House of Sayuri

 I watch a lot of stuff on Netflix as a result of having kids and needing to commute to work and as a result of this I end up watching a lot of weird shit.  House of Sayuri was advertised to me at the login screen and being a bit of a sucker for Japanese horror I felt like I had to check it out.  I thought I was getting a serious horror movie but instead I got one of the weirdest films I've ever seen and I'm not sure if its supposed to be a comedy or not.  Spoilers for a aggressively 4/10 movie lie ahead. 

The movie starts out with a family having dinner and there's one extremely hikikomi member that the mother tries to coax out to eat with the rest of them.  This pisses off the hiki and causes her to exit her room with a baseball and go to town on them.  It then cuts to another family who have bought the house as they move in.  The family consists of the parents, 2 boys, a daughter and the grandparents, things seem nice at first but things very quickly start to get ghost-fucky.  You can see where this is going right?  The daughter ends up getting possessed and smashing the younger brothers face into a wall as the inciting incident.  After a decent amount of spooky ghost shit, it all culminates in all but the eldest son and the grandmother being dead as the possessed daughter kills a bunch of them and then stabs herself in the neck with a kitchen knife.  I'm obviously being pretty wishy-washy with the details but the point I'm trying to make here is that up to the family getting killed, Sayuri is playing itself as a pretty straight faced horror movie but then the film just does a tonal shift so insane that I actually might have got a case of actual whiplash from it.  

The grandmother in this family up to the mass murder was characterised as a doddery old lady, probably with dementia, not really being able to do anything for herself and spends most of the early scenes getting distracted by the obvious ghost shit that no one else can see.  At the end of the scene where the possessed sister stabs herself, the ghost shit somehow pulls her violently out of her dementia ridden elderly-ness and she becomes a turbo badass and she becomes a sort of weird mentor to the eldest son as they train to resist and maybe even beat the ghost thats haunting their new home.  This manifests in the story as basically working out, eating well and telling the ghost to literally just fuck off whenever it turns up.  Like it feeds on fear and mental anguish or something so if you just tell it to take a hike when it starts being spooky its got no choice but to just leave.  Pennywise from Temu, I guess, since it doesn't shapeshift and can't hurt you otherwise.  This entire mid-movie sequence is presented as a comedy, with the grandma being an extremely over the top, larger than life woman who slaps the elder son around like a sort of loving drill seargent into not being scared of actual ghosts.  

While all this is going on, the grandma is also investigating the cause of the haunting as aside from not wanting to move out of the new house, she also wants revenge for her dead family.  This is where the movie takes yet another tonal shift as the final scene gets weirdly dark out of nowhere after the entire second act being so comical.  It turns out that the hikikomori in the opening scene, the titular Sayuri, was sexually abused by her father and after she died at the hands of her family she became a ghost.  The grandmas plan here is to bring Sayuri's family back to the house and offer them up to the ghost so she can banish it.  The ghost kills the family that caused the haunting, the granda gets to watch them die, win-win.  Although none of this works and what we get is a surreal scene where the grandma turns into a slasher killer, at one point killing a dude by shoving a crowbar up his ass and then the ghost is beaten by the eldest son who does what I can only describe as "mild anime shit".

It's an absolutely insane movie and I can't work out who its for.  There's some decent horror stuff in the first act but the tonal shift at the half-way point spoils it for anyone who was enjoying the movie that way.  I also can't see dark-comedy or comedy-horror fans enjoying it because the comedy isn't very good.  You get a light chuckle out of the grandmas awakening and a little guffaw the first time the ghost gets told to fuck off but after that its just sort of dull.  But then it takes its third big shift where it gets all heavy with its subject matter and the characters your supposed to be rooting for suddenly become just kind of cruel and weird.  Maybe there's something I'm just not getting about it but to me it feels like House of Sayuri was directed by a guy who just had no real idea of what he wanted to make.  Like he was in the middle of making a horror movie but then just woke up one morning like "Oh! actually I want to make a comedy now!" but instead of scrapping the horror film he just kept it and slapped his weird comedy plot on the end of it.  

