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Author: Mathew Kumar

  • UFO 50 #6: Mortol (Perry, 2024)

    UFO 50 #6: Mortol (Perry, 2024)

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  • Match Day (Ritman/Clarke, 1984)

    Match Day (Ritman/Clarke, 1984)

    Developed/Published by: Jon Ritman, Chris Clarke / Ocean
    Released: 1984 (first reviews showed up in Jan 1985.)
    Completed: 20/06/2026
    Completion: Scored a goal, at least, in every version I played.

    It’s the World Cup, and as usual when any major football tournament comes around, I suddenly get a hankering to spend all my time engaging with football content, which means that I end up playing a football game or two.

    Of course, this World Cup is a bit… extra, isn’t it? There are so many games a day that it’s hard to find space to do anything else, and I’m lamenting that I didn’t get myself a big wallchart or something just so I could remember the dazzling number of permutations of potential brackets. But on browsing Steam to see what was what in the ol’ football world, I was surprised to see that Match Day was available. Literally Jon Ritman and Chris Clarke’s original Match Day in its ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 editions, along with International Match Day for the Speccy (which is just Match Day but with some extra pieces of art and they just changed the team names to international teams.) Not Match Day II, the one people have a particular fondness for. Match Day. The one from 1984. On Steam. For money.

    This seemed a bit… optimistic from publisher Pixel Games. The last time I mentioned Match Day was when I was discussing Nintendo’s shockingly rancid Soccer, where I made the (possibly controversial) statement that “Match Day was at least as good as this.” It’s a statement I more-or-less stand by–certainly if you were looking for value for money, you were getting more for less with Match Day. But in 2026, with Soccer (essentially) free on Switch with a Switch Online subscription… Pixel Games are absolutely asking for money for old rope, here. As with Soccer, only the most extremely nostalgic could squeeze some pleasure out of a game of this.

    Match Day isn’t the first home computer football game; it’s not even the first on the Spectrum. The original text–at least, the one that spawned all the imitators–was International Soccer, released on the C64 in 1983, and a pre-Batman Jon Ritman, looking for his next project, found that every publisher he asked was looking for a version of International Soccer on Spectrum. Publisher Artic would beat him to it with World Cup Football1, but it wouldn’t matter–Match Day would blow it away, becoming a top seller (and becoming well liked enough to be mentioned in Crash’s fan poll, published as late as April 1986!)

    I’ve mentioned it before, but the issue with early sports games is the effort required just to recreate the sport is such that there’s really no space to consider what would make it particularly fun as a video game, and Match Day is no different. You can recognise it as football. Sure, there aren’t the right number of players, but there are throw-ins, corners, keepers–it’s football. But on the humble Speccy, there are issues. Firstly, the colour palette is insane. The game defaults to everything being white or yellow on bright green, which (I imagine?) comes from the idea that the most important thing about football is that it’s played on green pitches with white lines and a white ball–though you can at least go into the settings and change that to black on green, which is more or less parseable.2 The main issue is that it’s slow (though not really any slower than Nintendo’s take on the sport…) and with only one button–and no ability to actually tackle, or control shot power(!)–Match Day is really sloppy and stop-start to play, as you and your opponent rely on trying to slowly block each other with your players’ weighty movements. Because players with the ball are slightly slower than opponents, this can lead to situations where it feels you get completely boxed out (or just end up passing it to your opponent and back again) especially because a cross or diagonal pass is more than likely going to end up in another throw in.

    Match Day makes you watch a long intro to each match to show off that they’d licensed the Match Of The Day theme (but not the name.)

    To be charitable, the game is a lot of scrappy midfield play chasing loose balls, very “jumpers for goalposts.” They may as well be, because the keepers are hilariously incapable. When you get control of them, you can either have them leap left or right, and that’s it. If the ball is literally next to them, slowly creeping over the line? You’re out of luck, it’s going in.

    The reason I suspect Match Day was successful is that–while it doesn’t exactly play a great, or let’s be honest, even an adequate game of football, it’s a game where you can name teams whatever you like and easily play against friends–even in tournaments of up to eight people! If you had a Speccy and at least one pal, this was definitely going to get played a lot.

