Recent content on birthbydrip

 I’ve attended MAGFest six times now, and one of my favorite events each year are the tournaments. Regular head-to-head genres tends to monopolize the proceedings – fighting games, action puzzle games, TCGs, etc. – but they also put an emphasis on featuring less common tournament fare, including score-based games! In some cases this may be implemented through simultaneous…

 A side jaunt on the WonderSwan gave the Klonoa developers a chance to dig into the puzzle aspects of the original release, and no enemy suited their needs more than the Boomie. These bomb mice wrap up each of the primary Klonoa mechanics into a neat package: they can be carried, they squish under ceilings, they enable Klonoa’s throw-based double-jump, and they trigger interactables,…

 The first nuance of Tetris that a new player will comprehend is the role of each piece. The unique sides of each tetromino synergizes with particular holes in the stack and affects the future stack’s shape: some flatten, others create peaks, some bridge gaps, others divide. Few Tetris variants stretch what this entails quite as far as Tetris – The Absolute: The Grandmaster 2…

 Drax asks: 
 
 what do you think makes something “arcadey” since that’s a label i see getting thrown around a lot

 Where Kururin Paradise poured the scrappy look of the original Kuru Kuru Kururin into a sleeker, cheerier skin, Kururin Squash completely revamps the look and feel with lush 3D backgrounds and and a focus on gentler curves. The flat-shaded cartoon interludes of Paradise give way to a puppet show aesthetic, down to curtains that open on the title card and characters printed on cardboard with…

 A Katamari -like from the actual Katamari developers, those Now Production contractors who toiled to get Keita Takahashi’s vision off the ground. 1 Munchables twists the “roll up stuff, get bigger, roll up bigger stuff” loop from Katamari into a game all about eating, where the mute, spherical protagonists chomp through waves of pirate/alien/frankenfood creations,…

 The Helirin’s rotation in the Kururin games has a particular dynamic: certain rotation angles will always reoccur provided the player has space to sit and wait. Safe zones often bookend major obstacle sections, so a start-and-stop tendency arises, where arriving in a safe zone with the wrong angle to start the next section incurs a short break to let it spin into place. The first…

 Retrospectively speaking, Ace Combat ’s 1 rough-hewn edges might appeal to those turned off by how quickly the series streamlined starting with its immediate sequel. Starting Ace Combat ’s hard mode plops the player into an unmaneuverable tin can that explodes upon contact with a single missile, and the plane selection only incrementally improves its quality from there. Broadly…

 The fundamental genius of the Kururin trilogy derives from its unique, bare-bones approach to modulating outcomes over time. Consider racing games: part of their appeal is how the timing of an action alters the outcome of each action that comes after it. Taking a turn changes not only the car’s current speed and direction but the speed at which it arrives at the next turn as well. This…

 Although the package is unassuming and generic, Skydiving Extreme is actually a hidden fourth Bust-a-Groove entry, using a similar QTE combat concept without the rhythm component. 1 The latter absence fundamentally alters the flow of each match: without synchronized measures tying the players together, the race is on to mash the button commands as quickly as possible. Dance battles from…

 Tall: Infinity ’s ascetic insistence on clipped chains and limited board manipulation cultivated a severity that perhaps muted its appeal, so Techno Soleil went back to the drawing board and overhauled its core components 1 into something radically different. Instead of awkward stick figures slowly constructing the Tower of Babel, looming over the player on the title screen, Tall Twins…

 In Deus Ex , hour after hour of slices of the world perfectly align into a living playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. Rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet Deus Ex routinely weaves both together. For every underground lair with traps laid out in sequence, an open oasis follows –…

 First perceptions may peg this game as a Jenga variant with some explosive addendums, but Boom Blox is more of a generic rigid-body physics sandbox with support for a diverse range of play-styles. This isn’t robust on accident, as the campaign explicitly pushes the engine’s capabilities to mold it around its scraps of narrative. Each level takes place in a flat, open zone with…

