faea gaming: August '26
Hello, again. The seasons begin to turn, everyone’s Bokunatsu summer comes to a close, and I get caught in what feels like the first spot of rain since early July. Despite my seasonal depressive feelings usually rearing up during summertime, I’m feeling equally sort of flat watching the sun actually go down in the evening, having to fully open my blinds and turn my ceiling light on before the night light goes on at the end of the day – and it’s not quite cool enough yet for me to wear my nicer, thicker clothes. I work at a school, so despite the very welcome rest, August coming round almost feels like time stopping for a while. It's a strange feeling. I've done a lot, but it feels like I've done very little, if that makes sense? But let's talk about the 'video games' side of all that.
Games I Played This Month
Katamari Damacy
Fittingly for a game that probably had far more of an imprint on my music taste than I’d like to admit, the clearest way I can picture Katamari Damacy is a game as somewhat of an art exhibit. The straightforward mechanics and challenge of the game are rather mild – controls are unusual but reasonably intuitive, and the level timers aren’t pressing enough to provide any real pressure for optimisation – there’s little risk of actually failing any level, and the ‘best’ result is not too much harder to achieve for anything other than the constellations; I was watching my friend play for the first time, reaching similar sizes to my own results on my fourth playthrough. Rather, the act of play is built to draw focus on its aesthetic details. It’s just involved enough to not be able to coast through totally mindlessly, despite being rather easy to coast through with focus, so the spare attention easily ends up redirected towards all the tiny little details of its visual construction: the objects you’re trying to roll yourself into, the silly little visual gags sprinkled in, and the way it all folds back into the game’s overall aesthetic direction..
Its aesthetic direction, of course, is built around scale. Every level is scalable to allow scenarios where both the smallest objects in each stage and the largest have equal importance depending on the starting size and goal of the stage; it of course builds the inter-stage progression of growing the katamari to be able to roll up objects previously uninteractible in the level, but also scales a macro-level size progression across the course of the game. Of course the game slowly ramps up its starting and goal sizes across the game, but heavy re-use of levels throughout brings scale into focus as each level is repeatedly recontextualised against itself: previously-important level sections are now rolled over in seconds as the katamari grows to consume parts of the level that previously only existed as visual backdrops. It crescendos with the final level concluding with rolling up entire previous levels (subtly enough to where you might not notice without paying attention!) – before landing stuck in Katamari purgatory for about five full minutes waiting for the timer to while away with nothing really left to do. The game concludes by yelling its narrative ideas at you, if you didn’t intuit them already, but it still worked more on me than it ever has before: being at a point of my life where more than ever of my relationships take place online, and I manage a whole video games website that you might be reading right now… that sort of global connection is something to be held very dearly. I've always liked this game a lot, but never found it quite enough to love it; this last playthrough has finally given me the perspective to do so, sinking it in as a primarily aesthetic experience that's being upheld by its mechanics and play.
The Fairyland Story
More directly a predecessor to Bubble Bobble, but bears more similarity to Raizing’s later Snow Bros. through being predicated on turning enemies into – and chaining them with – a falling projectile, thus centring combat around gaining and holding high ground to land big chains on enemies underneath. It’s much more simple and legible here: as opposed to the aforementioned’s chaotic, hyperactive bouncing pinball chains, The Fairyland Story’s mode of offense is turning enemies into cakes, which can be pushed around and fall directly downwards when moved off a ledge; all enemies caught underneath are eliminated, a score bonus is granted based on how many enemies that single cake took out, and the cake breaks upon hitting the floor. The result is a rather static, almost puzzle-like learning process of figuring out the best vantage point to get high chains from, and how to wrangle the pack of enemies into a neat stack that can be taken out in a single move – enabled by rather rudimentary and predictable enemy AI that can be clearly and easily manipulated, but not always so without ending up cornered or pinned in one way or another. For the most part, enemies can only damage via contact – only a couple fire projectiles, with other enemies having properties that tie into other areas than straightforward offense: different jump arcs, different durations before breaking out of a cake, the occasional special ability – that further lighten the load in comparison to its peers and err it towards crowd-control puzzle solving as opposed to manic survival.