I don't think I could seriously suggest that anyone go out of their way to watch House of Sayuri but I can maybe see it having a place at a drunk bad-movie night.  If you've got a room full of drunk friends and you all just want to gawp at some insane bullshit then maybe it has some value but otherwise, don't be fooled by the slick poster and just skip this crap.

I Have A Gambling Issue

 

Slot machines are absolute dogshit and I hate them

Let me take you back to the year 2010, when I had come to Japan for the first time as an exchange student on my Japanese language course.  While at the university I met a girl who had a fairly deep interest in slot machines.  I saw her once sitting in the communal study space reading a magazine and when I asked her what she was reading it turned out to be a strategy guide (?) for a recently published Evangelion themed slot machine.  The magazine outlined how the machine was played along with how to trigger its various modes and even had these big ass diagrams of the reels.  After a short conversation about it I tagged along with her to the local Pachislot place where I gave it a try for myself.  I got 5000 yens worth of tokens, took a few spins of the machine and within about 20 minutes all my money had gone.  I wasn't expecting to win and I wasn't expecting to play for a significantly long amount of time but I was expecting to at least get a bit more than 20 fucking minutes.  In that moment I vowed never to play slots again and left the place.  

But the truth is I don't actually hate slot machines, I hate losing large sums of money in small amounts of time so when you tell me that I can play fakey rougelike video game slots with no risk to my families financial situation I'm fucking all in on that one.  

Cloverpit on its surface is a very simple game.  You are locked in a small, somewhat Saw-esque room, with a mini slot machine and an ATM.  The ATM tells you that you have to pay it a certain amount of coins within a certain amount of rounds or you get ejected into the abyss below.  If you pay the coins then your debt goes up and you do it again until you either win a key from the game master or the debt gets too high to clear and you fall to your doom.  That by itself would only be fun for a few tries but Cloverpit mixes things up by giving you trinkets that can modify your luck or modify the value of things on the machine greatly and now you get the true addicting quality of the game.  Not only are you pulling the literal slot machine but you are also pulling the trinket machine and when you get that pefect mix of items and circumstances that make one value on the reels super high and then you manage to finesse your way into an insane jackpot and that rush is basically unmatched.  It gives the game a real "just one more run" quality where a failed run can be frustrating but then "if only I had gotten <trinket> that time" and so you play again hoping to get your ideal setup.  Couple that with an additional phone mechanic where every round a mysterious caller gives you a chance to change things like the value of things in the machine or give you free shots at rerolling trinkets and all the moving parts make for a truly compelling experience.  

On top of all that Cloverpit offers a number of challenges to keep you spinning for hours and hours.  The game has a number of endings that can be achieved by fulfilling a number of conditions that amount to the gambling equivalent of self-harm and the game reaches Kaiji levels of fever pitch when you have these conditions active.  Not only that but you can also activate a number of "memory cards" which are like special challenge modes that make you rethink your approach to the machine and your trinkets.

There's just no better feeling in the world than when you're behind on tokens, its the last few spins of your final round, you have a high value mark on the machine but you just cant get it to come out.  Then you hit the lever, your luck trinkets all pop at once, the reels line up and the machine goes apeshit as your high value marking hits a jackpot, you go from guaranteed death to two more rounds of safety instantly, absolute euphoria.  Thank god these developers only made a fakey video game slot machine because if you hired them to make a real one then there might be a lot more people filing for bankruptcy in the world. 

BUT THATS NOT ALL 

 Scratch cards were also a thing I quite enjoyed in my student days.  I'd grab one whenever I did my grocery shopping and just the act of winning a fiver would get me giddy for the whole day.  So when I saw an incremental game based around doing scratch cards I had to buy it right away.  

In Scritchy Scratchy you are trying to avoid your shitty dish washing job by winning at scratch cards.  If it was just that it would be kind of bullshit but there are upgrades for you to buy that allow you to manipulate your luck and win more consistently.  From there you buy more expensive cards that have higher payouts to increse your luck to repeat this cycle seemingly ad-infinitum.  Eventually you are granted the ability to buy a "final ticket".  You scratch it, lose and it causes you to die.  

