what gaps he did need to bridge as well as skill at rolling with what worked and moving on from what didn’t, though I think most people in the room were a bit lost when he briefly started referencing obscure members of the Windsor family.

🎥 I shortened Yu-Gi-Oh!: Pyramid of Light down to about ten minutes ★☆☆☆☆

2026-02-13T17:05:34+00:00

Even watching an incredibly cut-down edit this film still feels like a bit of a slog. At least it has Seto Kaiba’s dumbass dragon jet. Also looking at the rules for Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon it does not seem particularly geared towards countering the Egyptian god cards¹ at all.

Egyptian god cards. Egyptian god cards? Egyptian god cards! ↩

🎮 Sandboxels ★★★★☆

2026-02-10T19:18:28+00:00

Falling sand games is the ultimate in playing with toys.

📺 The Boys S1 ★★★★☆

2026-02-10T12:58:10+00:00

Superheroes are inherently fascist 🫡

📺 Dungeon Meshi S1 ★★★★☆

2026-02-10T12:57:56+00:00

When I first watched this it took me a while to get over the overtly gamey aspects of the setting. It’s an acquired taste, y’know? Need to chew on it for a while. But there is a great satisfaction in seeing the concept of a dungeon being carefully examined, butchered, and picked part. To consider how it works and what needs to be true for it to exist and for it to continue to exist. Its economy, its ecology, its lifecycle. And there is a funny, compelling and interesting story woven throughout. It is not just wanking itself off about lore. The story is almost fractal in nature. Examining from the top down the world, the dungeon, the adventures in it, and the monsters that make their way into the adventurers’ stomachs. There are so many little things to pick up on and watch out for on rewatch. As a small but amusing one I don’t think that I noticed on my first watch: During the first intro there is a party trying to use a dog to harvest mandrakes.

I do think it feels like overly direct in adaptation at times. Awkward asides that interrupt the flow of conversations and various little visuals that I think work better in a comic than on television. And the way episodes are so clearly two chapters stabled together with more than often very abrupt and obvious transitions in the middle. Towards the end these start to feel like they’ve really gotten out of sync with the storytelling, with a run of episodes where the first half of one episode continues quite directly from the second half of the previous episode, only to change to something different in the second half that will be continued in the first half of the next. The Golden Country, griffin, and changeling episodes all follow this pattern with the somewhat underwhelming finale being confined to only the second part of episode twenty-four.

Still, I am very much looking forward to the second half of this show.

🎥 Labyrinth ★★☆☆☆

2026-02-10T12:15:04+00:00

It’s cute but the old fashioned adventure story with a series of fairly disconnected obstacles and set pieces one after another does not do much for me.

🎥 Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa ★★★★☆

2026-02-10T12:12:46+00:00

I think it’s actually better than I remembered. Some things like bringing back the armour was a bit of eye-rolling fan service and I’m not super happy with what they did with Wrath, but it’s fun, it looks great and I thought that the politics are handled shockingly well. There are plenty of historical inaccuracies but y’know what? Maybe Dietrich Eckart should have transitioned.

🎮 Remote Control Dandy ★★★★☆

2026-02-09T22:24:42+00:00

To launch a special attack, it needs to pose. That is an unavoidable requirement of robotics engineering.

I wonder how my feelings towards this and Robot Alchemic Drive would be if I played them in the order that they were released in. In many ways Remote Control Dandy feels like a first draft of RAD. A lot of the same ideas are explored. Similar character archetypes, reused scenarios, even a similar selection of maps for the areas that make up Torino and Senjo: The new downtown area, the old city centre, the docks, the power plant on the mountain. Both even have a map of Shinjuku for a mission where you have to defend the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. I definitely feel like a second go at this both lead to a more interesting and compelling story in RAD as well as just a more fun experience. Mechanics that were a small part of RCD get a bigger focus in RAD while a lot of the other concerns fade into the background.

