Toby Fox keeps tutorialising mechanics as jokes or in very silly contexts and then paying them off in huge, dramatic ways and I fail to see it coming every time. I struggle to think of other games that so deftly use mechanics as both humour and storytelling device. And the game continues to just be really fun.

Plotwise, the tensions and mysteries that I assumed would simmer for most of the game are already threatening to boil over. The game really feels like it could go anywhere at this point and the two different paths of the story only feed this more, each painting a very different picture of Kris and the player’s relationship to them.

Also I love Susie.

The anniversary stream was very cute but pacifist Sans is just too annoying to fight. I finished that fight from Deltarune chapter three yesterday and that was incredibly difficult but fun but this is just infuriating. Which is, in fairness, very much in character.

Extremely cute little remake. Love to see something like this fit onto an actual NES.

This game continues to be wonderful. Up until the ending chapter three acts as a bit of a fun breather while also catching Susie and the inattentive player up on nature of darkners. I thought that Susie might have been strung along for a bit longer but there are such interesting tensions bubbling in this game now. It doesn’t seem likely that Susie is going to actually want to condemn darkners back to being mere objects and I really have no idea where the divide between Kris and the souls is going to lead.

But I actually started this chapter by continuing from my evil save file from chapter two. My snowgrave save file. I immediately wanted to know how that plotline continued and was handled. Is Berdly actually dead? How much is it going to be actually acknowledged? I suspected that these questions would probably be avoided and maybe only teased further at the end, putting off any closure on those questions into chapter four or five, but it goes even further and doesn’t acknowledge anything. After all, your choices don’t matter!

It is interesting how this handles both the player who is going through these chapter by chapter as the game comes out who knows all the secrets already, but also the theoretical player, a decade from now, divorced from the rabid fan speculation and Youtube videos dissecting every detail, who is simply playing through the finished game. The S-rank quest is much, much more signposted than snowgrave was but contains very obvious allusions to it. For those who have already played the weird route in the second chapter it’s a callback and a warning about what you might have to do in future if you want to keep getting stronger and for those who don’t it’s a strong hint that you missed something the last time around.

It is also interesting how it leads you down the dark path using the context of it being a game within the game. It even leads you in in a very gamey way, with the promise of a reward for clearing levels with the best possible ranking and then locking you into something more explicitly violent, but also more abstracted, than Deltarune itself is. There’s no dialogue, no real characters, just a sword and some enemies. I’ve read someone talking about refusing to use snowgrave but talking themselves into completing Mantle because, hey, it’s only a game and doesn’t seem like it will have further consequences on the plot. And yes, it is of course only a game, just like Deltarune is. And this circles back to the treatment of darkners as not being “real” people. When you’re talking to them as characters in the dark world they certainly seem as real as Susie and Kris, who are of course also not real. They are all just characters in a video game, toys and stories for our amusement. But people feel very strongly about them and are genuinely worried about where the plot is going and what might happen to them. And me? I am very interested.

That said, when I go on to chapter four I don’t think I will continue my evil playthrough first. As Ramb reminds us games are meant to be fun and in my first playthrough of chapter three I was worrying trying to puzzle out what the weird route might be and if I might have locked myself out of it. That only served to blinker me and stop me from giving the chapter the curious exploration that Deltarune rewards so much.

Neal has once again swallowed my morning with one of his little games. Cute little thing, made me smile and curse in equal measure. Much like real CAPTCHAs often do a bunch of these minigames push you to actually behave more robotically to prove you are actually a human. The easiest way to solve the chess game is of course to load up the best chess bot you have access to and play as black against it, copying the moves from one game into another and for the maths puzzle I did first try to make order of magnitude estimations for each number, assuming that they would be pretty wildly variant, only to realise that the numbers were much, much closer together in value than I initially anticipated and just using Wolfram Alpha to solve them instead. I also looked up a guide on how to solve sliding block puzzles because I hate them.

The final boss rhythm game was a bastard, too. I had great trouble mentally mapping ⏶⏷⏴⏵ onto the actual physical layout of my arrow keys ␤. I was tempted to start trying to figure out how to temporarily remap four adjacent keys on my keyboard to get through it. Moving to using up and down on the arrow keys with my left hand and left and right on the numpad with my right hand did help and I eventually got it.

I have been waxing nostalgic about PAL versions of games lately but I will acknowledge that in some regards we did get the short end of the stick. As much as I fond of the slower version of the game’s music I don’t think Sonic the Hedgehog running one sixth slower than it was designed to was a good thing and the game manuals we got here seemed to be made as cheaply as Sega could get away with.

Let’s compare manuals of the Japanese, North American and European release of the same game, called Ragnacënty, Crusader of Centy and Soleil respectively in each region.

This is fairly typical of what European Mega Drive manuals were like. Fully black and white, printed in in a landscape orientation, arranged in thin columns, having little interior artwork other than screenshots that are so squashed down it’s hard to tell what they’re even showing and cutting everything down to the bare minimum details. The character bios aren’t included at all. This little bit of narration from the perspective of the protagonist is the closest thing. The whole manual is only 17 pages compared to 30 for Ragnacënty and 40 for Crusader of Centy.

And Soleil’s manual’s layout seems downright roomy compared to a lot of games. You might have wondered why the manuals might have that strange multi-column landscape layout? Well Soleil had separate manuals printed for each language the game was released in but that wasn’t always the case. Compare it to Tails’ Adventure for the Game Gear which across each pair of pages has separate columns in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Dutch.

But even this is still worth preserving. Soleil and its manual were precious artefacts for me for a very long time. I still had the game cartridge and manual up until a few years ago when I did a big clearout of all my old games (mementos are precious, but so is space and I live in a small house) but even when I sold it on I actually cut out the cover of the manual as a keepsake. Had I known as a child the stark difference between those pages and that of Rangacënty I might have held it in less regard, but it was still a piece of my childhood and worth preserving along with the other versions.

I’ve been playing the “open network test” demo for Sonic Racing: Crossworlds and having a good time. I am not much of a kart racer gal but I did really like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and that is going to be my main point of comparison. The quick version is that it’s fun but I am not spending 70-bloody-€ on this.