From here you get another upgrade system that allows you to manipulate your luck and payouts even further and you keep scratching cards and unlocking more stuff until eventually you win that final ticket and I will not spoil in this post.  It's a simple little incremental game with a theme that appeals very specifically to my vices that also doesn't overstay its welcome and has the good sense to roll credits just as its getting obnoxious.  A lesson that a game like Cookie Clicker could really benefit from.  If potentially life ruining bits of cardboard appeal to you as much as they appeal to me but you don't actually want to financially cripple yourself, Scritchy Scratchy is a game that you should grab off Steam ASAP.  

The reason I say I have a gambling "issue" rather than a gambling "problem" is because, thankfully, my weird urge to gamble can be completely satiated by games like this.  I think I owe a debt of gratitude to things like Cloverpit, Scritchy Scratchy and the Yakuza series casino (to name one example) for allowing me to indulge in the thrill of the game without any of the real consequences that would send me down a potentially very dark path.  Even if you aren't weirdly tempted by the casino lifestyle like I am though, these two games are very good and you should grab them anyway 

LETS GO GAMBLING

The Awful Kirby Game

 

I quite like a bit of Kirby from time to time.  I wouldn't call myself a die-hard fan of the franchise or anything but I do tend to have a good time with the little guy when I do fire up a game of his every now and again.  The games are baby-easy, clearly by design and are therefore good for when I just want to kick back and stomp all over something for a few hours.  So when I decided to play Amazing Mirror in my quest to explore the GBA library this year on my to-do list I thought it was going to be a nice easy time and instead I got a deeply frustrating slog that felt like pulling teeth.

The premise of Amazing mirror is simple.  There's a big mirror and bits of it have been scattered to the corners of the world and you have to go reasssemble them so you can hop inside and go suck off the big bad guy until he dies.  For some reason this splitting of the mirror has also resulting in a splitting of the Kirby and so you are joined by 3 AI buddies that will hop around and do basically nothing for the duration of the playthrough.  I think the idea is that you are supposed to link cable up and then you all branch off and explore separately until someone finds something of note and then you use an in game phone item to summon each other to that location.  This is 2026 though, so no one owns the game and even if they did, no one owns a fucking link cable and therefore we're left with some deeply frustrating semi open world exploration that only serves to take the classic, fun Kirby formula and make it deeply frustating as it wastes your time every other room.

Let's make one thing very clear here, Amazing Mirror isn't annoying because of its core gameplay.  It's still the same baby-easy Kirby game full of braindead, haphazardly placed enemies that pose basically no threat and even if you somehow do die to something the game showers with you so many one ups that it's actually impossible for any player over the age of 3 to game over.  What makes this game so annoying is the navigation of its world and levels.  Unlike basically every other Kirby game, Amazing Mirror has a more open world that you can explore.  The hub is this big sprawling zone that connects a number of areas and within those areas there are multiple routes you can take.  The problem with this is that only one of those routes will lead to the boss which will net you a mirror shard.  The other routes will often lead you to a "goal" but purplexingly the "goal" at the end of these routes is not the goal of the game.  The goal just gives you a shitty mini game where you ride a star up a screen and then watch Kirby do his stupid little dance.  Sometimes these screens will give you 7000 one ups, sometimes they just give you health.  Why anyone would give a shit about reaching these goals is beyond me because they seem to serve no purpose whatsoever.  Maybe if this were a real video game with some teeth and one ups were a precious resource that needed to be stocked up on I'd understand but its fucking Kirby.

The unused multiplayer mechanic when doing a solo game actually trivializes any potential challenge entirely because the Kirby clones can be utilized to break every boss over your knee and leave them in a bloody pool on the ground.  Using the shoulder buttons you can use a phone to call the CPU companions to your side in order to help you fight any given enemy but not only that, when they arrive the CPU will just hand you a bunch of free healing as well.  So even if there is a boss in this game that you would somehow struggle with, as soon as things start to look a little grim you just hit the call button and then 3 more of you, probably fully powered up with copy abilities, jump in, heal you to full and then start laying on some extreme DPS.  I like Kirby for being easy but this is just taking the piss.