Conversely, while RAD feels like a second draft it actually feels less polished. RAD’s story is more interesting but also less coherent and I don’t think that all of that can be blamed on the rushed (but charming) localisation. In RCD’s favour is that it looks a lot better for a Playstation game than RAD does for a Playstation 2 game. Partly that is aesthetic choices. RAD’s muted palette, Playstation 2 blur and general griminess aren’t doing it many favours, but while it boasts bigger maps and longer draw distances there is a conspicuous lack of damage models for buildings and other details that make Senjo feel a bit more sterile compared to RCD’s Torino. Animated character portraits, a more visual novel-style intermission section and a much fancier and seamless robot selection and launch screen also just make seem like more time and care was allowed in this game than was for RAD.

There is also some more detailed simulationist aspects to RCD that are dropped in its successor. Both games have monetary system to incentivise keeping property destruction down but RAD’s is much more forgiving, simply giving you a base amount of money per mission and then bonuses for protecting key buildings and minimising damage. RCD on the other hand (and somewhat more logically) gives you a larger upfront amount but penalises you for all damage done to the city over the course of your giant robot fights. You can, in fact, lose money on a given mission. The robots available to you even cost variable amounts to send into battle. Do you use the cheap, steam-powered robot that doesn’t have big fancy attacks, or do you send your expensive nuclear-powered model? You can go bankrupt if you spend everything and and smash up the city too much. You can also cause so much property destruction that the populace turns against you. In the second game this has largely been simplified away. RCD has more intricacies here, and that can definitely be appealing, but in the end RAD’s more lackadaisical approach lets one have a lot more fun driving a big stompy robot smashing through buildings without the looming risks of bankruptcy hanging over one’s head (though one is given more second chances than the game initially lets on).

And it’s interesting to see other elements that are somewhat vestigial in RAD having more of a presence here. In both games police cars drive around the city while you do battle. In RCD you have to pay the cost of them if they get destroyed but you are assured that they are automated patrol cars there only to detect and deter people from coming back into the evacuated city to steal while everyone is missing. You definitely aren’t killing anyone so don’t worry about it. The manual for RAD keeps this explanation that the patrol cars are automated drones despite the fact that RAD is more than happy to let you casually crush and mow down crowds of people as they spray comically large clouds of blood. You are not penalised for it at all; it is simply part of the slapstick. Yet it still keeps the excuse that the cars are automated, despite it not serving any purpose.

But for all RAD can feel like a rushed copy of this game, it’s still fundamentally the more fun one. RCD is great in its own right but it feels lacking compared RAD’s analogue stick controls, more engaging mech fights and more fun cast. The battle mode in RCD is also disappointing. While it does allow for playing against computer-controlled opponents it simply gives both players direct control over their robots from a birds-eye view, removing the core dynamic of having to deal with playing as a pilot operating from a ground level.

To end on a compliment, though, Remote Control Dandy’s final boss is much cooler than and has some more interesting unique gameplay tricks than Robot Alchemic Drive’s. Evidently the developers thought that they hit a winner there too, as one of the unique aspects of RCD’s final boss ended up being promoted to a core gameplay mechanic in RAD.

Also the fact that you can combine Vordan’s tornado arms and remote control rocket fist is extremely funny.

📕 The Grapples of Wrath ★★★★☆

2026-02-05T20:04:26+00:00

I have not kept up with wrestling since the 2000s but I have been recently been getting slightly back into it through my girlfriend (after her flatmate got her back into it), so Alice Bell’s new supernatural murder mystery being wrestling-themed was a nice little bonus on top of a book I was going to read anyway. Might beat out the first one for my favourite in the series so far, though I did cop who the murderer was a while before the protagonist and got slightly impatient waiting for the penny to drop.

🎥 Iron Lung ★★★☆☆

2026-01-30T21:16:48+00:00

This review contains spoilers.

Replicates the big clunky interface from the game in a way that is comical to see a real person interacting with, but doesn’t spend that long trying to replicate the isolation or dread of the game. Far from people stranded by himself at the bottom of an ocean of blood, people won’t leave Markiplier alone. Which is a shame; I quite like the scenes that focus on him doggedly navigating the oceanbed, cut off from everyone else.