    But today, Match Day is a museum piece. Essentially impossible to play (and with five minute halves, interminable to do so–a problem Super Soccer suffered too.) You’d hope then that in a modern re-release there’d be something to make the package feel worth it. Maybe I’m not asking for a Digital Eclipse-level documentary or something, but… some box art? Any context whatsoever?

    No, this is shockingly bare-bones. Like, bare-bones to the point you can tell they didn’t even bother to design a front end, it looks completely default. You get saves, rewind, and imagine resizing, but no scanlines or anything like that. There’s a real lack of care here. The first and most obvious thing they could offer is a “turbo” mode to speed the game up a bit, but they were hardly going to go that far when if you’re playing the Amstrad or C64 versions you actually have to watch the game get run from the operating system. And suspiciously the C64 version has the team names overwritten, so it’s not even a clean rom (look, I’m not saying they just downloaded it off the internet, but…) 

    Speaking of…

    Conversion Therapy

    The Amstrad version is not very fondly remembered–Retro Gamer seem to give it a kick every time they mention Match Day–and it wasn’t developed by Ritman and Clarke but by Sentient Software3. However, I do have to say… I like it better than the Spectrum version, sorry. Sure the ball’s yellow, it’s maybe a touch slower, and there’s some very weird colour corruption when players overlap, but exactly the same as far as I can tell–although Ritman says on his own site,

    “The versions for the BBC, C64 & Amstrad CPC were programmed by others who didn’t even talk to me about it.”

    I’m certain this version shares code (maybe Ocean passed it along) but happy to be corrected. Ritman does go on to say say he thought the conversions were dire, but the Amstrad version, at least, might be bearable at double speed. Still a shame about the terrible goalies though.

    The C64 version, however, is unsalvagable drivel. It’s way smoother than the Speccy or CPC versions (oh to have hardware sprites…) but it gets pretty much everything else wrong. The AI is non-existent. Opposing players seem to just stand about in a stupor, occasionally waking up to run at you and the camera doesn’t move until you’re at the very edge of the screen, so you’ve got no idea what’s coming, but it doesn’t matter because you can basically walk it into the goal every time. Absolutely shocking.

    The Pixel games release doesn’t include the BBC Micro version, but I feel like I should mention it anyway because it was, absurdly, ported by Chris Roberts, he of Wing Commander and Star Citizen fame. So there’s a game he actually finished, then.

    Match Day was important in its time and place, and I feel like I should be glad it’s “in print”–so many games aren’t–but you just can’t release it like this.

    Will I ever play it again? Aye, I’ll get the lads round for an eight-player cup one day. (I will not do this.)

    Final Thought: Literally the day Ritman handed in Match Day he saw Rare’s Knight Lore and became “determined” to make an isometric game. He went on to make Batman, and we all know how that went.

    1. Which would, of course, infamously become World Cup Carnival. You can read all about that on Super Chart Island. ↩︎
    2. The way you know which player you’re in control of is that that player’s boots are a different colour. Not an ideal system, but it works. ↩︎
    3. There are a few Sentient Softwares on Mobygames, but the most likely one is the one that made How To Be A Complete Bastard. So that’s cool. ↩︎
  • ‘A New Industry With A New Identity’: How Canadian Devs Are Faring In 2026

    ‘A New Industry With A New Identity’: How Canadian Devs Are Faring In 2026

    Now in its fifth year, Toronto Canada’s XP Game Summit–a sister conference to the long-running Montreal International Game Summit–offered a unique opportunity to take the temperature of a Canadian games industry that, as in other regional industries, has found itself battered by the winds of change. 

    Despite doubling in size between 2013 and 2022, the industry has suffered recently due to what some have argued is an outsized emphasis on generous tax incentives slanted towards triple-A multinationals with little oversight or protection for workers. In recent years, this has meant the industry has seen seismic studio closures and layoffs, with Embracer group shutting down Onoma (once Square Enix Montreal) and Ubisoft closing Ubisoft Halifax shortly after the studio unionized (although the company claims there was no connection).

    It’s no surprise then that at the XP Summit, attendees were bearish on the future of triple-A development in Canada. What might surprise some is that despite this, the mood at XP Game Summit was optimistic: couched in the recognition that the global games industry has changed drastically due to the “pandemic hangover.”