Maybe if you and some friends have this game and a link cable then I can see the appeal.  A lot of the navigation frustration could potentially be worked around by having 4 of you exploring different paths all at once and playing with friends is often just a nice time even if you're playing trash like this.  For the solo-players and emulation users out there though, just skip Amazing mirror because by yourself its just depressing.  Put this shit in the trash and just play Nightmare in Dreamland instead. 

The Games Industry Makes Me Sad

 

Let me just put it out there from the jump that this is not going to be a post bitching about the state of games themselves.  There is a lot to be said about the state of releases in an industry that's swamped year in-year out with remakes and sequels, an industry whos "best" game of the previous year just yoinked the plot of a PS1 game, the mechanics of a SNES game and the UI of a PS5 game smushed them together and made them French.  There's a discussion to be had there but that's not what I'm on about here.

I want to look back a little bit, to when I was a naive young boy.  A time before widespread use of the internet (my age is showing, I know, shut up) when most of the things I'd hear about games came from rare snippets on TV or magazines bought from the local supermarket.  One topic that always fascinated me when it came up was when development teams would get talked about, specifically Japanese ones.  Offices filled with people passionately bashing away at computers to make the latest and greatest games.  I remember hearing specifically, sometime around the Dreamcast era, that Japanese developers would quite often stay late at the office working on their projects, sometimes sleeping under their desks and then just waking up to resume work right away.  "Wow! That's so cool, these guys are so passionate about making games, I wanna do that, I wanna be like them" my young, idiot-ass thought at the time.  The sad reality of it though is that working like that sucks ass, even if its something your passionate about.  You may recall around the time of The Last of Us 2 coming out about the discourse around crunch culture, people working insanely long hours and burning out or suffering various mental and phsyical ailments as a result.  My dreams of developing games professionally got crushed by the staff at my high school because of my lack of general ability in maths was too much of a wall to overcome, according to them, but it was saddening to grow up and discover that the reality is not that these people are sleeping under desks and missing their commutes due to passion, but due to necessity and weird unwilling company loyalty, in a lot of cases.  Not a situation I would ever let myself fall into 

So my attention shifted, I may lack the skills to dev but I certainly have the skills to play games and write about them.  Having opinions on the media and reporting on industry happenings was something that a younger me rather liked the idea of.  But then, once again, this aspiration was mostly crushed by the reality of what being in games-media spaces is like.  An industry full of people who have no idea what they are talking about, writing bullshit in order to push magazine sales or, in the modern day, get ad revenue clicks.  A field where you aren't expected to have a deep understand or any real experience with a game before you review it, but where you play it for as short a time as humanly possible so that you can get a review up in time for release in order to drive traffic.  Not having any real opinions of your own but brown nosing indie developers and large publishers so that whatever outfit your writing for can recieve various perks such as early releases or even funding.  It sounds like a fucking miserable experience and judging from the joyless, skilless assholes that make up the majority of games media and games writing, I think if I had entered that side of the industry I would have left the mortal plane considerably earlier than intended.

So then I got older, I studied Japanese and became fluent and so the first thing I thought to maybe dabble in was game translation.  Well that turned out to be dogshit as well.  I started by doing a little freelancing, a few jobs for what mobile visual novels that I found on a website called Upwork.  The pay was low but it was a start, a foot on the ladder.  I figured if I kept plinking away at it then maybe I'd build a bit of a repuation, a bit of a portfolio and I could work my way up into higher profile things.  But then I got one job where the guy I was emailing back and forth with ended up just ghosting me after the job was complete and I didn't get paid.  I'm not working for free, so I took to looking for a salaried position somewhere and while I found some things I could qualify for, the salaries for these jobs are bullshit.  At the time, I wanted to get into translation as a way of escaping the English teaching trap a lot of gajin in Japan find themselves in, but the salaries for any positions I found usually only matched or were lower than the school I was working at.  Translating stuff is way harder than singing the alphabet to 3 year olds so I didn't really feel like adding the extra stress for basically no extra money, fuck that shit.  When my options were getting ripped off or extra stress for no reward I just bit the teaching bullet until I eventually got into translation and interpreting for an automotive company.  Not what I want to be doing per se but getting to use my Japanese and earning a real salary is nicer than having the field of education drain my soul