What the film does instead is to (unsurprisingly) focus on and expand the scant lore of the game into a more surreal and heroic journey for the convict forced into this suicide mission. That could work fine but a lot of it felt more like it was just trying to do creepy, surreal, horror movie stuff rather than being thematically coherent (or just coherent) at all. That said, it does mostly do creepy, surreal, horror movie stuff fairly effectively and it’s not like I wasn’t enjoying myself, though I rolled my eyes at the big heroic ending.

Despite finding the replica video game room funny I did like the X-ray camera and I do think the film generally looks quite good other than a few naff shots of the big fish and when it gets too dark to see anything that is happening.

🎮 Iron Lung ★★★★★

2026-01-30T21:10:13+00:00

Perfectly executed little thing. The relatively simple but non-trivial navigational task keeps one occupied enough for all the horrible little oppressive noises to slowly fray away at the nerves, keeping one primed for the bigger scares to release that built up tension. Doesn’t overstay its welcome or overexplain itself.

📕 In Transit ★★★★★

2026-01-29T13:04:25+00:00

[You cannot] detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experience. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past.

I have never read anything this dense with wordplay, puns and sheer linguistic playfulness. I did not understand close to all of it but all I need to continue reading to the next paragraph and experience Brigid Brophy doing something else charmingly unspeakable to the English language (and sometimes other ones as well). There is almost a tactile physicality to the prose in some parts. Is this felt joy like what people who like Joyce feel? I feel like the insufferability of my writing may increase just by having read this. The text rending the rendered text on my website unreadable. I flail to imitate it, my sincerest fattery.

Okay, I’ll stop with that. The novel starts very philosophically, with the narrator—born in Ireland but moved to Britain when they were young—wandering around an airport lounge as their mind similarly wanders, basking in the most liminal and modern of public spaces to muse on the concept of being “in transit”. Of a space of movement, of transition, of the crossing of boundaries, a space international in character and (the novel being written in the 60s) a state of being that is starting to be opened to more than just the upper classes.

In this state several peculiar things start to happen to our narrator. They undergo what they describe as “linguistic leprosy”, a state that mostly results in a flood of multilingual puns in major European languages. The relationship with the Irish language and Irishness here is interesting. The narrator is not comfortable with the language. They can not wield it deftly or easily and are reduced to making the old tired jokes about how odd the spelling conventions are. There is a lamentation in this. They have had exposure to it to think they should perhaps know it a bit more. This is put out to leaving at a young age but this rings quite true as someone who has lived in Ireland her entire life as well. Along with the leprosy there is the pain of a phantom tongue that was never really known. Joyce comes to mind again, though from reputation more than experience. The only Joyce that I’ve read is one or two stories from Dubliners. But with Joyce, Brophy and Ireland’s general reputation (or at least the reputation we tell ourselves that we have) for great works of English poetry and literature, does the ungaelicised mind seek to master its foreign mother tongue, to turn the tables on the colonisation of language?

The novel takes a turn towards farce in the second part, when the protagonist (gender previously hidden, as the book points out itself, with the use of the personal pronoun I) realises that somehow, ridiculously they have forgotten what sex they are, and tries to–within the bounds of polite public behaviour—figure out what’s going on downstairs. The sex marker on the passport has been (in)conveniently blotched by a coffee stain, their clothes are oh-so-modern, gender neutral and loose fitting, if they have breasts they are too small to be noticeable, reading the porn novel that they had in their bag and seeing if they relate to the Story of Oc’s Tongue as voyeur or self-insert and then stop just short of groping themselves in public before they realise that the man sitting across from them in the airport café is starting at them like they are a lunatic. This results in an escalating series of misadventures up to and including ending up on a gameshow where they have to guess someone’s kink live on air.