    Continue reading on gamedeveloper.com.

  • The Three Stooges (Mylstar Electronics, 1984)

    The Three Stooges (Mylstar Electronics, 1984)

    Developed/Published by: Mylstar Electronics
    Released: 05/1984
    Completed: 29/01/2026
    Completion: Rescued Curly’s bride, Cora. It’s just the same thing again for the other two brides!

    As celebration of the release of The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2, I’m proud to share this first excerpt from my article in said journal, “A History Of The Three Stooges In Video Games”. The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2 is available only physically, and only from Amazon: .com, .ca, .co.uk (or your regional variation) so run out and get a copy today! Well, you don’t need to run anywhere, but you know what I mean.

    I’ve never been a huge fan of The Three Stooges. I remember once watching what’s generally considered a peak Stooges short, A Plumbing We Will Go, absolutely stone-faced as Will Sloan, editor of the Journal of Stoogealogical Studies, and fellow Stooge fan Justin Decloux sat next to me, crying with laughter. But I never grew up with The Three Stooges–in fact, I can’t remember ever seeing them at all on TV in the UK, while I do have strong memories of Laurel and Hardy shorts playing on BBC2. When I finally encountered The Three Stooges I viewed them as, at best, poor imitators of the best of the slapstick form. Some cursory research shows that this reflects an Atlantic divide: bolstered, perhaps, by Stan Laurel being English, and that Laurel and Hardy toured British music halls post WWII, Laurel and Hardy remained popular in the UK, with their shorts staying in rotation, whereas in the US, The Three Stooges continued to grind away into the 70s, a hegemon led by cheap syndication and desperation.

    But I have warmed to the Stooges. I’ve actually got Will and Justin to thank for that. I was invited to Justin’s bachelor party where we watched a 16mm of one of their later, recycled-footage filled shorts Husbands Beware, and the sight of these old men hurting each other… if you’ll forgive me for recycling my Letterboxd review: if the old adage goes “comedy is tragedy plus time” the sight of the Stooges,ravaged by time, stumbling through a cheap lazy remake was genuinely tragic. So very, very funny!

    But it’s not purely an ironic appreciation; there’s a charm to their underdog tenacity; a tenacity that ensured their brand would endure into the video game age. It may seem surprising, but The Three Stooges license has been used several times for video games, starting with Mylstar Electronics’s arcade game The Three Stooges, and I don’t think only because it was cheap and accessible–I think because the people making them genuinely were fond of the Stooges.

    Released in May 1984, The Three Stooges is a product–and victim of–the legendary video game crash of 1983. Mylstar Electronics’ route to developing a Three Stooges video game began in 1976, when Columbia Pictures–owner of the majority of The Three Stooges output–purchased Gottlieb, then purely a maker of pinball machines. (It’s interesting to note there is no record of an attempt to make a Three Stooges pinball machine after this purchase, though Gottlieb would make several pinball machines based on Columbia properties in the era, such as Charlie’s Angels and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.)

    Gottlieb would have some success with arcade machines in the early 1980s with, most famously, Q*Bert, and in 1983–a year after the Coca-Cola company acquired Columbia–Gottlieb was renamed MylStar Electronics (somewhat controversially.) Mylstar Electronics would last mere months, releasing a handful of games before being shuttered in the continued aftermath of the crash. In fact, it’s believed that there were only a few hundred Three Stooges machines produced as a result, and due to poor reception, most of these machines were repurposed by arcade operators into other games, leaving–reputedly–as few as fifteen machines surviving today.

    Mylstar’s The Three Stooges is poorly remembered as a result, with no retrospectives and even few contemporary sources. Electronic Games Hotline (July 29th, 1984) has the closest thing to an announcement, claiming that the game was released in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Three Stooges (signed, as they were, by Columbia in 1934.) The game’s most notable developers are Jeff Lee–who did the graphics for Q*Bert–and David Zabriskie, a long-time creator of audio for pinball machines, with programmer Sam Russo and designer Tom Malinowski with little else to their names.

