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.    

Super Mario Kart is Actually Garbage

 

I remember as a child seeing  Super Mario Kart on TV screens around electronic stores and thinking it looked like the coolest shit in the world but for some reason my parents never got it for me.  None of my friends who also owned a SNES at the time had it either so while I enjoyed Mario Kart on the GBA, DS, Gamecube and Wii throughout the years, the original outing had completely passed me by until recently.

Well, I really should thank my parents for never buying me this one because holy shit is this game a piece of fucking garbage.  I'm actually surprised at just how popular Mario Kart is in the modern day because if I had played this one when it was new, I sure as shit wouldn't have been so willing to give the later entries a try.

As far as the core game is concerned its pretty similar to what you might be used to if you too have only played the newer games.  Drive around the track, collect items to pelt at the other racers, try to come first.  The big difference with this game, however, is that it's worse in pretty much every way.  Most notably the handling of the karts is complete ass.  Just steering left and right feels like pulling teeth and the drifting?  fucking forget it.  You jump and do drifts in basically the same way but the drift sends you flying super wide around corners if you try to hold it for anything more than a nanosecond and the AI that is constantly cheating will just take it tight without so much as a jump and just overtake you anyway.

Not only does the AI cheat with its driving but it LOVES to cheat with the items too.  On 50cc its not so noticable but on 100 is when you really start to feel it.  Most tracks only have a single section on them where there is a collection of item boxes.  But the AI racers don't give a fuck about that, if you are in first the second place racer will CONSTANTLY be pelting you with shit to try and make you screw up.  Even if you aren't in first place the AI fucking cheats with the items.  After I managed to pull a win on the 100cc special cup, I decided to check out the 150cc mode because that's usually the most fun in these games.  I was in like, 6th or something and the Luigi in front of me popped a star, ok fine.  But then, right after that star ran out, he just fucking popped another one.  We hadn't crossed the item boxes, his inventory should have been empty, but nope, fuck the rules he's just invincible forever I guess.  Even when you get items sometimes they just wont work.  At one point I had a red shell which I fired at the first place racer who then proceeded to just fucking jump over it.  Not like, the little hop that you do when you press L or R, a big ass fucking jump as if they had the feather item but, once again, there's no way in hell they should have had that shit because earlier in the lap they were pelting me with mushrooms, so what the fuck?!  Playing Super Mario Kart is like playing with a shitty little kid who just starts making stuff up when they start losing.  "Nuh-uh, you can't overtake me because my car suddenly has giant rocket boosters", fuck off kid, how about I boost you into a wood chipper.

Not to mention that a single error can basically cost you an entire race even if that error is made on like, lap 2 of 5.  In the later games the AI also cheats a bit there too but you can outskill them.  You can race so well and be so far ahead in those games that even if you get smashed with back to back blue shells, in most situations a human player will be so far in the lead it won't matter.  In Super Mario Kart you can be in first for a whole race, playing perfectly and then clip the dirt for a nano-second and suddenly you're in 7th holding nothing but a banana peel and a bucket of salty tears.  If the course has bits that you can fall off and you happen to go off track then fucking forget it, just restart because you aren't climbing the positions fast enough for a decent result.

I'm sure there's some massively sweaty bellend who's really good at Mario Kart who can play all the tracks perfectly and get world record times who would disagree with everything I've said about the game but to you, hypothetical person in my mind, I say that you can fuck right off and fellate an exhaust pipe.  Mastering a shit game doesn't change the fact that it's a shit game, go away.

Thankfully, unlike the later entries the game rolls credits at the end of 100cc special cup so after trying 150 and seeing the bullshit dial turned to fucking 15 I put the game down.  No, I refuse to sit here and roll the item dice for hours on end until I get a gold cup, it's not worth it, not even for Retro Achievements.  The later games are fun as fuck but this first game belongs in the pits of hell next to Shaq-Fu and fucking Hong Kong 97.  Piece of actual garbage

ROM Sites are Important

 

In the last couple of days well used emulation website CDRomance I assume got contacted by some legal types and were forced to take down all of their download links.  A sad day for users of emulation as CDRomance was probably one of the easiest places to get even some of the most obscure games you could think of and now those users have been scattered to other sites once again as a giant of emulation has fallen.