One might expect the exploration of gender to have aged poorly, but other than (admittedly fairly gaping from a contemporary perspective) lack of consideration of the concept of being trans or intersex I think it’s great and, more importantly, very funny. What has aged somewhat more poorly is the language around race that the book uses. It’s not hateful, but the earnest use of the word “oriental” and the in-passing exoticisation of the few non-white characters in the book is less than ideal.

The book transforms itself again towards the end, splitting our narrator into the dual personalities of Patric{k/ia} and then branching further off to focus on the experiences of various other characters as a socialist, egalitarian revolution takes control of the airport lounge. I must admit I didn’t like this section as much. It feels like the novel over-stays its welcome a bit, which is a shame, but I did enjoy the choose-your-own-adventure ending.

🎥 Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! ★★★☆☆

2026-01-29T11:33:05+00:00

It takes eight minutes until we see a flashback to the first film.

A lot of this film is quite bad. Almost any time Robert Culp is on screen it feels like it’s spinning its wheels and filling time; Ricky (incredible headgear aside) is a shadow of his eyebrow-wiggling, garbage day-declaring self; a third thing to round out this list but I’ve already forgotten most of the side characters.

But I find a lot of the scenes with Laura strangely compelling. Maybe I am just distracted by her looking a bit like Jennifer Connelly while being the best-dressed blind woman in the world but I really like this abrasive, assertive blind girl pensively making her way through an awful horror sequel.

📺 Kaiji S2: Against All Rules ★★★★☆

2026-01-29T11:22:31+00:00

A man sits playing a pachinko machine for ten episodes straight and it is somehow incredibly gripping.

📺 It (miniseries) ★★☆☆☆

2026-01-26T15:55:46+00:00

Compelling at the start but starts to get bogged down by repetitive scenes off all the kids being haunted in roughly similar ways. This only gets worse in the second half where, as adults, the cast still seemingly spend ages sitting around waiting for the next horror scene to happen and having flashbacks to even more shit that happened to them as children that wasn’t in the first part. When they finally do act the climax was less interesting than the one in the first part. I feel like the 2010 movies failed in a lot of similar ways but with the second half in that being even worse. Puts me in mind to read the original novel and try to understand what happened to it in adaptation.

📺 Columbo S2 ★★★★☆

2026-01-26T15:54:07+00:00

Very strong series. Does feel a bit less experimental than the first was at times but they have also settled into a rhythm that works. The only real stinker was Dagger of the Mind. They do lean into giving Columbo some more identifiable quirks with the car and the dog and they are going to bring them up enough times to make sure you know that these are his quirks and you will find them endearing but it isn’t overbearing and the dog and the car are both cute.

🎮 Tekkōki Mikazuki (demo) ★★★☆☆

2026-01-26T15:52:09+00:00

A demo for a cancelled tie-in game for a TV show that got reworked into Robot Alchemic Drive. Very interesting to compare it to the final game. The first thing that jumps out is that the map seems much more detailed here than any in RAD. It makes me wonder what kind of budget and time constraints RAD had during its development. That said, RAD also features extensive use of picture-in-picture effects and panicking crowds running around in the story mode as well a split-screen multiplayer option which might have put some more strict resource constraints on its maps than the largely static Tokyo of this demo. The only things moving around are the player character, their robot, the big watermelon kaiju and the buildings that you are smashing apart as you fight it.

Some of the assets from this demo seem to have been reused for the intro cutscene of the third level in RAD, both of which take place around Tokyo Tower, though when the level proper starts in the final game you are actually in a completely different map based on a different part of Tokyo featuring the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. The layouts of the maps in this demo and the cutscene in RAD don’t match up so they didn’t just reuse the same map, but some of the buildings appear to us the same models.

Both demo and final game do not feature a pause menu; the select button in both switching between pilot and robot and the start button showing control reminders in the demo and a map screen in the final game, but in the demo’s free-roam mode a message at the top of the screen informs the player that pressing select and start together will quit back to the menu. This feature is still functional in the challenge and versus modes in RAD but as far as I can tell not documented anywhere in the game or its manual¹.

