this is, i tell you what, a video game.
reminds me of the taito superman game with the art by the rastan guy, except ever so slightly weirder / more substantial
… you know, this one
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also some ac shinobi 1 / mega shadow dancer vibes in the environmental and monster design
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Taito Superman is one of my favs. i love showing people this game whenever i spot it in an arcade, because a surprising amount of folks seem to have not played it. it’s good!
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abslutly.
there was a cocktail cab in the pizzaria halfway up the hill in my hometown. (also: strider & gyruss.) it’s a cardboard-simple game, but the presentation and the tactile feel of the thing drilled deep into me. there’s a sort of reverent awe to slotting in a quarter, under that root beer stained glass.
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i like to think the p2 character is captain “shazam!” marvel
that was i think part of the game’s power for me, back then
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guessing sunsoft’s sunman, when they still expected the dc license, was significantly inspired by taito’s work, in that expanded-nes-adaptation sense.
like. just on the basis of what’s there, it might even have started as an outsourced taito commission to port the arcade game, before meandering into typical nes dev wilderness.
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yes, as a young child, colors meant so much to me. there was always an extreme excitement in my heart whenever i saw color variants in games. especially at home or in arcades, i always opted for 2P whenever possible, just because i saw it less. this probably explains why i preferred Luigi to Mario, Jimmy Lee to Billy Lee, etc.
anyway, same goes for grey and red Superguy
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People may have played the free browser version of Rhythm Doctor but the full release is pretty excellent.
Bits and Bops (which came out the same week) is highly derivative of Rhythm Heaven but Rhythm Doctor feels a lot more like its own thing. It’s sort of similar to Rhythm Heaven’s beat-keeping but the interface is a lot more focused on teaching polyrhythms and getting you up to speed on more complex rhythms rather than only doing call-and-response or metronomic beat keeping. It starts out with you hitting the 7th beat in a 8/8 framework. It then takes you through a syllabus of swing beats, syncopation, and polyrhythms as well as the occasional time signature shift.
It’s the first game I’ve seen where the Youtube OST is just linked to on the main menu.
Boss fights are generally great. They do a lot with glitches and an enforced windowed mode so that the game window is moving and animating to the rhythm in a way that mainly is to try and distract you. Layered polyrhythms make it so that you have two visually keep track of multiple beats but ultimately feel them out since the visual noise becomes too much. There’s even ambitions towards musical theatre as each stage interweaves the new rhythm element with what’s going on with the characters. There’s even full on lyrics. The rhythm bar becomes a surprisingly versatile storytelling mechanism. It can sync, it can parallel, it can have different rhythms ‘disagreeing’ like opera voices singing in chorus or duet.
It also does a bunch of things I’ve not seen in many other rhythm games. One level basically just has you playing jazz e. piano for a café. No requirement to be on time, just press the button when you think a note feels good. I’ve not seen many games challenge you to play in 7/8 either. Absolutely horrible time signature lmao but feels good to get it down.
Many rhythm games do a final fakeout beat to check you’re still paying attention at the end of a complex level. They do a riff on it with a character who’s been struggling to confess their love the entire game and ends the level with the fakeout by saying ‘I want to be more than friends’ (with accompanying fakeout beat).
The finale is quite an achievement but is also my least favourite part of the game. They break it up into multiple parts but the last part I simply cannot beat it. The pop out window choreography is difficult to conceptualise and play through given you’re using various different beats to keep a backing beat whilst also responding to unique cues. And the window is just there to fuck with you. They even manage a character sprite falling out of a window into another which I’m not sure how you technically do on a desktop? I don’t know if I have patience for it because the song starts with a very slow buildup to the very difficult changes and it takes about three minutes to get there only for me to get overwhelmed and fail and then have to practice that same three minutes over and over again. Either the stage should have been shorter or the number of failed beats should have been more lenient. It sours an otherwise really good experience with an arbitrary skill demand which is unlike any other boss stage up until this point. The final level should be a long mostly simple celebration or highly challenging but easily practiced.
I highly recommend it as a rhythm game but there are some sudden difficulty spikes that make it a bit frustrating and is one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to [not] finish it since December. I’m in the 8% of players who beat the penultimate chapter which says a lot. I also can’t play for very long at a time so practising stuff isn’t as easy as it used to be. It’s not quite as bad as the end of Drakengard 3, but there’s shades of it. Not sure if I’ll push through.
Also the two player mode is a lot of fun. Rhythm Heaven should allow you to play all stages two player.