Of course, this isn’t just a precursor to Bubble Bobble’s single-screen action-platforming gameplay, but that particular Taito calling card of systemic maximalism – so, what’s going on behind the scenes? Put simply: killing enemies raises a hidden EXP value which, once exceeding a certain threshold, raises the player’s level; level effects the weighting of random item spawns, with better items having a higher chance of spawning with a higher level. It’s already a rather eclectic system, but completely thrown off-course by the vast majority of higher-level items being either effectively – or literally – full screen-clears that give a full chain score bonus for the enemies they’re all but guaranteed to clear to begin with. On one hand, it is a system that rewards high-skill play, to some extent – raising EXP quickly comes from consistent strong chains, and dying is typically a big hit towards level progress – but on the other hand, at a certain point, the game transforms from that to running back and forth until the item that clears every enemy on the screen spawns, and then you pick it up and clear every enemy on the screen. It's a curious little game, and one perhaps totally unfitting for the score-attack context I was playing it under, but I find these maximalist, almost unnecessary-feeling design spaces very charming nonetheless, so I enjoyed digging into its quirks and practising it quite fervently over a couple of quieter days. And I’d say this is much more approachable than its big sister, so maybe give it a look?
Vulgus
Clearly a very direct post-Xevious shooter: infinite vertical scroller with existent but not clearly delineated ‘stages’, and a healthy mix of random enemy placements mixed with static spawns. The dichotomy here is much more slanted than its predecessor: Xevious uses a fairly even split of fixed and random spawns, with each wave of fixed spawns generally being accompanied by a random wave in order to tease out variety and novel situations from a fairly modest set of tools; whereas Vulgus leverages fixed spawns somewhat sparingly, being much more interested in the truer chaos of random enemy placement. Random enemies are layered on thick and fast, and though the game – at least in the first loop – often relies on just a single enemy type at once, their movements are tricky enough to where simply their spawn locations will cause them to move in different ways and force different responses. The basic enemy type used in the opening sections of each stage in the first loop moves in a way to often flank or encircle the player ship, sweeping down from the side to pluck them out of the bottom of the screen and force upwards sweeping motions of their own in order to shake them off whilst holding a safe position; while the occasional fixed enemy spawn encourages pushing yourself back against the tide to stand where the formation gathers and shoot them all down for a significant scaling score bonus. The sheer density of enemies allows even these single-enemy sections to stay interesting through attempting to hold a safe position at the bottom of the screen, sweeping through tight curtains of bullets and enemy ships coming from different directions while trying not to get pushed into the top or sides of the screen, where an enemy could spawn and immediately snipe you down. In a sense, it harkens back to the genre’s roots of being Star Wars simulators; tight weaving through seas of enemy fire and intercepting ships evoking high-speed dogfights perhaps far more effectively than any of its space-shooting peers.
The other sections, that include multiple random-spawn enemy types at once, are outwardly much more interesting by forcing an understanding and management of multiple enemy movement types at once, but it almost feels as though it’s too restrained with their use until deep into the game – before the end of the first loop’s third stage, these secondary enemy types do rather little to force complex situations and almost feel as though they dilute the enemy pool when put next to the simplicity of the single-enemy sections. Stage 2’s dark barriers – which form into Xevious-style invulnerable rectangular screens if left alive for more than about a second – don’t interact wonderfully with the section’s other enemy type which does little to try to push you into the paths of the shields, nor push you away to let them form – but are nonetheless far more interesting than Stage 1’s pinwheels, which act as living aimed bullets that can be dodged in their entirety simply by moving to the side exactly once. When it gets going, though, it carries an incredible momentum: the back end of Stage 3 introduces clusters of orbs that come from both sides of the screen and hover low to the bottom unless a significant vertical motion is committed to to shake them off, and the boulders introduced in 2-1 not only cover the bottom of the screen even more deliberately, but fly straight upwards when they cross underneath, cutting off significant parts of the screen while forcing specific, committal dodges that clash against the movements the swarms of basic enemies push you to make.
