faea gaming: December '25
Hiiii, everyone. Happy holidays and New Year and everything else, I hope everybody’s in high spirits heading into the big ‘26. Last year, I tried to make a concerted effort to branch out and put more focus into other hobbies, which… honestly, fell through pretty spectacularly. But I’d like to keep trying, and at the same time, I think I’m going to try to focus down on the sorts of games I play. I’ve spent the past four years trying basically everything under the sun, and I’ve developed a very strong idea of my own tastes, as well as my actual physical capabilities. I think it’d be fun to explore those games that are a good fit for me more deeply… so I’m expecting to see a lot of classic turn-based RPGs, easier arcade games, and slower-paced action games in my future.
Games I Played This Month
Marathon
After having played (and thoroughly enjoyed) seminal first-person shooters Doom and System Shock, it’s hard to not compare this to both: the enemy-dense projectile-dodging focus of the former lightly crossed with the pre-Y2K sci-fi aesthetic and heavier scenario focus of the latter. UNFORTUNATELY, it implicitly comparing itself in my mind to two of the coolest games ever is not the best look for it but there is a lot I like about it still. I really like that the levels are often really dark in a way that hides enemies, and the radar that tracks them isn’t that useful during a combat situation, but muzzle flash lights up the room fully for a complete second so certain encounters turn into trying to track enemies by using the light from shooting. I think the radar being sort of unreliable except for vaguely tracking faraway enemies is neat, and the combination of both gives certain encounters a neat level of depth I haven’t seen in other shooters. And the puzzles are fun! Kind of cumbersome at times, but I enjoy the spatial-awareness-y physicality of them – altering terrain in the world to make paths to proceed.
So it’s pretty unfortunate that the shooting bit is generally not very interesting. Every enemy type only really know hows to walk directly towards you and shoot you, and in tight, confined levels like the game loves to use, it’s predominantly a game about camping doors or hallways as everything filters through in single file. And by extension, the only way it can really up the ante is by having more – often exhaustingly more – stronger guys, or by ambushing you. The healing system also isn’t great: having it purely through free infinite healing stations both makes levels absolutely trivial and a little bit tiring once you find one – just run straight back whenever you get a widdle scratch – and often excruciating if you *can’t* find one quickly enough.
Think I might have played this one because I saw people bigging up Descent a good while ago and they basically have the same boxart so I might have got the two mixed up. Oops! Maybe I'll be playing that one soon as well :p
METROID (NES)
This game has such a clear mechnical sharpness. Combat is defined by limitation: Samus starts off being unable to attack enemies on the same elevation as her, and quickly becomes able to do so albeit in a very slow and cumbersome manner. It’s really fun to see the bomb become a genuine core part of the moveset after feeling like a vestigial “bomb the walls” tool in like every other Metroid I’ve played, and it’s equally fun to see how both the beam upgrades are also defined by limitations, both able to do certain things very well that the other can’t. It’s grounded in a very intimate relation with the enemies themselves; rather than just feeling like flat strength upgrades, both had me going “oh, that’s how I deal with *those* guys”, then missing that strength dearly when I switched. It’s probably a testament to the strength of the enemy design as well, how each of them has a completely unique means of threatening your space. Bugs not respawning until their dropped items are picked up or despawn is my favourite little detail; never felt so cool for *not* picking up a healing drop.
The exploration is wonderful as well; it can be a bit annoying at the start before you catch onto the game’s tricks – a couple of early moments did feel like bombing randomly – but repeating rooms effectively telegraphing that if there’s a bomb block in a room, it’ll be there in *every* instance of that room, made it super fun to hunt for the secrets in the back half of the game. And Lower Norfair is probably their admission that they thought that it was super awesome, too; that place is sooo silly and fun to navigate. Love how small and compact the map is as well; I’ve seen people talk about this like it’s a demonic evil thing where you have to draw out your own map on paper, but it’s really small enough to where it’s not so hard to vaguely remember where things are.