There are going to be a number of people, mainly Nitendo fans for some reason, who will see this news and think "Good! Another piracy website getting what it deserves" but I wish to point out to these idiots that emulation websites like CDRomance and Emuparadise before it are probably the best thing we have when it comes to the preservation of old games because we all know that developers and publishers sure as shit aren't going to preserve the data themselves.  In fact, companies are going out of their way to erase the past in the form of the hundreds of remakes that you see every year.  One look at Twitter when Resident Evil 4 Remake came out with people saying absolutely insane things like "Resident Evil 4 was always bad and this update was completely needed" and it paints the picture that even so-called "gaming enthusiasts" don't care about preserving the past of the medium.  People are more than happy to have the old thing erased if we can get another version of that old thing that just looks a bit shinier, even if its completely removed from what that original thing was.

There are purists out there who will also argue that emulation is bad because if you wanted to play or preserve the old thing so bad then you should go through the effort of aquiring original discs/carts and hardware.  Well there's two big problems with that.  The first being is that no physical media will last forever.  As much as I enjoy owning discs and carts of my personal faves there will come a day, maybe within my lifetime or maybe after I'm dead, it doesn't matter, that those discs and connectors on the carts will rot and the data will be lost.  You can make all the clone systems you want to play them but that doesn't change the fact those carts and discs will die one day.  Just because it might happen a few generations from now doesn't make it not a problem.  The second issue is that a lot of these games, the ones people want to play and preserve are prohibitably expensive thanks to absolute idiots treating old games like NFTs, not as games to be played or pieces of art to be preserved, but things to speculate on and hopefully get rich off of.

Don't forget, that when you buy an overpriced video game off some sausage fingered unwashed cunt on E-Bay or whatever other service, you aren't supporting that game in any meaningful way.  The money doesn't go to a developer that worked on it or even a grimy publisher that put it on store shelves, it goes right into the pocket of that unwashed cunt so that he can find some other obscure Saturn or N64 game to buy on the cheap and sit on it in the hopes that it'll build in value.  These phsycial copies don't hold any real purpose if they are priced so high that most people who remember them fondly or may want to experience them for the first time can't get hold of them.  

That's why emulation is so important, it makes the entire history of the medium avaliable for everyone to play and who knows how these older games may inspire another users who otherwise may have never gotten to try them.  How many games that have been locked to Japan for years for most people have been made avaliable to wider audiences thanks to emulation and ROM sites.  NO ONE would have known what fucking Racing Lagoon was if not for the efforts of those fan translators and sure, a bunch of people "pirated" the game to play it in English but if you think about it another way, the interest generated from that fan translation should maybe have the cogs going in some Square Enix money-mans brain to do a remake or a sequel.

Companies need to put the legal threats down and let ROM sites for old games just exist and a "necessary evil" for the sake of the mediums history.  Sure, if you have some sweaty nerds pirating the lastest Switch games to run on Yuzu, sure, take that shit down but if little Timmy wants to download fucking Albert Odyssey (real game btw) and experience it for the first time then fucking let him, I'm sure SEGAs bottom line will be just fine even if 100,000 people did that.

Leave the ROM sites alone
Fuck you Nintendo

Note: I'm aware of the half-truths in this post but I'm not discussing that here, shut up and enjoy your tickets in silence, idiot

Abandoning Game Collection

 

When I first moved to Japan, access to retro shops and old hardware meant that I was extremely excited to start collecting old games.  I quite enjoy playing retro games and so being able to do so on real hardware sounded really good but over the years I have come to realize that collecting games is a big pile of bullshit (for me)

As of right now, I still have a pretty sizeable chunk of my game collection.  A while ago I sold a bunch of boxed SNES games that I had bought for about 100 yen each back to local used book chain Book Off because they were eating up tons of space in my closet, but most of it remains intact.  The problem with this collection though is that it's not doing anything, it's just sat there, collecting dust, I just own it for the sake of owning it.  