 The kineticism of chiseling a sculpture out of stone infuses itself in any purely mechanical discussion; there’s no analysis of Picross 3D that can ignore it. In the original Picross games on Game Boy, the conceit was similar: the player chiseled images into a stone tablet. There, beyond the lack of a touch screen, 1 the flat surface made the action less like a sweeping change and more…

 Racing games often get boiled down to how turns are taken and how other cars behave, ignoring jargon-heavy descriptions of handling dynamics and transmission characteristics. Dotstream actualizes this: your “car” is merely a Tron -esque line that paints the lane behind it the same color. When you proceed straight on the horizontal track, you approach max speed, and when you arc…

 Atlus adapts the grisly world of surgery as a timer juggling exercise, with the player managing a main time limit, the drain on their patient’s vitals, and the interval until a new hazard spawns. Kyriaki, one of the game’s fabricated “GUILT” viruses, best exemplifies this. It appears by creating an incision in the patient’s tissue, which bleeds and thus…

 The Layton series put itself in an unenviable position with a follow-up to the grandiose Unwound Future , which pushed the world-rending consequences of the series to their breaking point. Last Specter attempts to roll back to a more sustainable franchise template, both by starting a prequel trilogy and by restraining the scope to a small town with minimal personal entanglements for Layton,…

 The usual action-puzzle title, hopelessly indebted to Tetris , builds upon a grid-based playfield with game elements falling from the ceiling; Digidrive ignores this, with elements appearing at four points and drifting smoothly down two perpendicular lanes. 1 These elements, of three colors, are abstract vehicles crossing through an intersection, where the player redirects them using the…

 Tucked away on the official AARP website – the acronym formerly stood for “American Association of Retired Persons” – is an oasis of small arcade-style games; browser experiences perfect for an aging audience uninterested in metaprogression or buildcraft. Of these, Ballistic encapsulates the style: it reframes Breakout as turn-based actions, where the player shoots a…

 Command-line interfaces are less a mystic channel of communication with an operating system and more a compromise. Writing graphical interfaces is difficult and time-consuming, and for the average developer, it’s much easier to implement text-based commands than get mired in the widgets, frames, and event-driven programming that comes with GUI creation. However, a CLI is also enticing…

 Having soldified their position at the top of the “experimental” commerical gaming heap in Japan, NanaOn-Sha were able to let their hair down with PaRappa 2 , moving past the idyllic picture-book narrative of the original game in the process. What this presents as is split between two equally disconcerting plot threads: the first a militaristic invasion of PaRappa Town by noodle…

 Goemon is clinging onto that 1997 release date for dear life: it gets plenty of points just for implementing a serviceable 3D Zelda template before Ocarina of Time dropped. Even extending the timeline out to the end of the fifth generation, it’s rare to see games on these consoles attempt a relatively explorable world. Of course, what qualifies as a “vast” depiction of…

 Although it’s technically a prequel to Solomon’s Key , Fire ’n Ice dispenses with that title’s action-oriented approach in favor of a tile-based Sokoban platformer, much like Catrap . Fire ’n Ice is slightly less raw than the latter, however. While the goal is identical – to eliminate all enemies on-screen – said enemies are fire spirits and must be…

 Raph asks: 
 
 can you talk about a game you love but would never want to be good at, something where wading through low level gameplay is satisfying enough (yakuza 3, i’m asking for yakuza 3) 
 
 This is a bit of a weird question because Yakuza isn’t necessarily the first example I would pull for this, both because I don’t really love the series anymore and…

 Usually I would avoid talking about something as dry and static as enemy spawn positions, but for Ninja Gaiden , their naive implementation colors the entire play experience. Instead of enemies appearing once their spawn point is visible on screen, blatant spawn triggers dot the terrain, yanking the enemy into the play-space once you collide with the trigger. Unusually, the relative clarity…