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A Straight Man talks about homosexuality in a Japanese Video Game.
The Japanese version…and this is fully someone could take a different read of this and be correct. Like Chou Aniki is ridiculous and gay and feels like a celebration. Ebisumaru feels like “I am Closeted Gay” and only by being a gay perverted clown can I hide and display my shame. Everything about it feels like this performative joke. Every expression of homosexuality is met with Manzai style undercutting. Outside of the fortune teller PLASMA who is this little pervert freak and I love him.
To maybe just restate the problem (maybe with the whole series) is all the clear homosexuality is performed as this sad joke no one likes or enjoys or even wants to tolerate.
It just made me sad and if I had been a better person I would have quit earlier on. Like I said I think the English version avoids this in terms of translation or censorship or whatever and is a better game without the self-demeaning.
Wonder how gay Bakeru is if at all.
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very glad they changed that for the localisation, i love mystical ninja 64
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mooed 
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… sonia can crawl like terry bogard?
that kicks ass. i never noticed until now.
christopher could *never*. 
it even plays into some super mario land 1 style setpieces…
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Oh thats terrible. Yeah in English I don’t think they mention Ebisu being gay at all. It just reads like Goemon having a sassy-moving best bud.
The game over screen def had me thinking more Chou Aniki style party time than mean joke.
Well Damn.
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hang on
cho aniki is gay?
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I’m about halfway through Bakeru. It’s almost obnoxiously straight so far.
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I’ve got like six other games in progress, but when I only meant to dabble for a minute I just keep on playing Dragon Warrior VII…it’s good…
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This sounds like a wonderful game I should never even attempt to play, seeing as the one stage in Rhythm Heaven where you had to switch from like on to off beat broke me to a degree I was never able to even approach passing it and getting back to the rest of the game.
I started playing Social Caterpillar this week as there were a few puzzle fans I know who spoke very highly of it and I’m a sucker for inspired pleas in favor of games with like a dozen Steam reviews that cost $4. The pitch is that you play as an introvert having to figure out how to socialize with various folks in various situations, with each convo basically being a set of puzzles where you have to determine the pattern in various symbols and what not to figure out what the proper response should be (each one of these sets being very distinct from one another).
Anyways that part is fine and takes a couple of hours to get through to the initial end/credits roll. It’s also supposedly only about 20% of the game tops, the rest being various secrets and hidden things you have to piece together beyond all of that (I would use the SB term “icebergvania” if there was anything -vania about it at all). My issue is that I am traditionally awful at these kinds of elements in games (see my mountain of struggles with Outer Wilds, Void Stranger, etc.) so I am sort of walking the line of this whole parts possibly tumbling into disaster at any given moment.
As I can probably say some things that are technically spoilery but without context don’t mean much, in terms of good breaks I figured out a pattern earlyish and was rewarded with one of four colored keys I believe is necessary for what is probably the third very hidden “true” ending, I convinced someone to cohabitate with me but am unsure how to craft a hand-waving response needed to finish our next conversation, I found what appears to be two distinct musical puzzles which are always a pain (one seems to have system in place to brute force through at least), my virtual pet cat no longer hates me, and I am currently staring down the prospect of having to translate an entire alphabet to make progress someplace. I also have a good half-dozen hint images I can’t make heads or tails of.
Oh yeah, there’s also a ton of minigames which I can only figure so much out of (the surface bit is obvious, the hidden significance less so). The text adventure trying to navigate using a crowded public restroom is the one that haunts me most.
Anyways basically at this point hoping for the best at this point!
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Yeah parts of it make the offbeat/onbeat stuff look pretty standard. Rhythm Doctor asks you to do swung 5/4 and 4 layer polyrhythms and you just gotta practice that shit.
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I have been trying The Alliance Alive both on 3DS and Switch. Am I the only one finding it much nicer on the 3DS, despite the mainstream internet consensus that prefers hd graphics? I actually think it looks kinda bland on the Switch by comparison
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I don’t think many people played Alliance Alive on both the 3DS and the Switch
BallXPit: Arkanoid x Vampire Survivors
I revel in the quick dopamine hits of Vampire Survivors and incremental games but the success and popularity of BallXPit is pretty baffling to me.
You just throw balls and choose upgrades at random. The upgrades don’t change your playstyle save for a few. You can get secret upgrades which seem marginally better but not that much.
At no point do you have any real feedback on what’s working or not. The spectacle is more important. You just die and restart with marginally better stats for the next run
Can’t imagine being depressed enough to play this
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