The watermelon monster is taken from the first episode of Tekkōki Mikazuki it’s just a very fun design. The conceit of controlling the robot from the ground is not from the show, though, and is taken from Remote Control Dandy, a game that Robot Alchemic Drive is very clearly a spiritual successor to, reusing and reworking many of the same concepts. The robot controls in this demo, though, are very simplified, using something like the “easy” control option from RAD for moving Mikazuki and without the different array of attack options present in either game. Perhaps the developers only had working or wanted only to present a basic, less complex version of the control scheme than they had in mind for the full game, but the end result in this demo lacks the clunky, expressive charm of RAD or its predecessor.

In the English version at least, I cannot speak for the Japanese version. ↩

🎮 Robot Alchemic Drive ★★★★★

2026-01-21T17:06:26+00:00

I really love a game that is deliberate in its controls. That doesn’t try to make everything as smooth as possible. That has a sense of physicality and realness to it. System Shock’s modular, maximalist UI, Metal Gear Solid 2’s intricate and deliberate controls, the process of discovering and operating your submersible walker in Nauticrawl. I love a game that feels like operating heavy machinery and there is no machinery heavier than Gllang.

Robot Alchemic Drive has such a wonderful conceit. You are piloting a giant robot—a meganite—against giant invading alien kaiju robots—the volgara. You must swap between controlling the pilot and the meganite, but the perspective and camera always stays with the pilot. You are watching from ground level, or from a rooftop, or from the shoulder of your robot, and it’s rarely a simple or smooth process. Judging the distance, the angle, how to aim or throw a punch from a distance. The controls aren’t simple either. Each analogue stick controls an arm, and each pair of shoulder buttons the legs. Just to walk forward you need to alternate L1 and R1 to take each individual step. I’ve wanted to play it ever since watching Videochess playing it a few years ago and the more recent surge in Nanao-posting finally pushed me to jump in myself.

And it’s just a blast to play. It can be a bit repetitive but you do get three meganites to play with if you want to shake it up. I did mostly stick with Thrones-class Gllang the Castlekeep, because if it’s it a game about being a big, stompy robot why would you not want to be the biggest, stompiest robot? Gllang is slow but loaded up with weapons and you can eventually unlock the ability to unload every gun it has at once, which makes for a very satisfying finishing move. He can also transform into fortress mode, a surprisingly fast and slippery tank the width of an entire motorway to compensate for how slow his walk is. On the fast and light side there’s Cherubim-class Airborne Dominator Laguiole who can turn into a V-TOL jet and Seraphim-class Vertical Fortress Vavel as the middle of the road bland main character robot who can’t transform into anything but has a super mode that gives you a time limit of three minutes to finish the mission within or else he’ll explode (though if you pick Gllang or Laguiole at the start they will also get a similar super mode late in the story).

The game is a bit repetitive, throwing you into fight after fight, but it tries to throw in different twists on the formula either as a once-off or in little mini-arcs that explore a particular idea for a few missions. You will have to deal with poison gas, putting out fires, various twists on the enemy units’ Phantom System teleporter that allows them to dodge all ranged attacks until they are on low health, and a various other things. None of these ever really get integrated back into the gameplay in a more systematic way. The meganites can pick things up but it’s only useful in one or two missions (though there is some fun to be had in experimenting with picking yourself up).

There are also missions that focus more on the protagonist’s relationships with various characters, most importantly Nanao, who is a perfect angel who no one is ever allowed to be mean to except for me when I keep “accidentally” blowing up the buildings she works in. Amusingly blowing up various buildings is one of the main drivers of character interactions. Masaru, the stuck-up heir to an arms manufacturing conglomerate, gets more and more character development the more you repeatedly blow up his company’s headquarters. The general campiness, which extends to the gameplay itself, is also enhanced by the localisation, which is charmingly low budget and aiming for the energy of old cheezy dubs of Gamera and Godzilla movies (though they could have left out the bad Japanese accent that they give to the news reporter and no one else). The story does go in some darker directions at times and it put my slightly in mind of Neon Genesis Evangelion but where Gendo died and they just put Shinji in charge (but still did not tell him anything).