One thing that is immediately apparently compared to Transformed is that Crossworlds is much more chaotic. The game is a constant sensory overload. The central gimmick is that the second lap of each race sends you to a random other track and the last lap of each track also adds new items, hazards and shortcuts to the track, so things are constantly changing every race and items feel more powerful and far less easily dealt with than in Transformed. That game’s blue shell created a minefield in front of the lead player, something that is going to slow you down a little but was avoidable with some care, while Crossworlds has two different items that directly target the lead player and seem nigh-undodgeable. The three different homing attacks also feel significantly harder to get away from with a well-timed boost than they did in Transformed (or perhaps I am just very rusty) with the constant sensory overload of the game not helping there. There are also three different catchup items that automatically send you forward in position on top of the monster truck super transformation and regular boost powerups which also help anyone who has fallen behind rejoin the clusterfuck in the middle of the pack.

Of course my impressions also being coloured here by the fact that I mostly played the single-player mode of Transformed while this demo of Crossworlds, being a network test, has very limited singleplayer options with only one grand prix with three tracks¹ to play singleplayer and many more tracks available to experience in online play so I have mostly been sticking to that. I am a bit disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be much character dialogue when playing multiplayer. The grand prix mode assigns you a rival character who will banter with you as you race other racers might talk to you as you interact (i.e. attack each other). I can understand that people eventually get sick of repeated dialogue in online matches but I wouldn’t mind the option to toggle it on and maybe even toggle on assigning other random players (or friends that you are partying up with) as rivals for a race.

The character I’m most interested in terms of these voice lines is Sage, who was only introduced in Sonic Frontiers and hasn’t interacted with most of the wider cast at all yet. I’m curious as to how they handle the context that she exists in outside of the plot of that game. She is not available in the demo, though, and I have been playing almost exclusively as Cream (because Blaze also isn’t available in the demo).

One thing that Crossworlds does have over Transformed is the vehicle customisation. It’s done a little strangely and there’s not a huge amount of depth to it—you are not swapping out spoilers or other individual parts, only the front and back halves of various vehicles—but it’s still fun to play around with. Layering decals on top of the paintjobs does give you some more freedom but even this is pretty restrictive – you can’t overlap decals and they tend have a large transparent zone around the main image that stops you using them to create more detailed shapes. I imagine that this might be intentional to try to stop people making anything offensive with them but I did try my best on my extreme gear design to combine some basic shapes to make a depiction of Rocky behind where the rider stands.

One criticism I have of the car customisation is that when it comes to horns and decals they don’t seem to have given much thought to the Sonic the Hedgehog theming. The horn options sound like they came unaltered from a stock asset pack. There is one labelled “spring” and it is not the Sonic spring noise, just a generic cartoon spring. There is a decal in there of Sonic’s face (which looks quite funny) but really none for rings or Chaos Emeralds? None of the other characters’ silhouetted extra life icons? The “auras” you can apply to the cars also all look like shit and just add to the visual noise of the game.

Your custom paintjob also gets overriden in the game’s time-limited festivals, in which players are put into themed 4v4v4 teams in races with special rules, with the winning team for each race earning points. The festival for the network test is Persona 5-themed with Team Joker, Team Violet and Team Mona. This sounds like a Splatfest but it is not—it’s a battle pass. You do not choose a team you are randomly assigned one every race, making them utterly pointless other than what colour your car is going to be for the next five minutes and points simply go to unlocking Persona-themed decals that I will never use. Joker himself, one of the future D.L.C. characters for the game, was also temporarily unlocked for this which just highlighted how much of a lazy cashgrab the cross-promotional characters are, lacking any voicelines or even a full set of animations. From what they’ve shown of the game so far the only voiced D.L.C. character is going to be Hatsune Miku, the one that they don’t have to pay a voice actor for. Even the Werehog pre-order bonus doesn’t have any lines and he’s just Sonic with a gruffer voice. They have Roger Craig Smith voicing Sonic and Omega in the game already could they not have him do this too at least? But if you want to race as a completely silent Spongebob Squarepants be sure to buy the season pass.

Also the final lap music for a lot of stages is really bad.

I exhibited at a showcase for local game makers yesterday. It was the first time I had done something like that and it was extremely fun and utterly exhausting. Working on games is an occasionally hobby; I don’t intend to make it my job and I haven’t worked on any game projects since the game jam last year, but I dusted off Snolf Robo Blast 2 and Conway’s Garden and set them up with some controllers for people to try out.

I had not thought about how exhibiting these would work before the event but I quickly realised that I was going to have to give a lot of context to people as to what they were playing. The vast majority of people attending never heard of Sonic Robo Blast 2 before so I had to give a quick rundown to everyone on what it was and sometimes the concept of fangames and mods.

Even with that explained, though, it became apparent how awkward it was to try to convey what the mod is doing when people seeing it do not have a context of the base game and how the mod is creating an experience on top of that. They are coming in and seeing and playing this game for the first time and expecting it to be a coherent whole, not this deliberate awkward layer on top of a base game. You don’t have the context that the joy in it is that you are playing the game “wrong”, layering a control scheme and method of play that the world was not intended for. Many people when seeing it as a golf-type thing started looking for a hole or guidance on where they are shooting for. The levels have a fairly legible linear structure when played normally, but when you have never seen them before and can freely shoot yourself much farther and higher than the levels for designed for, bouncing every which way, it is become very difficult to parse the structure of the space. More than one person suggested there should be guiding arrows of some sort to help.

Some people, though, did gel with it straight away and were delighted by blasting Snolf around, which was really nice to see. I was quick to give credit to the SRB2 team for the game itself and Dr. Melon for the concept. A line I fell into saying that got a laugh from a lot of people is that “all I did was make the controls worse.” A lot of people also got a kick out of it when I pointed out that the game was technically an extremely heavily modified version of Doom. Some people did have more of a concept of an antigame and compared it to QWOP and Getting Over It when I tried to explain the awkwardness of it not being entirely unintentional and the other game makers there generally got it and found it interesting. There were a few parents who brought children, including a Sonic fan or two, and they gravitated over to it being one of the more brightly coloured, exciting looking things on display, only to get pretty frustrated with it. For the kids at least I did quickly quit back to the main menu and restart the game with normal Sonic so that they could have a bit of fun trying it out and gave on the details of SRB2 to their parents if they were interested in it, pointing out that it was free. I think if exhibiting it again it would be useful to have a second computer set up with the unmodified version of the game, both to give context and to allow any child who sees Sonic and gets excited to play something that would actually be fun for them.