That said, I'm not so hot on the 30hp respawn, though; I think the game would be *worse* off if you respawned on full HP – you’d barely have to engage with most of the game’s setups after getting a couple of energy tanks – but there’s maybe a middleground to be had when the current clearest solution is to kill the same guy over and over until you get tired of farming. I stopped minding it so much as I went on, as I got better at maneuvering and avoiding damage, but then started minding it heavily once I died to Kraid a couple of times, scoured the whole map for upgrades, then went back and got stuck on Kraid again. The process of farming enough health to buffer like one or two mistakes on a tricky boss does not make that boss any more interesting! Though, maybe my issue there is more “Kraid was significantly harder than anything else in the game”, because I don’t think much else really warrants that much farming, and… in hindsight, I probably could’ve made that boss a lot easier for myself.
METROID II: Return of Samus
Metroid starts with you having to run past a bunch of enemies that you don’t have the capability to interact with; Metroid II starts by teaching you all the ways (crouching, down-shooting, starting with bomb) you can effortlessly destroy everything in front of you. It sort of seeps into the game’s overall design, with how it absolutely drowns you in upgrades early on. Normally I’d be fairly derisive of this – and it’s definitely a much less interesting deal mechanically than its predecessor – but it fits the narrative framing really well: Metroid (the series) is conceptually a major power fantasy, and while Metroid (for the NES) is so through slowly uncovering and eventually overpowering a hostile alien world, Metroid II is more directly an extermination mission, one that frames the killing as the forefront and a necessity of the experience – and makes said killing as easy as possible. So it’s a fairly strong statement that the protagonist – one who *has* already slaughtered aliens by the hundreds in her previous excursion – becomes weary enough of it all in this outing that she isn’t able to complete her mission.
It’s also, like, the best looking game ever!!! That’s important, too.
Angeline Era
This thing’s radicalised me so, soooo much harder against difficulty options in games like this: isn’t it the strangest thing to have become normalised, to force someone to curate their experience to that degree before even knowing what said experience entails? That’s not entirely true for me this time, at least: I did play the demo back when it came out, and I beat that on the highest available difficulty. So I decided that I ought to play on a high difficulty for the full game, since I’d rather have a game be hard and force me to engage with all of its systems and ideas more intimately than be easy and let me power through it all – but ultimately, I’m still going off the experience of a select few levels I played over a year ago, and my assumptions about what a difficulty of a game I haven’t really played is going to be like. I’m guessing!
I generally had a very good time at the start, but the game spiked very far past my capabilities as soon as I left the starting area – combat rooms often being very, very difficult for me to parse, with high enough damage to where losing focus for like, half a second would take out a third of my health or more. So I’m feeling that my only option is to the game five hours in and knock it down to a lower difficulty – where I’m effectively doing another blind guess (if it ramps this much early, will a lower difficulty still be too much later? Or will it be too easy, and feel like I’m just damage tanking all the bits I couldn’t do?). So for the time being, I think I’m taking the other option and sadly putting this one away quite early.
Despite the whole rant on difficulties, ultimately my primary issue with the game is the personal legibility issues I had (plus a feeew other nitpicks that didn’t feel worth mentioning), not the fact that the game has difficulty options, but the mental gymnastics that applying so many unchangeable difficulty options to a difficult and long game has been causing made it so much harder to swallow. I think these things can work well in certain contexts: chiefly short games where picking an unsuitable option isn’t much of a commitment, and ones small in scale enough to where difficulties can have wholly different design as opposed to just numbers changes – but having to commit to one in a game this long, and having the constant stewing of “did I pick the right one for me?” at the back of my mind, is a really aggravating experience.