    The Three Stooges sets the tone for the Stooges in video games in some ways, most notably that it sticks to the original Columbia trio, Larry, Curly and Moe (sorry, Shemp fans.) But the most interesting thing it does is that it portrays itself as a new Stooges short: “The Three Stooges In Brides Is Brides.”

    Although the game isn’t referred to as such anywhere except the title screen, it does imply that this machine did not just have the license slapped onto it–the developers had to have some interest in making the game offer a “true” Three Stooges experience, with a story (The Three Stooges must rescue their fiances from the evil Dr. “I.M.Acad M.D.”1) a genuine attempt to recreate the Stooges in pixel art from and lots of digitised speech.

    Unfortunately, they made a very optimistic decision: the game is made for three simultaneous players, one playing each Stooge, and the game is absolutely terrible if you don’t play it that way.

    Now, it’s entirely possible that it’s still terrible if you do play it that way–not that I expect to have much chance to find out–but the game is clearly fully designed around a group of three players working together. A single screen game, on each screen the players must attempt to destroy all the furniture to find three keys to open the door to the next screen, and they do this by picking up one of two hammers that spawn on screen. While this is going on, the police are attempting to capture The Three Stooges, while civilians get in the way–both of which can be halted by chucking pies at them, which sit around the screen on indestructible tables. But the civilians can also pick up and throw pies, complicating things further!

    It’s obvious that The Three Stooges is meant to be a raucous, silly arcade game for three; the design intentionally only places two hammers on the stage so that one player is left out to either play defence (by throwing pies at enemies) or spoiler (by throwing pies at the other players so they can get the hammer.) Sadly, played solo, the game’s deficiencies are blaring. Enemies seem to move about completely randomly, and when the other two Stooges are computer controlled they become just as dangerous, making the game (I suspect) significantly harder as they cost you lives by walking into you with a hammer. The game also suffers rough, unforgiving collision detection where you’ll find yourself stuck on furniture or killed by things you thought you avoided. 

    The game also massively outstays its welcome. I only played up to the point where I was able to rescue the first fiancee, but it took forever, and every stage is exactly the same bar the one unique stage that has you throwing pies at singers, avoiding the notes they create (this is by far the most frustrating level, as the notes are almost impossible to avoid.) On each level you beeline to the hammer, destroy the furniture, grab the keys then leave. Without other players, there’s very little play (I do wonder, if the company had not been rapidly closed, a revision might have seen the hammer and furniture placement change more across levels.)

    Fuck this level.

    And the thing that should be the most charming about it–real Stooge voices–becomes insanely annoying about 30 seconds in. Every time a Stooge collides with anything, they’ll say the same stock phrase; prepare to hear “Oh a wise guy, huh?” more times in a single playthrough than the Stooges ever said during their entire Columbia Pictures run (no, really.)

    The Three Stooges is an interesting curio, and one that I do believe was made with the best of intentions by people who were on some level fans. It’s certainly possible that it’s worth playing if you ever have two other Stooge fanatics to hand–I guess I should have given Sloan and Decloux a call–but I suspect that even the most hardcore group of Stoogeaholics would never have the patience to get that far.

    Will I ever play it again? Sure, if I see a real machine and Will Sloan and Justin Decloux happen to be standing next to me.

    Final Thought: The game features a few comedic interstitials (almost certainly inspired by Pac-Man) but the funniest thing in the entire game is that once all fiances are rescued, before the game loops, it announces “now it’s on to reruns.” Probably the most accurate representation of The Three Stooges in the entire game.

    1. I don’t grasp the joke here at all… Oh wait, “I am a cad.” Damn, everyone reading this in print is going to think I’m an idiot. ↩︎
  • Wild Gunman (Nintendo, 1974)

    Wild Gunman (Nintendo, 1974)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo
    Released: 1974
    Completed: 31/05/2026
    Completion: Played Reel A and C.

    Well now howdy, y’all, gather round as I tell the tale of how I played the only Wild Gunman in the West….

    *cough*

    Ach, I cannae be arsed keeping that up for an entire essay.

    Yes, in what can be considered an insane stroke of luck, I just happened to be within driving distance of Ontario Pinfest, Ontario’s only pinball show (though I admit I hadn’t actually ever heard of before) and 74XX Arcade Repair, aka Callan Brown, just happened to be taking his recreation of the North American Wild Gunman cabinet there. So obviously I had to go.