Similarly for Conway’s Garden I had to let people know that there wasn’t really any goal or point to it and it was more of a piece of art and a challenge to make something in a tiny amount of code. I had the code open in a second in a second window to the side so people could see how small it was for themselves. A lot of people, quite fairly, lost interest in it quickly, but some people were fascinated by the highly condensed code and the idea of tweetcarts and Pico-8 itself and a surprising number of people were already familiar with and recognised Conway’s Game of Life.

There was one man in particular I had a lovely chat with who was unfamiliar with games generally (he had to ask to clarify if “mods” was short for “modifications”) but enthusiastic about discussing the things on display as art. He said the mix of chaotic generation with the player’s simple, deliberate movements in Conway’s Garden reminded him of Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me and immediately recognised the Sisyphean nature of Snolf.

I don’t know if I will do anything like this again any time soon (and I won’t be working on anything new to show for the moment) but I had a great time and met some very cool people.

This game proved to be an extremely welcome distraction during a very difficult time, a lovely way to hang out with a dear friend, and just a really fun game.

A survival crafting game set not in an open world but in an interconnected facility in the vain of System Shock that you slowly unlock over the course of the game. The GATE Cascade Research Facility is, shamelessly, Black Mesa with a coat of paint. The game does not try to hide its influences at all, with one of the two character voice options being Gianni Matragrano doing his best impression of Harry S. Robins as a Half-Life scientist. Thankfully the character creator does not lock any options behind a choice of genders so I was able to pick that voice for my scientist while choosing a more feminine appearance. Look, voice training is hard.

I am not normally one for survival games or a heavy focus on crafting, they tend to be too directionless for me, but the metroidvania-like progression of slowly unlocking more and more of the map appeals to me a lot. Early on the rhythm of it reminded me a bit of the early Resident Evils; having a home base as a save haven to return to and resupply while planning out excursions into unknown dangers, planning out what limited resources to bring with me. Taking more weapons, more ammunition, more healing supplies with me is safer, but means having much less room in my limited inventory to bring things back.

And then your base expands, your toolset expands, your knowledge of what you are up against expands, and you grow more bold and more capable. The crafting elements are more than I would normally enjoy juggling but the structured nature of the game allows everything to be introduced at a slow and steady pace and its up to you how much you push forward into danger versus how much time you spend gathering and harvesting resources and building up your base and supplies.

There were a few frustrating difficult spikes in the middle to late game playing in early access, but the release update added an item upgrade system that should hopefully even that out.

As you unlock more of the base you unlock shortcuts to previous areas, the map is very interconnected, and a fast travel system that is very charming to anyone with a fondness for Half-Life: A series of Black Mesa Inbound-esque tram rides that interweave the sprawling facility (many of which can be traversed even faster with a deliciously overpowered long jump module you can get later in the game).

Unsurprisingly, the GATE facility has gone to hell as creatures from another world have started pouring in. It doesn’t take that long for you to visit this game’s Xen, here called Anteverse II, but after that it starts to reveal other influences. The second portal takes you to something jarring in that it is a much more human setting: Flathill, a small American town blanketed in fog clearly inspired by Silent Hill and The Mist. These self-contained portal worlds serve as linear levels exploring different gameplay concepts within the more open structure of GATE and also as renewable sources of supplies as you loot and clear out more and more of the facility. And as you do that you start to see that labs are taking after the SCP Foundation as much as they are Black Mesa.

The game has its own catalogue of “immurement registry” objects, which encompasses not just the aliens you are fighting but such things as an arcade machine that sucks you into the game itself; a creature that is only visible to the person it is stalking and will disappear if stared at for long enough; a cube that reduces gravity in the area around it and many things that have no gameplay effect and only exist as in readable journal entries or props with no special function such as a table that causes everyone who sees it to hate it or inexplicable yellow paint that seems to manifest to guide people who are lost.

The journal entries and email exchanges that you can read are often very fun, foreshadowing upcoming enemies, revealing plot threads, showing daily life in a mad science lab and often just being very funny. The exchanges between the Gatekeepers—the ostensible security forces for GATE who have taken to using all the various otherworldly and occult resources the organisation studies for themselves, becoming more and more inhuman and strange as they become stronger—and the normal research staff are particularly delightful, as are random exchanges about Doom and the W.W.F.

I played through this with one other friend and while there is a singleplayer mode I feel that the game would probably drag significantly more without more than one pair of hands and more than one backpack to fill up when scavenging and managing resources. More than two would probably have been ideal but also it’s not a game where you will want to miss sessions where the group is exploring new areas or progressing the story and every person you add is going to make organising sessions more complicated, but if you can get a group for it I highly recommend exploring the Garrick Advanced Technology Enterprises Cascade Research Facility with some friends.

Technically I watched a friend play this but I am going to count it. Honestly this was probably the better way to experience it because I don’t like the free roaming randomly generated structure as much as something more directed like Franken. Still an unbelievably charming and sweet little world to explore. I am also very taken with sproutbug in spite of it being one of the more basic creatures. I am a girl of simple tastes.

Extremely funny and charming game. Great sense of how to play off the RPG tropes for comedy in a loving way and some expertly deployed cursing. The Cerberus boss sprite is probably my favourite joke in the whole thing.

Steam Grid DB is a website that hosts artwork for customising game libraries. I learnt a little while ago that it has a tool called Boop that lets you apply art to Steam games much faster by clicking a button directly on the website.

This reminded me that I actually used to make quite a few custom banners for games on Steam myself and I decided to upload my old work to the website. You can find those on my Steam Grid DB profile and I will include a selection of them here:

Half-Life 2

Some of the first ones I made were a set of matching banners for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I’m still pretty happy with these.

Some classics

I made some for a few classic games, usually from a still of the title screen, sometimes with some variants.

Megagames 6

At the time I had a Retrode and would dump my own game cartridges. Two of the old Mega Drive carts I had were two different 6-in-1 game packs, so I decided to make custom artwork for them too.

ROM hacks

And of course some ROM hacks.