 All is not lost though.  Thankfully we live in an age where doing things by yourself is not only possible, but with a bit of luck and a bit of skill can even be profitable.  Working for a big game studio making things at the behest of investors and crunching so hard I never see my family sounds like shit, but engines and tutorials are avaliable and I can dev in my free time.  Thanks to services like Steam and Itch there's even avenues to put it out there.  The enthusiast press may be full of metrics driven idiots who couldn't tell a 3DO apart from a Sega Saturn but the mass adoption of social media and YouTube means it's extremely easy to just write your own shit and publish it to your own spaces and, once again, with a little luck even turn that into a living.  Translation is a bit harder to think positively on but at least I get to do it for real money even if its not about games.  A shame because the state of the average JP to EN translation for video games is actually embarassing, I'd like to do something about it, but without the coin behind it I'm happy to just play in the original text

So if the industry is making you as sad as it makes me on occasion, don't give up, just ignore it and get out there anyway.  Let me know about your indie projects so I can continue to avoid all this bullshit too.   

 

 

Time for "Dad Games", maybe

 

When people here the term "Dad Game" they may be thinking I'm talking about games about Dads.  You know, shit like The Last of Us or those non-greek God of War games, but that's not what I'm talking about, instead I'm talking about games FOR dads.  Depending on how old you are you may think dad games are things like Power Wash Simulator or some kind of job simulation type thing but in my mind there is no genre that suits the descriptor of "games for dads" better than Grand Strategy 

Before I continue actually, I have address the fact that I have no idea why I associate grand strategy with stuffy dads.  Maybe its because presented almost entirely by maps and dry numbers and also usually about simulating actual history rather than being about anything fictional.  But I've never actually known any dads who fit that bill.  When I was younger my dad wasn't like that, none of my friends dads were like that and none of the dads I know now are like that.  If anything, the one dad I knew in my younger days who was a gamer was playing Tomb Raider and Counterstrike and if you suggested that he play a grand strategy game he might have glassed you.  Despite that, if I close my eyes and imagine "dad game", I imagine a guy aged somewhere between 40-65 sat at a PC playing something like Hearts of Iron or Victoria

 Now that I am a father of two I feel like it may be time for me to revisit the genre.  The only genre of game alongside sports that I have actively avoided up until this point.  Not that I've avoided it as hard as sports, I have at numerous points in my life attempted it.  When I was in high school I had a friend try to get me into Hearts of Iron and I just couldn't figure it out.  The most complicated thing in a similar style I could say that I had any kind of skill was was maybe Civilization Call To Power or a Total War game but Hearts of Iron was way denser and way more complex than any of those games.  Hearts of Iron is the kind of game that makes Civilization look like a babies toy and so I ran away to play more JRPGs.  Later, after moving to Japan, I managed to get my hands on some of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games from KOEI and the gameplay was so complex and the language barrier so high that I put them in a cardbox box and they've been sat in a storeroom for about 10 years at this point.

But then I stumbled on a video from a YouTuber called KBash about Nobunaga's Ambition, the Japanese history version of the previously mentioned Romance games, also made by KOEI.  Watching his gameplay I had no idea what the FUCK was going on at any point but also the way he recants his experience of the series made me want to sit down and give it a proper, concentrated effort.  In his video, he played as the Chosokabe clan and historically, these are the guys that unified the Shikoku region of Japan and that's what he managed to do.  But the game didn't end there, he went on to fuck up the rest of the country, even going as far as killing Oda Nobunaga himself and in his simulated version of history it was the Chosokabe clan that unified the country.  Accurate history simulation that also allows for player input changing the course of events is immensely cool and just the idea made me want to go dust off some games.  I'm also going to assume that games like Hearts of Iron that cover things like World War 2 also allow for things like that.  Accurate to actual history but could allow the player to rewrite events if their knowledge of game mechanics are deep enough

So despite not being in the 40-65 year category just yet I think its time to break out some grand strategy.  Sengoku era Japan interests me far more than the second world war so I think I'm going to start with a Nobunaga game.  I actually got one for free with my PS+ subscription a long time ago.  I remember it blowing my mind because the discount on the store page for that month read "12,000→0" which for a subscription that was costing me 5000 A YEAR is insane value.  Its a pain the ass to have to hook up the system again but these games are 50 quid a pop on Steam so I'm going with the free choice just in case I bounce off again.  