    Wild Gunman has been covered in some detail before, so I’m somewhat wary of just reiterating a lot of prior work. I recommend Kate Willaert’s lengthy article on A Critical Hit that goes into the history, and I similarly have to push you towards Callan Brown’s video, where he goes into great detail about his own research after discovering an auction for some of the original 16mm reels.

    But to summarise Wild Gunman’s story: the game was released in a fascinating period of Nintendo’s history, as it continued its transition from playing card manufacturer into entertainment powerhouse. Already successful in electronic toys, the company was continuing to expand, and Hiroshi Yamauchi hit upon the idea of using the company’s existing toy gun systems to create a laser clay pigeon shooting system, and to then install it in abandoned bowling alleys, as bowling as a fad had come and gone in Japan. It looked sort of bonkers:

    This was, by all accounts, extremely successful until the 1973 oil crisis hit, leading to a ton of orders for the system being cancelled. This pushed Nintendo into debt to the point of bankruptcy–they had created a smaller version of the Laser Clay Shooting System, Mini Laser Clay for arcades, but it wasn’t enough of a success. Satoru Okada, Gunpei Yokoi’s “right hand man” and an engineer at Nintendo R&1 told Retro Gamer in 2016:

    “Nintendo was in such poor financial state. I remember that president Yamauchi came to see us and said: ‘We need money. But in order for banks to lend us some, we need to show them that we have new fun projects to launch. In short, find me some new fun projects quickly, even if we cannot really sell them!’ Since we still had a lot of material left from the Laser Clay, we came up with the Wild Gunman project in a hurry. In the end, the president liked it and he insisted we sell it.”

    Wild Gunman’s big benefit is that it’s immediately a lot more thrilling than simple clay pigeon shooting–because clay pigeons don’t shoot back. As designed, players step up, put on a holster(!) and pistol, with the idea that they’ll be shown five different opponents. The opponent’s eyes will flash, which is the player’s cue to draw, cock the pistol, and fire–all before the opponent shoots them. The goal is to shoot all five to get a perfect score, shown by lighting up all the sheriff badges on the machine.

    The original Wild Gunman is a clever bit of tech, in that it uses two 16mm projectors, and it would switch to the second if you shot your opponent to show them falling over (otherwise it would just keep the first projector running). There were four film reels that operators could purchase, allowing them (I guess) to switch them out or, if they were feeling flush, have more than one machine running. What’s really fun is that I think you could assume that the footage was re-used from something else, because by virtue of the rich 16mm film stock it just really feels like something from a legitimate spaghetti western, albeit an especially cheap one. But according to Okada, it’s not! He states that the footage was shot by Yokoi, and it featured actors/random whiteys local to Nintendo who they found and shot at Dreamland, the now sadly demolished Disneyland-inspired theme park in Nara.

    However, I’m going to have to quibble with Okada on his recollection, because there are four film reels, and if you look at the flyer, you’ll notice something: 

    Film reels A and B have a background that’s very building heavy. If you look at an image or map of Nara Dreamland, that seems correct. Inspired by Disneyland, it has its own version of Main Street, U.S.A., and I’m sure if you collected enough images from the park you could pinpoint where these shots were taken.

    However, film reels C and D are suspiciously… deserty, and several feature guys riding horses. It doesn’t match any area of Dreamland I’ve managed to see online, digging through different sites.1 I found this pretty suspicious. I got briefly excited when I saw that some of the footage in reels C and D match footage in adverts for Nintendo’s light gun toys while looking something else up in Florent Gorge’s The History Of Nintendo (1889-1980), but that’s almost certainly re-use as the toys in question (Custom Gunman and Custom Lion) didn’t come out until 1976. 

    However, I would still gamble that these second reel sets were not in the original Japanese release of Wild Gunman, and possibly created for the North American release, which also heavily changed the cabinet design. If I’m correct in my hunch, this creates a new mystery: who shot this footage? The different canisters and film stocks that Brown has aren’t really helpful there. It seems unlikely it was, say, Sega (who hilariously released the North American version of Wild Gunman) but I’m sure a proper historian will dig into this and solve it at some point in the future.