And a few others

Games that weren’t even in the database

Some games I had to submit to Steam Grid myself because they didn’t have the games listed at all. These all have links if you click on the banners. The Monokuro: From Here and Back is actually new and I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. The process of uploading these banners made me want to make a new one and I had the game added as a shortcut on Steam without any artwork. Somari 3D Blast 5 wasn’t accepted by Steam Grid DB, sadly.

One last joke

These are a pair of banners that I made for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube and Wii versions, respectively. It was a little private joke and I didn’t bother submitting them to Steam Grid DB.

Very interesting tradeoff with having to hold off using your most direct means of self defence against hostile fish to capture higher value targets instead. It plays very well into the tension of having to try to scour the level quickly to reach the designated score within the time limit but with sloppiness resulting in added time penalties.

Channelling the spirit of a 00s game reviewer: The scariest thing about this game is the controls!!!!!!!!!!!!

The tagline of “haunted house simulator” really does fit as this game has no ideas beyond walking through a series of corridors with the occasional jumpscare and that walking is so, so painful. I am a fan of gimmicky control systems and motion controls but this game feels like trudging through syrup at all times, inching towards the next inevitable jumpscare that will arbitrarily trigger the level to progress until Kayako finally puts you out of your misery.

There are parts of this that almost work as a budget, janky version of Sonic Rush. The boost works, the art is rather nice and the renditions of Unleashed level music are surprisingly good. But then there are no sound effects and the music cuts out after a few seconds (I don’t know if that’s an emulation problem or if the game is just like that) and you run into the brick wall that is the utter shambles of the jump physics and collision detection that makes platforming in this game barely manageable. I guess it’s impressive that this ran on mobile phones at all but it constantly feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.

It is, mercifully, short. Only four of the locations from Sonic Unleashed are here and all the hub worlds and everything else extraneous is gone. Even the plot is barely there. There are some brief bits of dialogue at the start of levels between Sonic and Chip that are lines taken from the main gain, divorced from their original context. Other than that there all there is is some interstitial titles between levels that were clearly written by someone who was not given much if any guidance on what the story in the game is meant to be. It refers to Sonic in werehog form as just “Werehog” as if it was a name and talks about Sonic going to “Athens, Greece” instead of Apotos (which is actually based on Mykonos) even though the title cards for levels actually do use the made up names for these places, correctly calling it Apotos. This itself is weird because that’s not the name for the level in the console versions of the game, that’s the name of the hub area. The level is actually meant to be called Windmill Isle! The ending screen also just goes on a weird ramble that “We cannot live without the night, we all must sleep, we all must rest. Darkness is a part of our world, just as much as light.” Sure, great!

One last funny note is that after you beat each boss you get a Chaos Emerald. You might think that this means you are going to get all seven before you fight the final boss and there will be a Super Sonic section, but when you get to the final boss you only have five of them and then after defeating it the game just gives you two more and then ends.

It’s always interesting to see different takes on the same core idea. I knew when Unleashed Recompiled was released that I would be playing this alongside that fancy new PC port of the XBox 360 version. This Wii version takes the core concepts of the game and executes them in very different ways and it’s a lot better than I expected!

Being the budget version of the game a lot of fat is trimmed. Hub areas in each country are replaced with a more visual novel-style menu interface, using static renders of locations and characters from the PS360 version for visuals. This saves some time compared to running around and talking to people in the other version but is still tedious and fiddly and you do have to talk to people a lot more to progress. There is one part in particular after getting to Spagonia and Mazuri where you keeping having to go back and forth talking to different characters and watching cutscenes (FMVs that also use the in-engine cutscenes from the PS360 version as pre-rendered assets) for so long that I was begging the game to just let me play a level.

But when I actually got to play the levels they are quite fun! I actually prefer the werehog in this game to the PS360 version. There are motions controls if you would like, and it is fairly charming to do left and right hooks to attack or swing your arms rapidly to climb, but they are a bit much to play the whole game with, especially when there there is also fairly involved movement and platforming on top of it, but the game offers full support for the Gamecube or classic controller too. Even on the more standard control scheme the left and right punch are still bound to separate buttons. This is probably a holdover from the motion controls but I honestly enjoy it. It means you have to alternate left and right shoulder buttons to do combos making it just that little bit more engaging than just mashing attack repeatedly. Enemies also mercifully die much faster in this version.

I also quite like the werehog’s general movement. There is a real feel of weight and momentum in the way you skid while turning when running (even if having to double tap a direction to run is fiddly) and I also like you hold X to grab things rather than just tapping it. It gives you that little feeling that you’re gripping onto it yourself.

The night stages are also divided up into sets of three smaller acts rather than one big level. This puts them in more manageable chunks and means you lose less from a game over (which are a bit more likely in this version, more on the lives system later). Each act also takes place is a pretty distinct area. In Dragon Road (set in Chun-nan, based on China) the first area takes place in an area with lots of shrines and pagodas, similar to the PS360 version of the stage, but the two subsequent acts have you ascending a waterfall and then running across the Great Wall.

For the daytime stages the motion controls stop being a fun gimmick and are really just a hindrance, but the control scheme for more standard controls work just fine. The day stages are an interesting and very different take on the boost gameplay. How that should work was not set in stone yet and it feels like a real road not taken for how the series could have worked. Boost being discrete bursts of speed rather than a meter you drain continuously was strange to me at first but works pretty well. You really have to think much more about timing when to boost because you are committing to it and it can send you off a cliff that you can’t stop running towards. That along with the system where you are rewarded with boost for action chains and drifting feels like the game really rewards constant activity and hitting everything in the level just right. Rings upgrading your boost gauge with extra charges also gives more incentive not to just collect rings but hold on to them which later games don’t really do. It’s really rhythmic and intense in a different way to the boost formula I’m more familiar with. I am a bit tired of these games at the moment but I’ve definitely tempted to come back and practise the daytime levels more and get to grips with what a perfectly executed level feels like in this game.