I do know that there's quite a lot of people who like displaying their games.  Piling them up in shelves like in the header image, putting jewel cases and boxes side by side or, in some cases, even putting them in special display cabinets.  This is all fine and dandy but there are two problems with that.  The first is a problem personal to me and many other collectors living in Japan where our houses or apartments just don't have to the space to do that, so even though I have a pretty sizable collection of PS1 games, they are just hiding in a cardboard box in my wardrobe.  The second is that even if I could, I just don't give enough of a fuck do that, I don't see the appeal of it.  Games are meant to be PLAYED, not looked at and I'm sure as shit that if you have a full wall of SNES games you aren't playing all of them any time soon.  In fact, if what I've seen on Twitter is to be believed, you have that massive wall of games and yet all you do is sit there and play Super Mario World, Super Metriod and Tetris all day while the rest of it sits there unused and unloved.  

What I realized though, the reason I started collecting all those games all those years ago is that I care about having access to these games more than I care about owning them.  Sometimes, on a lazy afternoon, it would be nice to just grab a random handful of Saturn games, spread them around me on the floor like I'm a young lad again and whittle away the hours playing a bunch of shit I've never heard of.  But nowadays that isn't necessary.  Mini systems and more importantly, emulation exist now so you don't actually NEED to spend a ton of money and use a ton of space to have that experience, with a few clicks and some computer know how you can have that afternoon with the Saturn but at no cost and you'll still have the shelf space for a cactus or something.

"But Tau! Emulation is IlLeGaL" I hear some of the 40 year old British saddos on Twitter cry.  Yes, to some extent they are correct, companies would probably rather you not download 3rd party software and their games and play them on your PC but who is really being hurt by emulation? Let's think on it for a second

One game I love dearly is Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne.  A long while ago, after moving to Japan, I wanted to play it again on my nice PS2 that I bought in Book Off.  So I went down to that very same Book Off to find a copy, and lo and behold there it was, the regular edition of SMT3 for about 600 yen.  But wait, Nocturne in Japan isn't the same Nocturne I had in the UK, I had the Maniacs edition! So a bit more looking and I find the Maniacs edition for TWENTY THOUSAND FUCKING YEN.  So I went home and I emulated it via PCSX2.  Now who did I hurt by doing this? ATLUS? No because they got my high school pocket money when I bought it in England.  The only people that lost out was the company that runs Book Off.  Someone who wasn't related to it's production or publication missed out on $200 because I'm not willing to pay jacked up prices for game that came out in 2003.

But the, a miracle happened, a Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne HD Remaster was announced for the Switch and PS4 and lemme fuckin' tell ya, I bought that shit IMMEDIATELY.  So the 20,000 yen I didn't give to whatever cunt runs Book Off I instead gave 6000 of it to ATLUS for the Switch version because SMT3 on the go is rad. The other 14,000 that I saved I can now use to buy other Atlus games like P5R (lol) and P5S or Persona Q or something like that.  Money that will go to people who actually work on those games to hopefully give me more SMT games (SMT5 release date please I'm beggin ya) If however I HAD given my money to Book Off that instead though, I probably wouldn't buy the remaster because I already had it on PS2 and ATLUS would have lost out on a sale.  Emulation reminded me just how awesome SMT3 still is after all those years, and then ATLUS sucked the money right out of my wallet with a version I can play on the go.  ATLUS, if anything, owe a big thank you to PCSX2.