    That all said: How does Wild Gunman feel to play?

    Now, I can’t say definitively, in some respects, as it’s worth noting the original Japanese version–initially called Gunfight–has a slightly different design, and Brown’s recreation of the western version has some changes (indeed the gameplay is a re-creation in Unity.) To have the exact experience of the Western version, you could hope that the guy in California who apparently has a real cabinet has put it back together, or possibly you could make your way to Vierzon in France and hope that the original machine that was seen there at a music festival(?) in 2011 is still there. But that said… I can’t imagine it’s that much different, and I’m confident in saying: Wild Gunman was great fun.

    One of my absolute favourite arcade machines is Quick & Crash, Namco’s novelty quick draw game, and while Wild Gunman doesn’t quite hit the highs of breaking a “real” ceramic cup and being timed down to the millisecond, what really stands out is how close it is anyway–and I’m sure in 1974 the live footage was more than enough novelty.

    It’s all about the experience of drawing the gun. There’s so much tension in preparing to shoot, and as much as you prepare yourself–”don’t shoot before you see the whites of their eyes,” you recite to yourself–the urge to panic and draw early is high. It’s exciting, too, that the game expects you to cock the gun before firing, adding just a touch more complexity to the experience.

    Wild Gunman even features two levels of difficulty. Players can optionally turn on the “Foul Check” mode which requires that they draw and cock the gun after the opponent’s eye-flash, making the timing even harder. I have to admit I didn’t check with Brown if this mode had been implemented when playing the re-creation, as I was generally overwhelmed by the experience (on my first play he just told me to cock the gun early, and on my second I forgot to put the holster on, which is probably why in the video I took I look so cool and skilful.)

    If I’m going to be a little critical, it feels like such a missed opportunity that the game doesn’t tell a bit of a story, though. It doesn’t need to have an intro or outro or whatever, but you can’t help but feel that the fact the game is just five random standoffs and then it’s over feels… wrong, considering the potential of using video. To have more sense that you were in a shootout against a band of outlaws or something.

    But I also sort of get it. You can “lose” every battle, so it’s not like it makes any sense anyway, and at least originally they were filming random white guys they found in Japan and they probably just had to make do with what they got.

    I played Wild Gunman twice at Ontario Pinfest because I was a bit shy and I didn’t want to bogart the machine. But I could happily have played it until I “mastered” it, the same way I have to play Quick & Crash until I’m as good as I remember being at it (good. The best, even. Don’t ask me to show you though.) That’s really remarkable for a game from 1974.

    Will I ever play it again? I’m sure I’ll be back at Ontario Pinfest, or maybe Brown will be showing the machine elsewhere–I’ll be happy to play through the other two reels.

    Final Thought: As exciting as the discovery of the Wild Gunman reels were, there’s a Nintendo shooting game reel that I suspect will never be found but which should be an A Day The Clown Cried level grail: according to Gorges, Yokoi and Nintendo created a prototype called Fascination using the Wild Gunman hardware, where the aim was to watch a (specifically noted as) Swedish woman dance around, and each time she paused to shoot off a piece of clothing until she was dancing around in the buff. This was never released (unsurprisingly) but was apparently very popular with the staff of Nintendo. I bet it was, the dirty buggers.

    1. And trying to work out which are AI slop websites that stole other people’s images. It’s getting harder and harder to work out what’s legitimate and worth linking. ↩︎
  • The Mandalorian And Grogu (2025)

    The Mandalorian And Grogu (2025)

    The Mandalorian And Grogu is a movie that seems to be at cross-purposes with itself. If you look at the marketing’s styling and the source material (by which I mean the show, rather than Star Wars writ large) it seems obvious that The Mandalorian And Grogu is not supposed to be a huge, tentpole piece of summer cinema; it’s really meant to be a charming throwback to the era of film serials (indeed the very film serials that Star Wars was inspired by the first place). 

    Sure, maybe it’s a bit more like the later period of features like the Zatoichi series or (if you’re feeling especially uncharitable) luchador films, but the idea is: you’re going to show up to see a movie starring “those characters you like” have a sort of inconsequential and probably formulaic adventure, but because you saw “those characters that you like” doing the stuff you like seeing them do, you’ve had a good time.

