Dungeon Trawler

Games As a lapsed Doomer, I check the Cacowards  each year, go 'oh, that looks neat' at a few entries, download one of them, and get a few maps in before remembering I'm pretty sick of Doom  maps at this point. This year was slightly better; I saw When Them Demons Cry  in the runners-up and couldn't resist checking it out, and while I thought the very Higurashi -y opening and ending sequences (featuring The Junkyard From Higurashi and a very appropriate climax) sandwiched a somewhat generic middle (underground temple, Hell, demons, zzz: not much to do with Higurashi  beyond the Japanese aesthetic), it had me hungry for more. A finalist, In the Doghouse , quickly got too hard for me. A previous year's finalist, Doom 2 in City Only , suffered from the usual community project problem of every map being ridiculously huge. (Modern maps in general are too long for my tastes—I prefer shorter 3~10-minute maps in the style of the original duology—but community projects take ...

Happy new year! Games Arisha to Kagami no Arisa popped up on my Twitter feed; it's a VN/spot-the-difference webgame in the vein of those spot-the-impostor games sweeping the market, with the big gimmicks being that (1) the impostor is a friendly mirror doppelganger who's pretending to be you; (2) you can only see your own appearance between  rounds, so it's more like remember-the-difference; and (3) missed differences persist between rounds, so it doubles as a(n increasingly creepy) dress-up game. There are multiple endings; unfortunately, these are a bit predictable, and you'll most likely get the least interesting one on your first playthrough, but it's an enjoyable time and the art is very good. If you can read Japanese, you should check this out. I underestimated Ninja Gaiden ; the last two stages are brutal, and I'm currently stuck on the final boss. What's the deal with dying to a boss sending you back to the start of the subact at best and the start ...

Happy holidays! Check out my sick tea haul: On to the usual. Games After finishing my Dynasty Warriors 4 rare   item collection, I took a look at Xtreme Legends , the expansion disk. Unlike DW3XL , it doesn't add new Musou Modes, just standalone stages (one for each character!) and Xtreme Mode , a pseudo-roguelike mode where you build up officers, troops, and stats over a series of procedurally generated stages, with the end goal being to conquer all of China. I wasn't too into it; the stages are missing the strategy feel—large forces clashing, reinforcement gates—that makes Warriors  so appealing to me. Perhaps I would've found the prospect of infinite randomly generated Warriors  content more appealing if it were 2003 and I didn't have two decades of hand-crafted  Warriors  games ahead of me. Instead, I got really into Samurai Warriors 1.  Initially, I was a bit put off by it: during battles, it bombards you with "Missions" to capture such-and-such a poin...

Games My journey through Data East's platformer catalogue continued with Congo's Caper . I appreciated it for its verticality (think Sonic the Hedgehog if switching 'tracks' was often only a high jump away), but what I'll remember most of all is the strange powerup system. There's only one powerup that doesn't just give you lives: the red gem. What it does depends on your current state: When you're Monkey Congo, collecting a gem turns you into Human Congo and taking a hit kills you. When you're Human Congo (the state you respawn in after losing a life), collecting a gem fills one notch of the three-part transformation bar. Taking a hit turns you back into Monkey Congo and  empties the bar. Only by collecting three gems in a row without taking a hit can you turn into Super Congo. When you're Super Congo, taking a hit only removes one notch from the bar; if there are no notches left, you return to Human Congo. Collecting a gem refills a bar, or giv...

Games A desperate Google search for 'best SNES platformers' took me to Joe & Mac , a platformer/beat-em-up about Neanderthals and dinosaurs—until the last stage, where you walk into the biggest dinosaur's mouth, explore his guts, and find out that he was controlled by Satan the entire time. He's also pretty nasty; two continues and I still haven't taken him out. The last couple of stages have some pretty nasty 1-tile platforming that doesn't suit the controls very well—they're fine but not THAT good—but I was otherwise completely satisfied. I like the tradeoff between the normal jump, which is low but completely actionable, and the spin jump, which goes quite high but doesn't let you attack until you peak. Nuclear Throne  got a big patch, so, after a long absence, I'm back to that. It took a half-dozen runs to work off the rust, but I got a win. At the risk of being declared legally insane, I think the game looked better at 30 FPS; it made the im...