If I buy a classic game, I want that money to go to the developers or the people who may be involved in making another one, I want to vote with my wallet and tell those devs or publishers that this is what I want more of.  I don't want to make some re-seller little cunt on Ebay $200 richer so he can buy more anime figurines to cum all over

I'm not saying however that game collecting is complete bullshit, if YOU personally get something out of it and you have the money to do it, then go for it.  I know a couple guys who collect for specifically the Saturn and the PC Engine and to tell you the truth, the idea of curating a collection of games for one system that you're particularly passionate about does have a sort of lure to me even now.  But if I'm being honest I'd rather save my money, support new IP and buy certain remakes of games I really like so that hopefully we can see some more from those series'

Snake Rattle and Roll

 

When you think of "the worst NES games" what usually comes to mind?

Silver Surfer?

Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde?

Action 52?

Yeah, screw all that, THIS is the worst game to ever curse the NES.

Snake Rattle and Roll is a game where you have to slither around eating balls in order to make yourself heavy enough to hit a bell attached to a High Striker in order to open a door to progress to the next stage.  There are a couple of stages that don't do this and instead opt for straight platforming challenges and all in all you've got to get through 10 levels of the stuff before you can see the ending.

There are 2 problems with this game, one minor and one major.  The minor problem is the perspective.  The game has this sort of isometric camera that was probably really cool to see on the NES back in the day but in a game that needs precision platforming, the camera makes it sort of hard to judge where you are in relation to platforms and enemies at certain points.  I call this a minor issue though because it's the sort of thing you can just get used to after a short amount of play time.  The major issue though is the ice physics, probably the dumbest, most obnoxious ice physics in all of video games and I say this without hyperbole.

The last 2 levels are these icy gauntlets that are full of one hit kill rocks coming at you and the balls you must put in your mouth to reach the end of the stage are flying, so while you're slipping around trying to eat them you're liable to fall of the stage A LOT.  The game also has a garbage respawning system so more than once I would die only to respawn off the ledge again and fall right to my death.  The big problem though is the ice itself because you never EVER get a break from it pulling you all over the place, meaning that the ice physics are working on your snake EVEN WHEN YOU'RE IN MID-AIR.  So if there's a small platform you need to hit, you'll always either undershoot it and slide back down whatever hell mountain you were climbing or you'll over shoot it and fall to an instant death.

The game only has a handful of continues too so if you mess up too often on those ice stages, enjoy being knocked back to stage one every time.  Also don't give me any shit about the stage 8 warp because actually hitting that is a pain in the ass as well.

Sometimes playing shit games is fun because having a nice controlled rage at something obviously shit can be cathartic.  Sometimes they can be so jank that they sort of come full circle and become weirdly entertaining in their shitness.  Snake Rattle and Roll isn't cathartic to yell at and it isn't jank enough to be fun, it's just shit.  Shit in it's purest form, unfiltered and untainted by any traces of quality game design, just a massive pile of doo doo.

There is a version on the Mega Drive too but I've not played that, so I dont know if it's any better.  But to be honest, after the experience I had with the NES one, that version can suck at a fat one.  Don't play this game, it's not good

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I would be willing to bet a few hundred of my Yen that when Super Smash Bros Melee came out on the Game Cube and people saw Marth in this roster, they had NO idea where he was from.  Melee came out in 2001 and Shadow Dragon, the DS remake of this game, didn't come out until 2008 so I bet for a long time Marth's origin outside of "that dude from that FE game" was a mystery to a lot of people.  Hell, I even saw people who looked at Hector in FE7 on the GBA and was like "is that Marth?" when his name and weapon are clearly different.

Silly comments about Smash aside, I recently finished Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light on NES.  The game follows Marth doing some stuff against some bad dudes, I actually have no idea what the story is because the entire game is in Hiragana and if you think I'm going to read long textboxes of only that, you have another thing coming.