I actually have one other backup game if I end up bouncing off the historical sim called Gemfire

 It's another KOEI thing but instead of being a stuffy historical sim its that style of game as a fantasy strategy game.  If Nobunaga beats my ass yet again then maybe Gemfire will be the gateway drug I need to assume my full dad form.  I also know that Pokemon Conquest exists but you can fuck off with that.  Either way, time to take up my seat in the ivory tower and strat crafting some strategems.  

Shadowman Sucks

 

I managed to knock yet another game off the endless stream request list and it was such a slog to play through that I feel compelled to write a thing about it.  Shadowman was released in 1999 for N64, PS1 and PC with a Dreamcast port also coming out a few months after the initial release.  It's a massive piece of shit that a decent number of people seem to have played but seemingly very few people have actually finished and after finally beating it for myself its extremely easy to understand why.  

The plot of the game is that Jack the Ripper is helping some asshole build a big fuck off castle in the land of the dead and this going to cause an apocolypse so you, playing as Shadowman, have to go and collect "dark souls" and shoot some guys in the face with a gun in order to save the day.  If you thought a game with such a simple plot would be a simple experience then you are quite mistaken.

From some of the footage I had seen prior to playing I had expected the game to be a generic 3rd person action shooter but instead Shadowman turned out to be a weird Metroid-like.  You start the game and make your way into "Deadside" where you are being blocked at almost every turn by soul gates or environmental obstacles that you do not have the skills to get past.  As you slog through you'll collect dark souls to unlock the gates which will unlock more areas which will contain items and skills that allow you to get to more areas to get more dark souls.  Standard stuff.  Part of the issue though is that none of the items or skills you get are interesting at all.  For example, in Metroid when you get the ice beam a number of core things about the game are changed all at once and suddenly you have a lot more options.  The gun is stronger which is satisfying and now you can use enemies to make platforms so your brain might light up as you remember some out of reach areas you might have seen previously.  In Shadowman, I slog through some boring ass beige dungeon to find a knife that lets me use teleporters.  I find about 3 of the fucking things and then the knife sits in my inventory for the rest of the game just as unused and unloved as I imagine Micheal LeRoi to be outside of his time as Shadowman.  The other major things you find, Shadowmans version of finding the Varia Suit, are tattoos that grant you certain abilities such as being able to walk on fire or swim in lava.  Two out of the four of these upgrades, which are a real pain in the ass to get, are only used briefly in very specific sections of the game,  so while in Metroid the varia suit is only useful in a few rooms, at least it has the knock on effect of reducing your incoming damage as well.  The toucher ability in Shadowman, for example, does nothing outside of its stated using and practically speaking it means that you push about 4 cubes and can shimmy across one ledge.  What a fucking waste.  

Maybe none of this would be an issue if it was fun to explore but that sucks massive shit too.  The levels have 2 themes, beige looking caverns or rust colored interiors.  That is the only thing you'll be looking at for the majority of your playthrough.  This isn't just visually boring to look at but causes an issue because this game is labyrinthine as fuck and doesn't give you a map at any point so the samey looking environments just cause constant confusion.  There was one level near the end of the game where there were 3 rooms in a loop and I didn't know I was looping because every corridor looked like the previous one so it was only when I hit the entrance again after about 30 minutes of exploring did I realize that I had double backed on myself.  This then led to another 30 minutes of scanning the muddy graphics for a hole in a wall that I had missed.  Maybe if any effort at all had gone into the visuals or a map button had been implemented maybe so much of my life wouldn't have been wasted.  