Streets of Rage 2
As someone whose perception and processing has always been bad, and has felt the consequences of that harder than ever this year, it’s really, really comforting to have a wonderful, difficult action game that’s just this slow; this is an action game where I can very easily see and process every single situation, and make immediate sense of every hit I take. It’s a really cool game as well, one focused almost entirely on positioning and crowd control almost like a puzzle: understanding which enemies are most threatening and how a group’s threat ranges overlap in order to know which enemies to prioritise with which moves, while avoiding getting surrounded, overcommitting to something, or picking the wrong options for the situation (or pressing Axel’s dash attack an awful lot). I’ve been calling this “the world’s most fucked up neutral” in my head a lot, and I think that especially sticks out with the bosses: having to play slow and patient and basically whiff-punish enemies that have ridiculous movement or damage, or abilities that nothing else in the game can do. I’m also a big fan of how meaningfully different the game feels in 2p compared to 1p: in particular, I felt my usual footsies vs bosses just wasn’t as applicable due to all the natural consequences of it having two targets to focus on, rather than one. Having to actively mind your positioning compared to your partner is fun, as well; it’s very Monster Hunter, or maybe Monhun is very multiplayer beat em ups…. (it’s more interesting here though :p)
It’s a bit too long for me (1hr+) to ever really want to commit to a full run without a friend tethered to me, but it’s fun enough to where I’ve been playing lots by myself anyway, and just going for as long as I feel like. I started playing on the hardest difficulty before I had even cleared the game before, and being able to have genuinely difficult encounters straight out of the gate cemented that I just really, really love this game.
Ninja Baseball Bat Man
My initial impressions here were low: it was my second ever bmup after SoR2, and in comparison it felt extremely chaotic and hard to read on my first play in 2p. But after digging back into it by myself, learning all of the moves I didn’t know existed, and playing more and more of the genre whilst still picking away at this one, this one’s rocketed up through my favourites – very likely my current favourite in the genre. Despite the wackiness, all the extra specials and supers and moveset options, its pace and positioning game feel very similar to SoR2: similar-feeling enemy positioning and aggression, and being focused around applying jabs, grabs and like one or two other core options. In response, it’s got a host of wholly unique-feeling enemies and hazards that cover space in very different ways, and it all comes together to make almost every screen feel genuinely unique? It’s soo impressive: most other bmups, at least at the level I’m at, feel more about learning and applying fundamentals in a broader sense, with lots of individual screens not feeling that distinct from each other; this one feels meaningfully different almost every time. Big shoutout to THAT ONE ROOM in Stage 4 gotta be the funniest 20 seconds of my life
I’d initially written down that this is “the hardest game ever”, but actually feels quite tame compared to others I’ve played since – legibility is generally really good, enemy density rarely gets too excessive, enemies tend to telegraph themselves heavily, and every boss is grabbable and generally very reasonable to bully as such. IT IS STILL A VERY HARD GAME and I’ve only taken my first credit as far as stage 4, but right now it’s hitting a wonderful sweet-spot where it definitely is impossibly hard for where I’m at with the genre, but feels incredibly doable in the long term. Love this game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hebereke
Beat this one in basically a single day. ‘Metroid redirected to overt silliness’ is pretty neat! Though none of the immediacy (platforming or combat) is ever particularly interesting, the game breaks open in a cool way after getting the wallclimb. There’s a (at least theoretical, cause I haven’t played enough recently to have seen this much) problem with these really strong movement powerups where, if you get them too early, later levels have to warp themselves around that ability, making it feel less like a strong powerup and more like a Standard Part Of Your Moveset – I think Hebereke’s brevity lets the wallclimb feel really cool for the whole game, both because nothing supersedes it and because it’s a fun tool to awkwardly shimmy around and ‘break’ platforming challenges that were tricky until you got it, and I think the sections around the time you get it really emphasise that. Although later sections do still fall into that aforementioned problem a little, both from having less straightforward platforming sections and by sidelining it for a different (imo far less interesting) powerup later on. But it’s cool! I wasn’t enjoying the game that much until I got the wallclimb, and enjoyed it enough to wanna plow through until the end. I also think an exploration-focused game is such a good outlet for SUNSOFT’s insane late-NES presentation – NES and GB/C are probably my two favourite consoles ever presentationally, and both of SUNSOFT’s NES games I’ve played are really some of the best I’ve seen. Also the final boss was sort of fucked up massively for being a boss you have to run back to and pick up potions for every time you die, but every time I dodged a weird situation by crouching it made me feel so cool.