gng director was responsible for this one and I know you all like those games. hop on
Duo Princess
EasyGameStation are well enough known for their international releases Recettear and, to a lesser extent, Chantelise, but are any of you aware of what they were getting up to before then? Well, as with many dōjin circles worth their salt: a fair heap of fan-works, but it’s the specific properties that they were making for that feels so interesting. After getting their start making three Azumanga Daioh-themed games – a snowball-fighting game, an action-puzzle game, and a beach volleyball game – they moved onto making Duo Princess, a Threads of Fate fan-sequel with similar enough combat and level structure, but compacted into a ~40 minute arcade-style game complete with continues and a score system. They’d next follow it up with Dash DE Lei-Lei, an auto-running time attack sidescroller themed around Lei-Lei (or Hsien-Ko) from Darkstalkers, built around avoiding and jumping over obstacles but with limited-use items to break or skip over them themed around her weapons and projectiles from her fighting game movesets. Following on from these would come ElePaperAction, a title based around the series R.O.D: Read or Die, playing out as an action sidescroller with the conceit of playing as all three of the series’ Paper Sisters at the same time, with their melee attacks coming from the leading sister – who can desync from her group to approach enemies quicker – and special attacks coming from the backing two. Their last fan-work would be Gunners Heart, a rail shooter derived from the somewhat obscure shooter SkyGunner that exchanges that game’s Ace Combat-style free-flight for something much closer to Space Harrier, using the money system from SkyGunner to fuel a persistent upgrade system. All of these games still remain hung up on the sidebar of their website alongside their later releases, like fridge magnets, complete with links to commercial sites you likely haven’t been able to purchase the games from in decades. It’s charming to have a very clear idea of how specific their inspirations were, but is also a good signal for whether you’ll get along with their output as well – their range and proudness of where they came from begging me to want to dig into their games a little more than what I’d originally planned.
Duo Princess is, of course, taking an awful lot of itself from Threads of Fate, but while the latter game is – in true Squaresoft style – sometimes a 3D spell-weaving action game, and oftentimes a smorgasbord of whatever ideas they felt like lobbing into the cauldron, Duo Princess takes some of those ingredients and remixes them into something much tighter and more compact. Trimmed down from two ~8 hour stories into a 20-50 minute arcade-style experience (complete with a continue system that’s actually normal!), it’s much more focused on enemy-dense action sequences than its predecessor ever was, with its magic system retooled to fit: spells are accrued one per stage with Mint’s magic-combining system eschewed in order to give each of a much smaller spell list a distinct purpose and use case, and MP cost is much higher to restrict spell-spamming quite as excessively. Though as MP now refills over time rather than upon landing an attack, the dynamic of each combat encounter is more about rounding them all up safely, and blowing them up quickly with magic. To pull back on this somewhat, the scoring system revolves around building high chains from repeated attacks, encouraging slotting in those riskier melee hits while waiting for enough MP to blow a wave away, with Mint’s jump-kick being an extremely safe combo-extender in this context – though poor old Maya, now taking Mint’s original archetype as the lower-health spellcaster, almost feels like an afterthought here: all her basic attacks are highly-committal ranged spells that only hit a single target, making it incredibly tough and arduous to keep a safe distance while piling on enough hits to keep a combo up. Bosses still remain relatively linear bait-and-punish ordeals, and their use of adds is never quite enough to make them truly dynamic until the endgame boss rush, but they feel like footnotes this time around in favour of the action and exploration of the stages.
the fact that I can’t read the dialogue makes the random callbacks very funny. that whale boss comes back twice and is even more annoying than in the first game. they put wylaf on a bridge and then sat him on a chair. the silly girl is the final boss for some reason. awesome
End of Starchild (download here)
best games are the ones you download from a site called msx dot horse
As opposed to its predecessor Time Tripper, maps are much less focused on neatly-delineated combat arenas and more on being fully-connected open spaces – this doesn’t often reinvent the terrain-focused encounters of DOOM, where physical space enjoys pressing against you to limit movement against enemy groups, as these maps are still typically very open and traversable, so it ends up feeling a halfway compromise between the two design spaces where terrain bends in more interesting ways than in its predecessor’s arenas, but leaves enough breathing room to allow enemies to nonetheless be kited around the globe in similar fashions. Playing into this are the pistol replacement – a crossbow whose bolts, if hit against a wall, ping back towards you and damage you on contact – and the new chaingun both being very accurate long-range weapons that feed well into that cautious, slower playstyle. This doesn’t bother me a great deal, since it’s not too different from my own natural approach to these levels, just with a longer-ranged arsenal to deal with a bestiary that threatens far more from range themselves – and it does tighten its grip often enough to feel varied, and enough for the crossbow bouncing to genuinely be a danger sometimes…
The game self-describes as a “survival fantasy and manic shooting adventure”, and I feel the game’s paradigm shift compared to Time Tripper is heavily, heavily warped around that last word, ‘adventure’. Because this is a game reaching at so many things at once, the actual FPS gameplay almost starts to feel minor at times despite dominating the moment-to-moment. There’s a reasonable lean towards platforming sections in levels, a hub world-style area with customisation priced behind score earned during levels, a whole second game that has to be unlocked gradually through finding secrets within levels, extra rooms in the hub that can only be unlocked through finding secrets in levels, alternate endings unlocked through finding secrets in levels… secrets. Secrets secrets secrets! Hitting the dissatisfying ‘normal’ ending after having so many secrets jangled in front of you for so much of the game’s runtime feels like some Bubble Bobble ‘key of secret game’ stuff… you haven’t really Beaten the game until you Secrets. And most of these secrets are effectively adventure game pixel-hunts within each level… transforming a really compelling, charismatic FPS into the bits of a point-and-click where you can’t find the item you need to progress, because you literally can’t see it on the screen. Mercifully, the secrets needed for the ‘true’ ending can be located a bit easier, of course with the help of a different type of secret, so a few sullen evenings did begin to find a route towards a different ending, but I never quite pulled myself over the finish line.