Then there's the combat and like every other aspect of this title, it sucks massive dicks.  Your main weapon is a pistol that shoots blue blobs and is the only thing that can kill monsters in Deadside.  You do get a regular pistol, shotgun and machine gun but I don't think I used them a single time since they can't actually deliver the killing blow.  I THINK the idea is that you equip one "real" gun in one hand and your soul pistol in the other and then weaken then enemy with bullets before killing them with shadow-powers.  That still doesn't make any fucking sense though because you also find shadow weapons in Deadside that can kill monsters in exchange for the use of some MP or some shit.  All of these weapons are hot dogshit and I got some use out of ONE of them against the games singular large enemy type but otherwise, total waste.  The pistol powers up as your soul meter goes up and allows for a charge shot so there's basically no reason to use anything else.  When the weapons aren't out here being ass though, the combat itself, along with the rest of the controls are basically unusable.  Most of the enemies in the game will just stand in place and shoot at you or run at you in a straight line so you don't feel just how bad it is but every so often a boss will turn up that is significantly more mobile than you and things get real miserable real fast.  Shadowman controls a bit like a tank which is fine for the most part.  Like I said, most enemies just stand and shoot so controlling like a S.T.A.R.S. member with broken legs is manageable.  But then you get some enemies that are fucking Dragon Ball Z teleporting around the arena on you and shooting your from all angles and you just have to sit there and impotently watch your life bar decrease as Shadowman takes 4 business days just to turn 180 degrees.  The final boss in particular is flying around a giant arena while shooting homing missles at you from directions that the camera can't see so good fucking luck with that.  Thankfully, if the final boss kills you, instead of returning to a check point you just get a bad ending and after I saw what I was up against I just threw up my hands and let the world end.  

The thing that really killed my enjoyment of the game though, despite all of its awful design, was the bugs and technical issues.  If I had a dollar for every time I got stuck on some level geometry and was unable to move then I could provide the Alzheimer's charity that we are raising money for here a pretty significant research grant.  Then there's certain enemies that look like they should be just minor annoyances but can kill you in seconds because Shadow Man doesn't get any I-Frames on hit.  Tiny fish in bodies of water and dogs, enemies that seem like they are designed to harrass you and deal minor damage while a bigger threat leads a big attack are actually the most dangerous thing in the game as they can drain your HP from full to zero in a matter of frames.  The worst technical problem, though, came in the form of a wall in the final temple en route to the upgrade that lets you swim in lava.  In that temple there is a wall of rotating blades.  The blades move slow and you have to shimmy across a ledge suspended above a death pit to reach the other side.  It's a pathetically easy trap to avoid but due to the gaps in the ledge the game just bugs the fuck out and Shadow Man gets stuck between the two ledges.  Being locked in places means you cant avoid the blade and then the blade knocks you into the death pit.  SOMETIMES the bug doesn't occcur and you can just shimmy through but its basically a dice roll every time and there's a easy but lengthy platforming section you have to restart from EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. the bug kills you.  When the environment isn't killing you then sometimes bosses or enemies might push your shit in because the targetting system just decides to take a day off in the middle of a fight.  It happens mostly with flying enemies  where Shadow Man just gives up on the fight because I guess he has chronic neck pain.  Maybe these complaints aren't true for the Dreamcast and PS1 versions but I'm sure as shit not suffering this crap game again just to find out 

What blows my fucking mind is that this piece of trash got a remaster.  Who the fuck was out there wishing they could replay Shadow Man again with beefed up graphics and a morsel of extra content.  Weirdos, that's who.  If this game ever gets requested on my stream again you can catch my ass taking a voluntary trip to Deadside

Weird Games Getting Weird Sequels

 

I live for weird niche shit.  I don't care if I need to dig through Steam suggestion queues for hours on end or digging through the aisles of a retro game store, I love filling my game libraries with weird crap that no ones played and no one cares about other than me and a few other weirdos.  So imagine my surprise when I'm going through my Steam suggestions only to find that a curio game from my earlier years or something I never hear anyone talking about ever gets a new release in the current year.  I want to shine a light on these newer games so that hopefully I can convince a few more people to try the same weird shit that I like, here we go 

1. Radirgy Swag

Radirgy is a arcade shmup from 2005 that made its way to the Dreamcast and the Gamecube later down the line.  It was Japan only but its built up a bit of a following with shmup fans thanks to its unique artstyle, bangin' OST and interesting gameplay loop that involves slicing things up like its 2am in central London.  