It does feel like there was more ambition here than was able to be filled, with dramatic and especially the more dream-like sequences struggling to convey themselves with the game’s fairly simple cutscenes and descriptions of the situation in the city of Senjo and Earth in general getting worse and worse as the war wages on being undercut by every map being completely reset whenever the next mission starts.

There is also a multiplayer mode that is both a little barebones but shocklingly generous with how much it offers. You choose a map and then each player chooses a pilot and a robot to control and then it dumps you in a splitscreen match. First person to have the health par of either the robot or the pilot deplete loses. But it doesn’t just offer the three megatnites; every volgara that you defeat in the story mode gets added to the roster and every map from the story mode is there with all their moves from the story mode. Even the Rome map that only appears in the opening cutscene of the story is here and fully playable, modelled well beyond what was needed for the intro. And with no time limit, no scorekeeping and a match only ending when something dies it leaves it very open to different strategies or even just being a toybox to make up your own game. You can focus on the other player’s robot or their pilot. The robots are giant, slow, targets, but the pilots are small and have a hard time defending themselves directly. You can ride on your robot to not have two targets, but it’s quite easy to get knocked off and find yourself in a very vulnerable position. You can agree to have an honourable robot fight and not attack each other’s pilots or you can forego the robots entirely and just chase each other with grenades. Myself and Ruby had a blast just messing around with it in various ways. We had a match where we tried to pick up each other’s pilots with our robots, first person to get grabbed loses. After that was resolved we just both rode around on her Gllang together in tank mode blowing up Rome.

And it’s also just a game that sets me off imagining how I would tweak it. What would I try to make if I made something like this? Could contextual or once-off mechanics be made more systemically useful or interesting? I think some way to control the pilot and robot at once would be cool; maybe the D-pad can always control the pilot while the analogue sticks and shoulder buttons are reserved for the robot? Or a two-controller mode where one controls the pilot and the other the robot? I just want more of this, different iterations of it. I am already eyeing up the fan translations of Remote Control Dandy and Marionation Gear.

Miscellaneous observations:

There is only one walkthrough for the game on Game FAQs and the author hates both Gllang and Nanao. They have not been vindicated by history.
In the famous bread and water soup mission the protagonist complains that 7-Eleven charge too much for vegetables and it’s cheaper to get them at the greengrocer when the smallest unit of currency you work with while upgrading your giant fuck-off robots is ¥500,000,000.
As well as the hammy acting often being funny there’s a few great deadpan bits that really got me. In an early missions one of the people in mission control tells you to explore the city and familiarise yourself with the area while you wait for the meganite to launch. When the call back a minute later to ask if you’ve gotten familiar with the city the protagonist just responds “Well, yes. I live here.”
The cutscenes aren’t skipable but holding down the start button fast forwards them which is very funny to watch.
It’s one of those games with a choice of protagonists where they do not change the script very much if you pick the female hero so her and the love interests just become lesbians, which is great.

🗨️ Sonic the Hedgehog, Vol. 21: Reprise ★★★☆☆

2026-01-20T13:08:00+00:00

Comic looks great as always. Very funny that the first issue in this has a bunch of Sonic the Hedgehog’s friends celebrating killing a guy.

Shadow continues to be frustrating in these comics, stuck doing the same bit of being an egotistical dickhead who fucks things up by rushing in without thinking.

The Soleil/Lunar plotline felt a bit rushed.

🗨️ Comrade Girls, Shoot the Enemy, Vol. 1 ★★★☆☆

2026-01-20T13:07:00+00:00

Gorgeous art and a comic set in an all-girl Soviet sniper training school is a fun premise. I really enjoy the stuck-up princess type who thinks she’s better than everyone being an fervent communist who despises the aristocracy. Interested in where Olga’s plotline will go.