I think the game is most certainly enjoyable regardless of whether you’re ‘that kind’ of Secrets person – I’m partially emphasising because I might have had a better time with a better idea of what I was getting myself into! The description on the website is rather flowery and vague about the nature of this ‘endgame’, so to speak, and primed me somewhat for a much different sort of experimentality. But it’s legitimately admirable even just taken very straightforwardly as a short and intentionally anticlimactic 6-map romp with a lot of flair and personality. The presentation is completely top-notch and had me engulfed in its visuals and atmosphere from the very start of the first map; bonus points for returning that one track from Time Tripper that I kept vocal stimming ‘I’m in the house like carpet’ to. only thing that got me through that arena map. It’s a project I have great admiration for, even if it wound up moving a little far away from my own priorities by the end; I think this sort of thing has a very specific audience, and I hope it finds it.
Pocky & Rocky with Becky
I think the most immediately off-putting part of this game – the audiovisuals, which don’t even match the original Kiki Kaikai, and might immediately match the ‘IP shovelware’ feeling the game gives off straight away – isn’t actually so bad if you’ve immersed yourself into that game for a while – the original’s art is much more aesthetically compelling than an awkward recreation of it fifteen years later, but I wouldn’t say that game either is a notable standout for its graphics, and what’s left is the most direct sequel to the original arcade game, compared to Dotou-Hen which leans towards an adventure structure and the following games that reinvent the mechanics by a fair margin. The only mechanics back-ported into with Becky are separate shot types, which drop from different coloured pickups as in Kiki Kaikai but replace each other rather than being additive; and the gohei swing deflecting most – but not all – enemy bullets. It’s actually much more interestingly implemented here than in the surrounding games: few enemies and limited graphical variety means there’s a much clearer distinction between what can be deflected and what can’t, and being able to move while swinging prevents all those situations in Pocky & Rocky and Reshrined where a situation eventually solves itself if you just root yourself in place and mash the melee button for long enough. The main game’s difficulty is fairly mild in how it actually applies any of this, though: very few unblockables or high-health enemies let you sort of just plow through many of the levels tapping the melee button and charging forwards. I haven’t played the hard mode yet, but I’m hearing that it adds a lot more unblockables across the game, which sounds good to contrast the normal difficulty being far too hesitant until the (very short) final stage.
We Were Here (download here)
Asymmetrical escape room-framed communication exercise between two people, where one player is locked in a room with Information, the other is left to explore an abandoned mansion, and they have to communicate what they can see between each other using the world’s most challenging form of communication: the walkie-talkie. Though it is literally a game about solving puzzles, I would still hesitate to call it a puzzle game – most solutions are the navigator physically finding an exact solution in their room, and then reciting it down the radio verbatim – it’s moreso a challenge of finding a shared method of communicating somewhat abstract glyphs to each other in a way both people can understand, in order to reach those extremely simple solutions. It’s nothing too challenging, and if it ran on just a little longer than its ~60 minute runtime I’d likely start feeling weary of it, but it’s a nice fluffy little hour to have spent with a friend.