Surprisingly, it got a couple of sequels which I think are both on the Nintendo Switch although if my understanding is correct, the English version of Swag got delisted due to license issue.  I was pretty shocked, then, to find that on the 4th of March 2026, Swag got released to Steam and for 10 bucks and even you can play it right now.  Radirgy 2 is still MIA on PC but apparently you can get it on Switch and PS4.  I'm not sure if thats true for places that aren't Japan but if it is, go check that out too

This is the most normal one of the games I'm about to cover since the original was a shmup and its sequels are also shmups.  Good games too, I'd suggest playing the first one on and emulator for either DC or Gamecube to see if you gel with it and then dropping some support for this game on Steam if you do.  

2. Slave Zero X 

Slave Zero is a 3rd person shooter from 1999 where you control a big ass robot shooting other big ass robots.  This is one I never finished myself since I only ever had the Dreamcast demo of the thing but there's a user on YouTube called pmcTRILOGY who has done speedruns of it that I've enjoyed watching.  One I need to bump up the backlog priority list for sure.  It's a game that I think very few people are actually aware of.  I can maybe think of one other person that I know who is aware of what Slave Zero is and I'm not certain he's actually played it for himself, like he just knows it exists

So then in 2024 it got a weird followup game called Slave Zero X.  X is not another 3rd person shooter about big ass robots like you might expect but instead a 2D side scrolling sprite based character action game.  Inspirations for its designed cited on the store page are Devil May Cry, Strider and Guilty Gear.  Guilty Gear.  Funnily enough, when I saw the Steam page for this first time around its launch the first thing my brain went to was Blazblue because the main character is a dead ringer for Hakumen from that game. 

I can't speak to its quality since I've not played it for myself but it honestly looks really cool.  If you're into that style of game then it might be worth checking out.  Its price tag is a little high at 20.99 which is why I have not purchased it for myself yet but hardcore character action fans looking for a fix might be willing to drop that.  I'm personally gonna either wait for a sale or a significantly reduced backlog and I'm certain the former will come first.  

3. Baroque: Become A Meta Being: Revive

Baroque is a strange game originally released in 1998 for the Sega Saturn exclusively in Japan and is probably one of my favorite games on the system.  It got a remake that actually released in the west for the PS2 and Wii but it's quite different from the original version and just not quite as good.  So with that combo of Japan only game on an obscure system along side a sub standard remake that got mixed reviews, Baroque was doomed to the curio dimension.  

So when I was going through my steam discovery queue one evening imagine how hard my jaw hit the fucking floor when I saw Baroque: Become a Meta Being crossed my path being a game that apprently released in December of 202 mother fucking 5. 

If you have not seen or heard of Baroque then the quick description is that it's a sort of first person real time dungeon crawling roguelike kind of like mystery dungeon but not really.  That's not a good description but at the very least you can get a vague idea of what I'm on about.  So what kind of game do you think this is?  If you said "oh, another dungeon crawler of course" then you lose 10 points and get bonked on the head because its a fucking FROGGER CLONE.  This isn't close to the first time the series has had a spinoff that's out of left field like this but man, all I want is more weird dungeon crawling and instead I get this shit.  

Actually, having not played it I can't say for certain that its shit.  I don't actually like Frogger all that much but I'm such a slut for Baroque that I'm basically forced to at least give it a go.  I'll go in with an open mind and maybe I too can hop my way into becoming a Meta Being. 

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All of this makes me wonder if there are other weird curio games from my past that have recent or semi-recent sequels or spinoffs just hiding out there on Steam or some other storefront somewhere.  Is there are Jade Cocoon 3 or something extremely similar hiding away somewhere?  Maybe a modern Mohawk and Headphone Jack I don't know about?  Or fuck it, after seeing that Baroque game there could be typing tutor based on The Granstream Saga for all I know.  I need to do more digging and I need to try these games and so do you.