I did think the game was a bit unforgiving with lives, only giving you three attempts at a level before a game over with no way to collect more, but what I had missed is that extra lives are actually a permanent upgrade in this game that you have to get elsewhere, but once you get an extra life you have that extra life for every subsequent level that you play. This is what the sun and moon medals are for in this game; they don’t gate progress like in the PS360 version. They also aren’t found through exploring, not directly at least. They are gotten through getting good performance in levels. For daytime levels this does just mean going as quickly as possible and beating certain par times. For the nighttime levels though there are three separate criteria for earning them for each level: You get one for beating the level under a certain time, one for getting enough “force” (experience points, basically) which can be found in high amounts throughout capsules hidden in little nooks and side areas—thus making those medals your reward for exploration—and one for getting enough rings, which just means being careful to hoover them up as you progress normally. This gives you some leeway in how to play levels if you still want to get some sun medals without worrying about getting them all.

What the sun and moon levels gate in this version is side areas in temples with extra puzzles. These puzzles require you to change back and forth between hedgehog and werehog and use their different movesets to peal back the layers of the puzzle in a way that you never do in the other versions of the game. And it is optional, though one might struggle in the last few levels without the extra lives. I certainly did before I realised that I had missed this entire system.

The final boss is also better in this version I think. Certainly the Punch-Out section is more fun than the equivalent part from the PS360 version. The Super Sonic part is a bit dull but certainly a lot less janky than those parts often are in this series.

Like its alternative version this is not without major flaws but I was surprised by how much more I want to go back to and fully get to grips with this version, this different angle on the series.

It’s interesting playing this after Shadow Generations; going back to the first boost game after the most recent one. They landed on a winning formula but there has been some clear and needed refinement over the years. The boost, homing attack and air dash all being the same button is a less than ideal and it lacks a good way to half your momentum quickly, the stomp transitioning into a slide when you’re moving quickly rather than stopping you dead line in later games. But it’s at its core familiar and fun territory for the day stages. Very familiar, actually, as I’ve played all of these levels before in Sonic Generations through mods and only now am experiencing them in their original context. It’s an interesting! There are definitely some gaps in the version presented by the Unleashed Project mod where the toolkit available to Sonic Generations modders could not replicate the original gameplay. On the other hand the original versions have fiddly and surprisingly unforgiving quick time events, so there are trade-offs whichever way one plays these levels.

For the night stages Sonic the Werehog is fairly fun. To begin with anyway. As the game wears on the combat increasingly overstays its welcome and while the platforming challenges can offer a breather they are generally not very interesting. Thankfully Unleashed Recompiled includes an option to turn off the battle music which helps with one of the more irritating aspects of the night levels. As a final nitpick I found the fact that all these Eggman’s robots and Dark Gaia monsters just hang out together and apparently work together in the night stages very odd. It feels like there should be a stronger dichotomy between the two types of enemies or even having them fight each other. Watching monster infighting is always fun!

Levels of both types can be pretty mean with bottomless pits and the like but the developers seemed to have at least noticed this and often put extra lives shortly after checkpoints before difficult sections.

Outside of the core gameplay the game does leave a lot to be desired. The world tour was a cute idea but the execution is tedious and a bit racist. It’s hard to ignore how western countries get towns and cities with levels that have you running through streets with human inhabitants, while elsewhere has small villages that you quickly leave to run through empty ruins (which you are also smashing up a fair bit), any significant construction or urban civilisation in these places being relegated to ancient history. When you arrive in Mazuri, based off Mali and other parts of Africa, you find yourself in a mudhut village devoid of any modern technology other than Eggman’s invading robots and one of the first people there you can speak to says something to the effect of “You’re looking for a professor. What’s that? Sounds tasty!” The one blessing is that when people are voiced they all just have American accents rather than any attempts to imitate different nationalities.

Even aside from all that going around and talking to people in general is a pain. Hub areas are littered with people but Sonic moves so sluggishly in them and no one ever has anything interesting to say, but there are times when you have to go around and mash buttons to advance their dialogue to the end in order to progress. That or go back to Professor Pickle’s lab fifty times only for him to tell you to go back to where you just were. It was only very late in the game that I realised that sometimes NPCs will give you challenge missions so there is actually reason to talk to them beyond reading them say inane crap. The fact that I had stopped talking to them whenever I didn’t have to meant I had probably missed a lot of those and did not help with my medal deficit.

You have to collect sun and moon medals to unlock stages and progress in the game. These are found scattered around both hub areas and levels and as long as you keep an eye out for them and make sure to collect them you can keep ahead of requirements for most of the game. I knew this going in and tried to be diligent but I still ended up hitting a brick wall on getting to Adabat (based on Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia) I had to go grind for sun medals for while before I could continue, which was tiresome and not helped by the fact that you can’t find medals or other collectables if you do the time trial or other challenge versions of levels, which at least might have let you do the grind with some more variety.

The plot is fairly insubstantial and dotted with comic relief characters who fail to ever be funny. Chip is Scrappy-Doo with pixie wings and proto-Orbot is even more annoying, ergo every cutscene with him in it is a pain to listen to, ergo I was annoyed every time I saw him, ergo I wish he wasn’t in this game.

Returning to the gameplay, the final level having you swap between both gameplay styles might have been cute if it was doing anything interesting with that, but it really is just day section, night section, day section repeatedly with one point where you can take a shortcut to stay in a day section for longer. I might have been tempted to replay the day parts if there was a way to do only them as it seems to have an interesting degree of branching paths that give it a feeling of semi-openness not seen in the rest of the game, but I do not want to go through the werehog sections of it again.

The final boss is… not the worst for a Sonic game. It’s passable. Like a lot of other things there’s some interesting ideas there that are lacking in execution.

For all its flaws this game did lay down a very solid foundation for the series going forward. Most of what is good about it was refined through future games and the worst parts of it were left by the wayside.

Surprising that this had an option for your shout of “no!” to be in Irish, and not just because it’s a minority language in a small country. There isn’t actually a direct word for no in Irish, so they went with «ní dhéanfaidh mé é», “I will not do it”. This does highlight how the word no is used in a bunch of different contexts in the game. It is often used to refuse a task, which this translation makes sense for, but it is also used to answer questions and other contexts where «ní dhéanfaidh mé é» doesn’t really make sense, and I wonder do any of the nos offered for other language don’t always make sense in context in the game.

Though honestly even shouting “no” in English sometimes felt like it didn’t really fit as a response. I was often waiting for dialogue to get to a point where shouting no fit in naturally, but it quickly becomes apparent that there is no point in doing this. Really this is just a game with a button to advance dialogue that also plays a sound effect and it does shockingly little with the idea.