 While the core conceit is a guy who punches stuff with robot arms instead of shooting, there’s a surprising amount of Mega Man DNA present here, even beyond the selectable stage system. The enemy designs draw from a similar pool of stationary gunners (including in the iconic upwards three-way orientation), flying popcorn enemy spawners, and larger robots with slow or repetitive…

 Although it was mostly outsourced and didn’t get mainline status, Code Veronica vastly outstrips its predecessors in sheer scope. The first and second games set their primary areas up in an iconic orientation: two multi-floor building halves connected by pathways through a center hall. These were dense, with subsequent areas shrinking the scope considerably; Resident Evil 3: Nemesis…

 Much like in Techno BB , there’s a certain amount of complexity extracted just from moving many tiles at once. In Dialhex , these tiles are triangles embedded in a giant hexagon, and the player spins these tiles six at a time within a hexagon-shaped cursor. 1 With a gravity system and less-than-intuitive position resolution thanks to the slant of the pieces, any match (made by creating…

 As you drive for the first time, you’ll notice that the 1-wood has its impact zone tightened up such that any non-perfect hit will sharply slice or hook. 1 Beginner characters used to trade out power and control for easier impact zones, whereas here the expert characters linearly improve on the starting roster without a relative debuff to impact. A small change here instantly changes…

 Happy new year! My “resolution” this year: after playing a lot of ’90s stuff in the last year, I want to cover as much seventh generation stuff as I can. I own an absurd number of Wii and PS3 games, so the fact that I haven’t worked through most of my actual collection is a bummer. Time to change that! Regardless, here’s the other 18 games that I wanted to…

 I used to do lists of each of the games I had left unfinished over the year with little blurbs to accompany each, although after a stressful holiday season last year I put the practice on hold. This year, however, I have 36 bullet reviews to give you to bring in the new year! I will be releasing a Part 2 later this week. Thanks for reading birthbydrip this year!

 Devil Dice leverages the simplicity of die orientation to complicate what would otherwise be rote tile-matching mechanics. Six-sided dice lay across a grid, with the cutesy “Aqui” demon running around on top of them. 1 Moving off the side of an unobstructed die will rotate it into the adjacent space, exposing a number on top. When a set of contiguous dice share the same exposed…

 The burst mechanic (surely drawing from Tetris Effect ’s zone mechanic) violates the purity of the elegantly terse Lumines concept on a first impression, as it tacks on an extra meter and lets you blow up the stack on-demand. In a series that already has a friendly and frequent screen-clear block type, slapping this on top is a bit overkill, and survival play, which had a low ceiling…

 Grid-based puzzle games usually project the playfield as a flat surface; Tall: Infinity bucks this by wrapping it around a vertical cylinder, tying the edges of the playfield together and incorporating gravity. While the player’s avatar can freely walk up walls and fall from great heights, when rolling a block they can only surmount edges that are one row higher, and they need a…

 Techno BB is just waiting for its time to shine as a profile picture machine; the adorable half-panda half-bumblebee main character looks like a archetypal blind box figurine, with its little ears poking out over its aviator goggles. An obscure Konami title from the twilight years of the PlayStation, 1 it’s an elevated match-four puzzle title with an extremely light malware aesthetic,…

 Pass interference is usually the bane of a cornerback, but in NFL Blitz ’s take on American football, where penalties don’t exist, lets defenders manhandle or completely tackle open receivers to their heart’s content. Despite the limited defensive playbook, 1 legal pass interference makes controlling a defender interesting: who and where do you cover? Obliterating a…
One of the “issues” with many of the arcade rhythm games I play is that they have such a breadth of content and high difficulty curve that I rarely reach the point where I’m comfortable talking about them in the context of a full review. However, since I published my guide to rhythm game critique last week, I wanted to also provide some quick thoughts on some rhythm games…

 Luna asks: 
 
 I want to see the rhythm game breakdown/a rhythm bonanza discussion personally :3 
 
 Raph additionally asks: 
 
