birthbydrip

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

A systems-driven game with one amazing core system and a whole bunch of shitty ones in its orbit.

Happy NFL kickoff!

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…

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.

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” do…

Múseca’s initial launch, with its shop-based progression system that required grinding the game’s story mode, inevitably doomed the game to obscurity.

It’s a Crash-like with a twist: you can emanate a magnetic field for either polarity, north or south.

Although my initial impression felt like the callback-heavy aesthetic and the linear level design were undercooked, Super Mario 3D Land now reads to me as compact and focused. 3D Mario traditionally struggles with providing proper applications for the nua…

You can imagine the theoretical version of this game per the emergent, systemic gameplay I discussed in my recent interactive fiction article.

Raph asks: when are you hopping on if Shin Megami Tensei If…?

I hopped on the roguelike bandwagon recently because of some friends, specifically variations on the classic tile-based format (although I also put a fair amount of time into Slay the Spire alongside these).

Despite releasing a couple years prior, Zombie Revenge pioneered Devil May Cry’s signature bullet juggling, all the way down to the enemy splaying out in the air as they bounce.

Originally the start of the eclectic Hebereke series,1 Ufouria had an unassuming localization for the European market that left it with few western fans until emulator-fueled retrospectives came along.

A group of veterans with credits on both Namco’s Ridge Racer and Sega AM3’s Sega Rally, the short-lived studio Sega Rosso plopped this into arcades at the turn of the millennium just after their back-to-back titles NASCAR Racing and Star Wars Racer Arcade.

I’m reluctant to do the full-throated condemnation of the expanded toolkit here because, outside of a comparison against the NES Castlevanias, it’s still restrained.

LordDarius asks: Thoughts on the value/function of time limits and why they seem to have gone out of fashion in mainstream gaming?

An oddball Fromsoft-esque title with a similar sort of interplay between loadout, upgrade currency, and death mechanics.

A recent Maximilian Dood video on the topic of “friction” in games came across my feed the other day and really concisely laid out (on accident) the mess of concepts that friction has come to embody.

Although often inaccurately compared to Link’s Awakening,1 Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (officially translatd as The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls), resembles something more like Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, where cartoony dust-cloud autobattles

This is me playing the Golgo 13 arcade game from Raizing.

Mizuguchi’s work incorporates musical elements without tethering it to rhythmic execution challenges.

Also known as Scary Dreams1, Buster’s Bad Dream has slipped under the radar thanks to its incredibly delayed release stateside, its outdated cartoon license, and its overall limited presentation.

One distinguishing factor of vehicle games that tends to get lost in genres tied to humanoid avatars is that turning around can be rather difficult.

My recent onslaught of Crazy Taxi posting has caused a lot of my friends to revisit the game and attempt to play for score.

In the era of Metroidvanias before Super Metroid, a dense world would still take the form of traditional single-directional platformer levels, just interconnected with ability-driven progression.

Sega’s mission statement for the ’90s in a three-track package.

The era of character action games (CAGs) is over.

A Metroidvania based on an arcade game should instantly ring structural bells, but Strider thankfully opts for an on-rails approach.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Ziad uploaded a loose video talking about the idea of games preservation, specifically in how people conflate “accessibility” (being able to purchase a game on a modern storefront) with “preservation” (the game existing pe…

While Coloris sits on a match-three foundation, it distinguishes itself from similar titles through a Mizuguchi-esque approach to player-guided sound evolution.

While the overall 2D platformer scene died down in the advent of polygonal rendering in the late ’90s, Klonoa quietly inherited the mantle of Yoshi’s Island and brought its slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs into the…

I tend to play a lot of games at once, and recently I’ve been sampling the start of many different games just to keep myself fresh and avoid getting bored with any particular game I’m playing.

A group of simulation game experts naively wandering into the arcade domain results in the rich fabric of mechanics combining the best of each genre coming out patchy.

In my previous article, I presented my model that I use as a jumping off point for my game analysis.

One of the first things you’ll likely disentangle as you begin thinking about games in more depth is the difference between “mechanics” and “level design.”

Although the painful gotcha moments and frequent shifts between setpieces may hide it on a blind playthrough, Strider’s main appeal is its movement and handling, which bridge the gap between commitment and fluidity.

The initial bombast of Unwound Future immediately sets it apart from its two predecessors: a public showing of a time machine goes awry and explodes, taking the prime minister with it as Professor Layton and his soon-to-be emigrating companion Luke observe

Diabolical Box instantly has a better sense of scale than the first, with its initial mystery having more personal stakes for Layton and its starting train ride setpiece giving way to multiple locales compared to Curious Village’s single tight area.

Link to the game on Newgrounds.

The Professor Layton series takes the scaffolding from Japanese adventure games – screen-by-screen navigation while conversing with static characters placed within each area – to contextualize a deep collection of puzzles.

This strange late-era Game Boy Advance release was developed simultaneously with a DS release the year prior.

It’s Eurojank Resident Evil 4 for sure, but given the near immediate shift away from that particular third-person shooter paradigm in the post-Gears era, it’s sweet to see a lesser-known game attempt the style.

The first volley is always “It’s aged poorly!”

Note: This is the first in a four part series that builds off a previous piece I wrote regarding state space representations of video games.