Every once in a while you will be stopped to do a tutorial on how to do a different style of no, which sets up the expectation that these matter in some way but they do not; they are purely for a little bit of extra self-expression. That might have been a cute little bit of player controlled flair but the fact that they keep stopping everything to give me tutorials on something utterly pointless soured me on them. The control scheme for them also seems needless complicated. Why have them as different modes you have to toggle between with the d-pad? Why not just have them on the four different face buttons? None of the other face buttons do anything anyway so you could have just let them free for that. There is a shocking amount of tutorials to sit through in this game that has absolutely no mechanical depth. Maybe that was intended to be a joke in and of itself? Well it falls about as flat as most of the humour in the game, then.

The one little bit of mechanical choice is the decision to not shout no sometimes, which lets you progress some little mini scenes. These are cute but also they then run out of ideas for what to do with them and repeat the same staring contest joke five times.

Okay I’ve been enough of a grump. This is a short game with a cute idea and I do really like the Mega Man Legends-esque aesthetic and really liked the character creator. It’s okay.

This was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously. Despite the medieval fantasy facelift the game feels immediately familiar and charming but with a lot of thoughtful tweaks and changes to systems to make them fresh and more engaging.

I am very fond of the critical hit system making unit placement and countering much more thoughtful than a simple rock paper scissors approach of damage types and weaknesses.

I also quite like them sticking to the idea of making the different commander units representative of the different infantry types in the game to the point of having a dog commander.

The problem, though, is that this was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously and as part of that they tried to actually make it balanced! I don’t want balance, I want fun little weirdos with ridiculous abilities bouncing off of each other!

Every army is the same other than their commander, without even any passive buffs. Where is the guy who gets bonuses for roads? The guy whose artillery sucks shit but gets super buffed spearmen or something? I understand that they wanted to create a viable multiplayer game but I am just here for the story mode.

I mentioned that the commanders are based off the different types of infantry but even then they all have the exact same stats and only differ in their charge-up ability. The dog doesn’t behave like a dog unit, the vampire doesn’t behave like a vampire unit, they are all just super-footsoldiers. It’s a real shame.

And of course the other problem with this being made by Advance Wars sickos is that the difficulty is skewed pretty highly. I don’t think it’s massively unreasonable but it was harder than I expected and I certainly didn’t want to replay everything on hard to grind out stars, which you need to do to unlock the completely unreasonably gated final level. I ended up just downloading a completed save file to play it and honestly it wasn’t even that difficult.

Since New Year’s Eve 2021 some some friends and I have done an annual race of the game Celeste. We all start at the same time and then the first person to get to the summit wins. We track it using the in-game speedrun timer.

2021

I was very into Celeste at the time and won by a pretty wide margin. I don’t have a record of how everyone else did, but I completed the game in just under two hours, with three hundred and six deaths and six strawberries¹.

2022

After this two of my friends got into the game very hard. My friend Ruby ended up getting most of the golden berries², something I haven’t even attempted and another friend, who wished to be called The Shadowblade in this post, started getting into Celeste mods. So when the next race happpened on the 8th of January 2022 Ruby took the gold medal from me, beating my time by half an hour while I barely improved. The Shadowblade sadly did not finish and gave up four flags from the summit due to hand pain.

2023:

On the same day the next year myself and Ruby both improved our times, with Ruby coming in first again, a newcomer who I will call D. in second and myself in third. The Shadowblade did not finish again.

2024:

The next race was on the 14th of January 2024 and I managed to take more than twenty minutes off of my time, which was not enough to beat Ruby’s best time, but Ruby did a worse race than the previous year and it was enough for me to win for the second time.

We also decided to do a little race of the Pico-8 version of Celeste, which Ruby won.

2025

Finally, this year’s one took place on New Year’s Day. Ruby had a clear lead from the start and has gotten very close to the one-hour mark, just three minutes short of it. I came in second, doing a bit worse than last year, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering an hour before the race I posted about how worn down, tired and sore I was. The Shadowblade finished this time, coming in at just over an hour and a half.

We were also joined by our friend Stella who had never played Celeste before but decided to join in on the race. After the rest of us had finished Ruby said if that Stella actually finished she would forfeit her victory to her and shockingly Stella actually did. She finished the game in one sitting in just over ten hours with closing in on four thousand deaths and nine strawberries.

Ruby insists that I should record Stella as the winner, but I am a petty bitch and I never said that I was going to forfeit. If she wants to fine but if I she does I’m saying that makes me the winner.

2026

Maybe next year we will come in under the one-hour mark?

This is the skeleton of a functioning Sonic the Hedgehog game under this that you can sometimes catch a fleeting glimpse of before the mess of bad decisions piled on top of it re-asserts itself.

The addition of weapons is not inherently a bad thing, I enjoy the Gamma stages in Sonic Adventure, and having auto-lockon guns to blast stuff with as you run through a level is fun, and the way the rage mode gives you infinite ammo that lets you keep firing as long as you can destroy enough to keep your meter filled can be a cute little balancing act sometimes.

The weapons that don’t lock on are borderline unusable, though. Aiming is difficult at the best of times with these controls and rockets seem to have a habit of going straight through enemies and hitting a wall behind them and mêlée weapons are not something that works in conjunction with contact damage and knockback on hit. There is a reason that Freedom Planet excised those things from the basic formula.

But those are petty and mostly avoidable problems compared to the mission system. The Reloaded mod tries to smooth out some of the tedium but it does not solve the fundamental problems with it.

The levels are largely designed like Sonic the Hedgehog levels (and are often pretty fun when played like ones) with a linear structure but with some branching paths and shortcuts, shortcuts that you absolutely cannot use if you are trying to do missions because you will skip over a bunch of the sixty fucking individual soldiers you need to kill in order to do the dark mission so you can explore more branches of the story than the neutral pathway.

Absolutely no consideration seems to have been made for the mission system and branching story structure. The chaos control power is entirely useless to you if you are doing any mission other than the neutral one as it will simply skip you past your objectives. You must disengage with much of the games mechanics and rewards systems in order to experience more than half of the game.