My favourite part is the bit where you have to slowly and excruciatingly bomb through five layers of blocks and if you miss the next two jumps you get sent back to the start of the area and have to do it all again. They got bad Mario Maker levels in 1991
Streets of Rage 3 (JP)
Immediately felt a little off in some not-too-impactful ways compared to my perfect darling baby, namely the extra mobility and fluidity; particularly on the jab, which can now advance forwards between its combo hits while still holding enemies in hitstun. I spent my first playthrough not really focusing on the fundamentals that its predecessor drilled into me so hard, instead mainly just advancing jab → throwing everything, and not really feeling like I was being pushed to do much else until near the end. Thankfully, I found myself a lot more fond of it on my second go, on Hard. This game feels like SoR2 redirected to as much silliness as it can muster: the aforementioned advancing jab being one of the new options as well as a universal sprint, bizarrely tight air control, fast-refilling special meter that lets you spend one for free, and your dash attack getting stronger with your performance. There’s certainly the same strong core recognisable, but the breadth of new options allows itself to feel pleasantly unique from its predecessor, rather than just trying to reheat it. That also manifests in how many stage gimmicks this one has; SoR2’s stages often very restrained, and 3 in comparison feels like it’s throwing everything at the wall: bottomless pits, damage hazards on fixed routes and cycles, traps, screenwide conveyors, literally the entire premise of Stage 6! And even the more eclectic ones play very well into bmup fundies, pushing against you in ways that enemies just can’t do by themselves.
There’s a level of visual excess on this that makes it feel a little harsh for me though, unfortunately. I’ve certainly played much WORSE games, even other bmups (especially other bmups), but there’s a few too many screens with visual excess layered over the foreground (we also had what I presume is a particularly nasty emulator bug that made the whole disco segment flicker black aggressively) that makes me a bit unwilling to keep revisiting it; it’s not extreme as to feel inaccessible, but a bit too uncomfortable for me to want to keep playing it over games that aren’t.
~*ʚїɞ*~
Thank you for reading, as always. Firstly, apologies for the pictures being..... a bit less than stellar this time. I'm not sure how to downscale pics with scanlines without making them look disgusting, and running the GB games on my Steam Deck meant they weren't pixel perfect (once you use retroarch you'll never stop wanting to beat retroarch to death with your bare hands etc etc.). Anyway, there were a loooott of bmups I played once or twice that I didn't feel familiar with to want to write notes for (specifically: Streets of Rage 1, Undercover Cops, Denjin Makai, Guardians Denjin Makai II, Final Fight, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Golden Axe (the only real fucking videogame), Pu Li Ru La); none of these struck a particular chord with me on first impressions, though less so for distaste and moreso for "I'll be good enough to appreciate this in about ten years" reasons. Though, I've noted this before with shmups, but I've found a lot of bmups quite hard on my eyes for one reason as other, as someone with fairly impactful processing disorders; so far it's been worst with both the aforementioned SoR3 and with Undercover Cops, though I've found general legibility particularly on the ultrahard arcade ones a bit rough, particularly lategame situations in 2p where the screen gets really, really busy. My initial plan was to do a really broad, surface-level dive of as many as possible, but the more I play the more I want to find, like, one more I'm really into and then get really deep into those ones.
While writing my last piece, I noticed that my writing on these has generally become far longer and more detailed. I'm happy with that!! I'm happy it feels that I'm managing to draw much more out of absolutely everything; either I'm getting better at thoughtful analysis, I'm playing things that are much more interesting to me, or both. It does make me wonder if some of these, if polished just a little beyond 'immediate thoughts I wrote down as soon as I had them', would stand as meaningful pieces on their own. I obviously put far more effort into the other articles I post here, but I feel some of these journal entries are almost more substantial than what I was posting on Backloggd as high-effort 'reviews', even up to right before I migrated. I wonder if I could do more with some of these. Similarly, I've noticed I've been struggling to put out the longer pieces focusing on single games: inspiration doesn't come often, and it feels both difficult and restrictive to try to focus so singularly on one topic; specific ideas sometimes feel both like they can neither be expanded on greatly nor woven into a broader topic. Of course, I've already started, but I'd like to carry on finguring out how I can make writing more fun, easier and more frequent. It feels a little odd to be having these big reflective or reframing moments when I've technically been writing for a few years now, but I suppose I've only been writing like this for about half a year, so it's probably more natural than anything.
Happy new year, again. I hope you have a good and comfortable new year, and that lots of nice things happen. Love you all. See you next month ~♡