If you're unfamiliar with Fire Emblem then it is a series of strategy RPGs where the main feature is permadeath.  Over the course of your 25 level adventure with Marth, you'll meet and recruit a number of people of various classes and skills that will level up as they fight stuff on each map.  However, if one of your allies falls in battle they are dead forever, no coming back, end of the line.  This of course means that MOST people who play these games will have a save before each map and will instantly restart as soon as one character goes down.  I tried to avoid this on stream to make it more interesting but I did have a selection of 5 or 6 core team members who, if killed, would trigger a restart. 

Fire Emblem 1 isn't actually all that dissimilar from its sequels but there are a couple of features missing from this game that make it grueling compared to the others.  For example, this game lacks the weapon triangle from the later games and instead has weapons just having certain qualities.  For example swords are accurate but don't do all that much damage while axes are inaccurate and will cleave a guy in half like its Mortal Kombat.  In later games, you have a sort of "swords beat axes" type thing so if you take advantage of that the guy with the axe is a lot more likely to miss.  FE1 doesn't have that so occasionally a raider will just walk up to one of your mercs or even Marth himself and just send him to the shadow realm in a single hit and there's nothing you can do but curl up into a ball and cry.

Crits also seem significantly more abundant in this game for both sides.  I got out of many stick situations with a lucky critical but also I lost a fair deal of good, well leveled and geared units over the course of the game to some guy who usually does 10 damage, suddenly doing 30 damage to my guy with 27HP max. There's a lot of frustration with these games but that's what makes them all the more satisfying when you eventually beat them.

I wouldn't recommend Fire Emblem 1 on NES to someone new to the series, I don't even know if I could recommend it to a fan either.  It's not a bad game but its sort of obtuse, slow and seemingly unfair at times.  If you're new then I'd say go and play Three Houses on the Switch because I heard you can turn off the permadeath in that game so if THATS the feature that's turning you off, you can test the waters with a game that doesn't do that.  If you don't mind the permadeath though, go dig out your GBA and play Fire Emblem (7) instead although I'm only saying that because, despite owning Three Houses since December, I haven't actually played it yet.

I personally never want to play THIS installment ever again although I was digging through my old NES carts on Sunday and I found the sequel, Fire Emblem Gaiden so despite everything I just said about this game being obtuse and unfair, I'm probably going to start that very soon.

Akihabara Aint All That

I am now home from Tokyo but before I put that horrible memory behind me I want to tell you a little about a place called Akihabara and how it isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Just in case there are people who aren't clued in on their Japan shit, Akihabara is a bit like nerd Mecca.  If you're into manga, video games or weird shit like maid cafes then people will tell you that Akihabara is THE place to visit if you go to Japan.  This might be the case if you're a hardcore anime fan, but for a gamer Akihabara is a bit of a disappointment.

It's not a shitty place by any stretch and there are a lot of things to like about the place.  For example it doesn't matter if you're into new games or retro games, chances are that if you want something you WILL be able to find it in Akihabara.  The selection on display in some of the stores in this area is nuts, it's the only place I've seen a fully stocked shelf of MSX games and that's just one thing of many.

However, as good as all this may seem, Akihabara is massively overpriced ESPECIALLY if you're into your retro shit.  I found games for 1000, 2000+ that I bought in Nagoya for 100s of yen.  The arcades are overpriced too but not the kind you might think.  Modern games are the same price as they are everywhere else but Akihabara has a pretty extensive collection of cabinets running older games.  In Nagoya, cabs running older games are 50 yen a pop but here they were your usual 100 yen, which is a little bit BS to be honest.

In it's defence, I didn't have a lot of time to truly bury my fangs in and really explore the place so I'm sure that there are places that are actually really good.  That said, there's no way you're going to find these places without a full day to explore and some command of Japanese to help get you round.  So if you're a resident of Akihabara or a nearby area, feel free to comment and call me an idiot but if you're a tourist making a pilgrimage to what is essentially nerd capital, then you may feel a bit let down.