The branching story structure that this is in service of doesn’t seem to have any consideration put into it at all either. The same cutscene will often play at the end of a level regardless of which mission you did, the CIA mainframe will be hacked regardless of if you did that mission or not, the events of any previous level are never mentioned because they all just exist in complete isolation and make no reference to anything that came before. Every character will act surprised that you are not doing what they say at all times regardless of if you have spent the entire playthrough so far ignoring them.

The path where you only do hero missions is really emblematic of this. Black Doom will continue giving orders that he apparently expects Shadow to obey till the end, despite Shadow not having listened to him once. But Shadow himself is similarly ridiculous on this path, which contains the infamous line “This is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me!” On the path where you only do the good missions! This path also has you fight the Black Bull boss twice. Surely it should have been obvious that this would be a path that many if not most players would end up doing and that it shouldn’t have the same boss fight twice on it.

Another path that stood out to me is the neutral path, which alternates level themes between ancient ruins and overgrown jungle tech base which made it feel like you were going backwards repeatedly with Glyphic Canyon, Prison Island, Sky Troops and then Iron Jungle. It really gives the impression that levels were made and then just randomly distributed between the different story paths without any thought whatsoever.

And of course the structure of this requires you to replay the same levels over and over in order to explore branches that you haven’t done yet. The Reloaded mod at least allowed me to not have to play Westopolis ten times just to unlock Last Story but the five times I had to play it to be able to at least play every level once was still far too much.

And yet it’s still sometimes actually quite fun. It’s very frustrating to have this core game that is enjoyable but with a mountain of shit piled on top of it that consistently gets in the way of satisfaction.

Expert mode almost fixes these problems, simply offering the levels one after the other, mostly just letting you play them by getting to the end without having to worry about missions, but then throws in some blatantly unfair changes to some levels on top of removing continues entirely.

Overall I still somehow feel positively about this game but I am not going to go back to it any time soon.

Yesterday I took part the Cork Game Jam which was the first in-person game jam I’ve taken part in and my first time diving back into game programming in a few months and Pico-8 programming in a few years.

The theme—“myth”—was announced at ten and the pizza arrived for the after party at around four, which gave me about six hours to derust and bang something out. It was exhausting and stressful but also a lot of fun. Here’s the result:

The theme being myth immediately reminded me of an idea I had years ago based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature that we have a record of. There exists no complete copy of it. What we have of it is an amalgam of fragments from various damaged cuneiform tablets.

My concept is an adaptation of Gilgamesh, probably a sidescrolling action platformer, that uses the aesthetics of corrupted data to fill in for the missing sections of text. Within the six hour window I managed to get a sample of that core idea implemented, though admittedly little else.

So that I wouldn’t have to do everything from scratch I used Matthew Hughson’s platformer starter kit as a base and started making modifications to the sprites and speed values to get more in line with my concept, using Castlevania sprites as a bit of a reference for the walk cycle initially.

I spent far too long getting an attack animation working before I realised I would probably not have time to implement any sort of combat. But its presence at least speaks to setting up an expectation of what the game might involve before you end up running into the faux-corrupted mess it actually is, or within the metafiction of the premise what the game once was before most of it was damaged and lost.

The other thing I added is, of course, the scrolling text taking up the top part of the screen, consisting of the start of the text of tablet 5 of the epic, taken from Maureen Gallery Kovacs’ translation. It starts out fairly normal and then getting more and more broken as it gets to the parts of the poem that are lost.

Within the code these are represented by lines of hashes. I wrote a text drawing function that, when it encounters a hash, draws random data from the spritesheet (from specifically selected sprites in it, not the entire thing) over it, mimicking the aesthetics of famous bugs such as glitch pokémon.

Ideally the progress of the broken text would correspond to the player discovering the broken nature of the game, but it just scrolls at a constant rate with a lot of normal text up front and there is not that much in the way of level so if a player simply walks to the right they will outpace it.

In a more full implementation of this idea the game could perhaps corrupt dynamically as parts of the text are reached, simulating live memory corruption. Or perhaps the scrolling text is a bit too much of a blunt instrument and should not be included in a more complete game.

That said, I think there is definitely potential for playing with some of the more evocative parts of the fragmented parts of the text.

The oft-quoted fragment of one of the works Sappho springs to mind:

μνάσεσθαί τινά φαῖμι
καὶ ἕτερον
ἀμμέων.

someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.

Sappho

Within a section of the text that made it into the jam game is the sudden implicit violence of mention of various weapons, axes smeared with what is not said, followed simply by the word alone. I placed a long, blank pause before and after “alone” for effect.

…Suddenly the swords…,
and after the sheaths …,
the axes were smeared…
dagger and sword…
alone …
The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 5.

A segment shortly after features has some broken dialogue mentioning something in Humbaba’s belly, a throat and next, and Gilgamesh then saying “Humbaba’s face keeps changing!” which is begging for a scene involving the level’s tileset suddenly being replaced with disjointed meat level sprites as the boss becomes a horrible jumbled mess.

When you were still young I saw you but did not go over to you;
… you,… in my belly.
…,you have brought Gilgamesh into my presence,
… you stand.., an enemy, a stranger.
… Gilgamesh, throat and neck,
I would feed your flesh to the screeching vulture, the eagle, and
the vulture!"
Gilgamesh spoke to Enkidu, saying: "My Friend, Humbaba’s face keeps changing!

The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 5.

For what I actually managed to accomplish in the jam the only tricks I managed are the corrupted text and a short corridor level which becomes more visually broken as it goes along, but is completely static.

I made a pretty minimalist tileset for the background of six tiles with only two colours and tried my best to use them to give the impression of a forest, as per the epic narration.

I spent a while drawing these and then getting down trying to draw trees with them, though some of what I mapped out for the background ended up getting hidden by the tablet with the scrolling text, whoops.

As you cross the bridge you encounter a group tile in place of a bridge tile and above it a tree drawn in the same style as the first few background trees, but with the left and right side tiles swapped. Then and broken skull and a serpent implying some sort of non-functional boss mark the boundary for things really going wrong.

I still tried to keep to drawing similar tree shapes but with tiles swapped out to tiles from other parts of the spritesheet, including ones that only appear here, implying that some more game exists beyond what is implemented. Then the bridge itself corrupts and is replaced by corner ground tiles and then invisible but solid tiles as you walk into a screen of just skulls marking a little ending point.