 Or an explanation on when aesthetic obfuscation in rhythm games is and isn’t acceptable 
 
 Rhythm game critique threw me in the loop for a while because it’s working on a different axis from a lot of other…

 It lacks the usual framing that comes with a point-and-click adventure, ignoring a general guiding question in favor of understated wandering and seemingly tangential puzzle design. Few rooms in the Barrows Mansion direct the player towards any method of escape, but perhaps they don’t need to; main character Jennifer Simpson can hightail it out of the mansion in minutes by starting up…

 The first hurdle is the ersatz-Mii, flea-market puppet custom characters that infest the world, getting stuck on each other on the course and running up to you eerily in the hub. The second, and much more more major one, is the decadent progression system. After stepping foot into the Clap Handz land-out-of-time and accessing the tournament counter, it becomes apparent that you only have…

 BlazingWaters asks: 
 
 have any thoughts about platformers - typically 3D - incorporating “minigames” (i.e. anything not directly related to vertical/horizontal plane tissues) into their elements? some are just minigame distractions but others keep it cohesive somehow 
 
 This is a pretty standard complaint to throw at 3D platformers from their “golden…

 A prototypical puzzle game, as in a game that makes it abundantly clear how the barest mechanics should interact in order to produce interesting levels. Owing to its origins as a BASIC type-in game, 1 the mechanics are extremely simple: moving into a block will shift it forward one tile, moving into sand will make it disappear permanently, preventing you from walking on it later, and moving…

 Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner has become one of the ball-knower’s character-action favorites, but it’s worth giving some love to its predecessor for laying the groundwork. Its release being less than six months before Devil May Cry gave it some room to stretch its legs outside of DMC’s reliance on combo depth and i-frames, while it also has a stronger hand-to-hand…

 This has a distinct Quintet-esque flair to it: a solemn world-restoration myth communicated through gameplay that shallowly evokes its contemporaries, although here it’s 2.5D platforming instead of hack-and-slash. Protagonist Porch Arsia’s soul is mistakenly reaped by bumbling spirit guide and dessert auteur Straynap, and the duo must retrieve the “petals” of her soul…

 A systems-driven game with one amazing core system and a whole bunch of shitty ones in its orbit. DMA Design salvages a lot of elements in here by threading everything through the game’s driving mechanics, which perfectly straddle the line between fiddly accuracy and easy-going simplicity. The taxis clogging the streets give you that front wheel drive that’ll keep you from ending…

 Happy NFL kickoff! When I was a kid I was obsessed with football, trying every Madden we had 1 and playing flag football every autumn. Last year I got back into it for real after only following from the sidelines for most of my teens and 20’s, and I fell in love with the sport again. Perhaps it’s because it’s the only good real-time-with-pause game, the RPG to beat out all…

 The childhood nostalgia angle hits well as a thumbnail teaser or a loopable GIF of warm glow dusk, but Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is less concerned with portraying the ideal child’s summer and more with letting the disarming naivete of your avatar Boku open up the reality around him. “Stark” may not be the right word here, because for all of the pain and intrigue that worms its…

 There’s two possible games here: one where you spam main character Max’s Egress spell to restart fights while retaining all the EXP you’ve gained, and one where you tough it out and push through even as the enemies far outpace you. The difference is difficult to reconcile because going the latter route directly interferes with one of the game’s strengths: its robust…

 It’s tempting to split the game down the middle here somewhere to try to rectify its conflicts: overworld versus dungeons, story versus gameplay, even Koizumi’s Clock Town versus Aonuma’s outer villages. 1 Pithy comments like “an official edgy ROM hack” don’t do justice to the staggering depth of the developer’s notebooks, tossing out off-kilter…

 Múseca ’s initial launch, with its shop-based progression system that required grinding the game’s story mode, inevitably doomed the game to obscurity. Beyond hastily released updates that unlocked all of the charts and removed the influence from the unlockable “grafica” characters on score, support for the game tapered off only a couple of years after release,…