    It’s not a horrible idea, except for the fact that they made a huge deal about seeing The Mandalorian And Grogu in IMAX, the film cost $165 million dollars, and serials succeeded because the cinema was the only place you could see those characters that you like and we’re all already accustomed to seeing the Mandalorian and Grogu have low-stakes adventures at home. There better be something pretty special if I’m going out and paying the ridiculous IMAX surcharge to see it!!!

    There is not.

    I’ll say up front: I wanted to like this. A major issue with The Mandalorian as a show is the seeming terror Disney has had in, you know, committing to anything featuring major character development post The Last Jedi. Were you moved when Mando delivered Baby Yoda to Luke Skywalker1? Well, Disney definitely felt that you couldn’t bear to see them apart so desperately that they had to reunite them immediately… in a spin-off! I’m not entirely sure why, but I think I imagined that if they were making a film, it was because they really had something they wanted to make. They had some clear, concrete idea at hand.

    They did not.

    I’m not sure I’ve seen a film as devoid of a thesis as this one in a long time. If you’re really reaching, it’s something about fatherhood? Rotta “Stinky” The Hutt bangs on about his bad father enough. Maybe it’s about children growing and coming into their own? Maybe? There’s no reason for me to be reaching this hard, no one making The Mandalorian And Grogu did. It’s incredibly clear no one was originally thinking “oh let’s make a charming throwback to film serials.” They were thinking “we need to get something, anything in theatres to keep the franchise warm.” A transparent act of desperation, and it’s all over the movie. Stinky’s second speech about his dad repeats so fully what he said in his first that it’s one of the clearest signifiers that this was obviously originally a season of TV, reading as it does “well, you probably forgot what he said last week.”

    It’s not that there aren’t fun concepts here. I, on paper, like that the first proper chunk of the film is going for a noir, detective story vibe, but it ends with the (masked) Mando being knocked out with poison gas. Uh, ok. Later, I like the idea of Grogu having to come into his own. But that ends with him being given a magic potion by a random character. Very meaningful!

    Every beat that could lead somewhere meaningful is frittered away to nothing, and instead we get the exact thing that killed things like Solo: a relentless urge to show us Star Wars shit we recognize. Or are supposed to recognize. A guy from Star Wars Rebels is there and I guess we’re supposed to be losing our minds, but I don’t really know who that is. An arena battle happens… and it’s just like the holochess from the Millennium Falcon. I know what that is, but I don’t care, and I don’t need to see it!!!2

    This shit sucks, man. Here’s something that actually is cool that they did: getting Phill Tippett, who worked on the original holochess sequence, to create Chekhov’s cool new robots for a later stop-motion sequence. Now that I like!

    Except for the fact that Jon Favreau can’t shoot action for shit. In every sequence I basically had no idea what was going on. It’s a neat idea to try and do a Hong Kong-action style bar fight, for example, but the only part of the action I could follow was noticing when dudes tried to punch a guy wearing a Mandalorian helmet in the face. That’s going to hurt! It doesn’t make sense even in the moment!

    Every action sequence from the opening sequence also suffers from another major issue, which I call the “this seems very dangerous for a baby to be at” problem. The solution they came up with was “just make the baby disappear for most of the shots” and I gotta say… It doesn’t work.

    If TV didn’t exist, they were banging one of these out every year or six months, and going to the cinema cost a nickel, then sure, this would be fine. But in 2026 this is symbolic of the fact that they just gotta put Star Wars to bed. Make me want to revisit this world. Before The Mandalorian And Grogu was over I was desperate to leave it.

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    1. Sorry, a horrifying digital cadaver, but close enough. ↩︎
    2. I did like when they showed a picture of Clone Wars-era Stinky. Good joke! ↩︎
  • Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō (Sega CS3/Syn Sophia, 2010)

    Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō (Sega CS3/Syn Sophia, 2010)

    Developed/Published by: Sega CS3, Syn Sophia / Sega
    Released: 22/09/2010
    Completed: 25/04/2026
    Completion: Completed it and the majority of the side stories. I even found all the cats.