Space Dynagon
Another adventure STG penned by Platine Dispositif, this one drawing more directly from its forebear Gauntlet with extremely high-density enemies that typically attack in melee range, erupting in a nevending stream from monster spawners that, in this case, respawn just a few seconds after being taken out. Distancing itself from the huge, somewhat overwhelming moveset of Platine Dispositif's prior work Engage to Jabberwock, Space Dynagon reins itself in with just three buttons: a shot, an aim-lock that allows strafing while firing, and the game’s core gimmick – digging holes. Enemies will always try to path around dug holes, but one that falls in – from being otherwise totally blocked off, from having one placed on a tile they’re already committing movement to, or just from straightforward luck – fall in, and break out without being ‘dug’ again to fill their hole in within a few seconds. This causes them to sprout – of course, all enemies are walking plants with leaves growing from their giant anime heads – and then walking into them causes them to explode, with any other enemies taken out by the blast causing a chain explosion for a multiplier, a spew of healing items erupting from the aftermath and, perhaps most importantly, an audiovisual teardown of giant purple explosions, unnecessarily-violent screenshake, and sound effects crunching under the weight of their sheer existence.
It’s not a verb that fits well into the typical flow of the game, though. Catching an enemy is very slow and cumbersome: holes-digging adheres to the tile-grid of the map, of which the player character’s movement does not, combining with her very fast speed to make snagging a moving enemy or making a clean wall of holes irritatingly precise and always take longer than planned. Other enemies can cross a hole with an enemy inside, whether filled or not, making it somewhat risky to approach the hole to fill it in or to start the chain explosion. And, most importantly, enemies that do threaten from range tend to do so with large explosions of their own, making idling around in one place much more risky than just holding down the fire button and charging forwards, which tends to take out most things by itself. The central mechanic of the game winds up as a recovery mechanic with the odds rather stacked against you, with intentful learning of the game likely just routing out the safest rooms to land a chain and heal off, with most of the game instead spent running and shooting through indulgently irritating mazes, trying to focus on flying enemies and ones with trees on their heads while trying not to lose the player character’s position in all the noise. It’s not quite as exciting as Jabberwock, but the intent nonetheless toys with my imagination: a game with a similar focus on enemy density, but a slightly more applicable bizarre and cumbersome crowd control option would be something right up my alley; I enjoyed this a good deal nonetheless, but not enough to want to put in much more time than I did.
~*ʚїɞ*~
Thank you for reading, as always. Despite having the month off, it’s been much slower than I’d hoped. I wanted to push out two new pieces this month, but couldn’t get any of my others in-progress over the finish line in time. Nonetheless, I’d like to keep sticking to the one-per-month routine I landed myself in before the pseudo-break I took between May and now: I’ve got enough on the pipeline to last until the end of the year under that schedule, and a bigger one I’m working towards that I’d like to be able to get out this year as well, that I’m very excited to tackle. I’ve also not been able to play as much as I’d have liked, most of the games here being quite short and going down in a modest few sessions. What have I been up to, then? In terms of games, I’ve been ambling through Pokémon Green, Threads of Fate, and Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure – as well as a couple others I didn’t note down, since I’ve both talked about them in my journal before, and have fuller pieces in the works on. The ≤10hr silly adventure game has been doing a lot of heavy lifting for me, lately… I’ve also been trying to watch more films, particularly with a small group I’ve been doing weekly-ish watches with. (they made me watch A Goofy Movie, if you’re curious how it’s going.) I’ve also been working on cleaning up some of the pages on this site, but… I’ve been doing that for months already. It’ll take a while.
Anyway, the articles of the month I come to you with are…:
Wild Guns: Reloaded
Sort of a sister article for the Reloaded piece I never ended up writing :p. lakespirit and I spent many a night whittling away at our high-scores together, and landed on a lot of the same conclusions (it’s really really good). My own hypothetical piece would have been a really dense, nerdy breakdown of the differences between the old game and the new; hers is a likely much more approachable piece explaining its appeal from the perspective of the process of getting into the game.
Diving with Friends | Finding Hidden Horrors
Baxter pulls together a host of his friends to make a list of Japanese horror that each of them is fond of. I have cursory knowledge of some of these, though a lot are totally new to me – though one of the recommended, Warning from Space, I happened to watch myself earlier this month and had a very good time with it, so I’ve got good hopes for the other picks to be interesting, as well. maybe I should drag some of my friends into doing something over here....
Oh, and I’ve opened a ko-fi for people to support me if so inclined. Everything will always remain available for free over here, but with executive functioning being such a premium in these times, the knowledge that people might value my work enough to want to financially support it would give me a well-needed proverbial kick – even if it’s never likely to become a full-time thing.
Okay, that’s all from me now. Stay safe, and indulge yourself in some silly ≤10 hour adventure games of your own. See you next time. ~♡