I have expressed here some ideas for a larger game but I do not really have any plans to expand this out. It very much the kind of thing I might do eventually in a world where I had endless free time to work on every project idea I have, which is sadly not the world I live in, and it is far down the list and I only have very vague notions of how to expand this out into something bigger. It would probably not be done in Pico-8 as Pico-8’s size constraints and limited character count, not to mention tiny resolution, don’t make it ideal for games involving lots of text or expansive levels.

Very fun dive into a bunch of absolute messes. Being divorced from the plot of the comic it’s based on means it’s quite self-contained but also that it gives a deeper view into a bunch of characters who don’t get as much time dedicated to them in the main work and it is impressive how the different story threads interweave and play off each other depending on the order you do them in and which paths you take.

The most important thing this game layers onto the Sonic the Hedgehog template is versatile movesets for each character that gives huge breath for improvisation and recovery, allowing more room for keeping the flow going as one glides through levels.

The tools each of the four characters are also very different from each other, each resulting in their own style of movement and their own challenges in different levels.

The movesets also result in fun, expressive combat. The game has thirty-two levels and all of them have bosses to fight (though some levels are just boss fights) and some of them are really gratifying to bang one’s head against a few times till finally getting how to read and dodge and counter them.

A few other tweaks from its erinaceous roots like lack of contact damage or knockback help to keep the pace of both the running and fights smooth even if you do fuck up a bit and make the whole thing extremely satisfying.

An incredibly satisfying short and sweet little mini-shooter that I found myself looping over and over again.

This post includes plot details for Shadow Generations, Sonic Generations and Sonic Adventure 2

There is a part of Shadow Generations that I got unreasonably excited about, but it is going to take some explanation as to why.

There is a boss in Sonic Adventure 2 called Egg Golem. When you defeat it Sonic taunts it by saying “Nice try, rocky!” during the victory screen.

Also in Sonic Adventure 2, in a scene aboard the Space Colony ARK, Sonic the Hedgehog tries to fool Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik with a fake Chaos Emerald created by Miles “Tails” Prower, which Robotnik spots immediately.

These scenes don’t have much to do with each other, but in 2020 I watched videochess stream a Sonic Adventure 2 randomiser that not only randomises the levels and characters, but also all of the cutscenes, playing them in a random order and with every voice line for each character swapped with a random line of theirs from elsewhere in the game. The results are mostly nonsense but sometimes they line up in funny ways.

In particular a version of the fake Chaos Emerald cutscene plays where Robotnik says his line identifying the Chaos Emerald as fake early, to which Sonic responds by pulling out the emerald and saying “Nice try, rocky!”, apparently to the emerald itself. This resulted in several people watching, including myself, immediately declaring Rocky to be the name of the fake yellow Chaos Emerald. Eggman then tells Sonic to put Rocky down and back off.

Most of rest of the randomised dialogue is the usual ill-fitting nonsense, but the appropriate dialogue from Ivo with the Rocky line in the middle cemented this moment permanently in my mind. Rocky is my beautiful fake son and I want to protect him. And in Robotnik’s next line he insults Rocky and calls Rocky “sand” and says his machines hate Rocky and shoots my poor boy into space! It’s fucked up.

But Rocky does not have a large part in the Sonic series. The general idea of fake Chaos Emeralds gets revisited briefly in Sonic X where Sonic uses fake emeralds to turn into Dark Sonic and in the IDW comics Eggman tries to grow the “Eggperial City” using giant fake Chaos Emeralds. Also in the comics, specifically in Imposter Syndrome #2, a yellow gem that might be Rocky appears as a background detail on a shelf in Starline’s collection.

The real yellow Chaos Emerald appears throughout the series of course, including in Sonic Generations where it’s the emerald that you get for defeating Shadow the Hedgehog in a fight. And with Sonic Generations’ rerelease bundled with the new Shadow Generations campaign one of the many things that delighted me about the game is Rocky’s triumphant return and the silly way that it tied back into the original Sonic Generations.

In the promotional animated short for the game, Dark Beginnings, Shadow already has the yellow Chaos Emerald before the start of the game and holds on to it throughout the story. At the end of that short he flies to the Space Colony ARK and in an early cutscene in the game before being attacked by the Time Eater he finds Rocky still chilling on board the ARK and pockets it, now having both Rocky and the real yellow emerald.

Then, midway through the game, there’s a cutscene showing Sonic and Shadow’s fight from the Sonic Generations from Shadow’s perspective, where after losing he passes off Rocky to Sonic so that he can keep using the real emerald for his own fight.

It is, I admit, quite fan-wanky but I just admire pulling these disparate threads together and how this plotpoint is only possible because the fake emerald in Sonic Adventure 2 and the one in the Shadow rival battle in Sonic Generations both just happen to be the yellow one. And it means that Rocky is back! And he did such a good job! And he even retroactively gets to appear in Sonic Generations now too!

There is an incredible satisfaction in nailing a level of Sonic and/or Shadow Generations. It often feels almost as much like a rhythm game as a platformer, giving you that steady flow of obstacles to react to as you start off sight-reading and then eventually memorising the feel and flow of the stages, with plenty of alternate paths and shortcuts to tease out as well.

The contextual DOOM POWERS add extra layers to this for specific levels and Shadow turning into a squid now or using evil HM03 Surf is just kind of funny to see and Shadow’s chaos control power adds an interesting element of resource management to every stage as well, especially if you are trying to get the fastest possible speedrun time as, hilariously, when Shadow stops time he also stops the level timer.

The music is, like the levels, composed of banger remix after banger remix. I am listening to Space Colony ARK Act 1 as I write this and I will probably be listening to it a lot in the future.

The writing was also a surprisingly highlight. The plot is fairly simple but Ian Flynn uses the giant Sonic lore vault in his mind to weave different threads together in interesting and funny ways without coming across as fan wank. There’s a lot of references to past games but there’s usually some sort of point to it rather than saying “hey look at this thing!” and the supplementary material around the game with the Robotnik family history makes me hope Flynn or Evan Stanley get to explore Ivo Robotnik’s relationship to his family more in the comics or a future game. And the way the third boss was handled is so funny.

It’s good.