    Probably about halfway through playing Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō (translated as “Black Panther: Like A Dragon New Chapter”) I thought a funny gimmick for when I wrote it up would be I’d make, like, a pretend YouTube thumbnail where I’ve got a completely exaggerated shocked face and the title was something like “THE SECRET BEST YAKUZA GAME CAME OUT ON PSP???” but, and I’m sorry if this is going to render the rest of the article moot, by the end of the game I felt like a more accurate thumbnail would be one where I was giving an exaggerated sigh and the title was something like “WHY ARE YAKUZA GAME PLOTS ALWAYS CONFUSING AND OVERCOMPLICATED???”

    I feel like if I was A/B testing them the first one would probably do better, and it’s not completely unwarranted. Because Kurohyō is genuinely great–certainly better than Yakuza 4, anyway. 

    Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō, which I’ll just refer to as Kurohyō, is not the first spin-off of the Yakuza franchise1 (that would be Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan!) but it’s the first on handhelds and the first to be set in the contemporary version of Yakuza’s Kamurocho setting. Never officially translated–because it had the misfortune to be released in the twilight of the PSP and in the era where Yakuza was still scraping along at its lowest popularity–in 2026 you can play it thanks to the efforts of TeamK4L who (so far) have translated almost the entire game outside of the non-story required hostesses (which, let’s be honest, are only for the absolutely maniacal completionists, here especially for reasons I’ll describe.) The translation isn’t perfect–there are more than a few awkward points, misspellings and grammatical errors–but it’s more than good enough. Indeed, as someone who hasn’t really messed around with emulating more modern systems [“20 year old systems? Modern?”–Ed.] it feels like a near miracle to be playing a close-to-professional translation of a PSP game on Steam Deck that otherwise I’d simply own a disc copy of and glance at every once in a while before going back to slogging through Japanese grammar drills.

    Kurohyō is set in 2010, just after Yakuza 42, though there’s ultimately no connection to the main franchise (I was surprised by this, in our current era of endless franchise interconnectivity; if there are any cameos, I didn’t notice them). The player takes the role of Tatsuya Ukyo, a juvenile delinquent who is scrabbling for survival in Kamurocho and–angry about his lot in life–pushing everyone in his life away and on a path of self-destruction. The only thing he has going for himself is his fighting ability, and it’s ultimately that which sets the gears of the plot in motion–accidentally killing a Tojo Clan member when trying to shake down a loan shark, Tatsuya finds himself in debt to the Kuki Family, and forced to fight in the “Dragon Heat” underground fighting tournament3 with the promise that if he can win ten matches in a row he will earn his freedom.

    This is a great setup for a story in the Yakuzaverse, and even only four games into the franchise it feels so refreshing to step away from Kazuma Kiryu and his entanglements. It’s also refreshing to not have a game where the protagonist and everyone around him, despite being literal criminals are not the nicest, most honourable, best men to ever live, but flawed, angry and honestly sort of shitty dudes. Tatsuya suuucks. He’s angry, rude, and ignorant, and the people around him aren’t any better.4

    It sets up a genuinely meaningful narrative: Can Tatsuya, in this horrible situation, pushed to the brink, learn and grow, because it’s obvious he wasn’t going to be able to go on the way that he was? 

    I would say for a big chunk of the game this really works. Every chapter ends with a climactic MMA battle that’s been foreshadowed and which has a meaningful part to play in the plot. But there’s an issue with that structure, and it’s one that video games have a real issue dealing with: how do you tell an underdog story when you have to win all the time? 

    The fact is, we all hate scheduled losses in video games, and they’re always handled in some stupid way. You lose control. The enemy can go down to 1 HP but no lower. The enemy health bar is literally impossible (I just complained about this kind of thing in Promise Mascot Agency.)

    It’s really hard to grow if you’re winning all the time. It’s not something I blame for Kurohyō’s plot ultimately tying itself in knots–most of that’s all the usual Yakuza infighting–but it doesn’t help, as they have to lay a lot of extra stuff on to make sure that Tatsuya really “loses” when he’s winning. But when the game stays close to his emotional journey, it does work.

    The real vibe killer is that towards the end of the game the story is so complicated that the cut-scenes seem to go on forever. This is really strange for what is ostensibly a portable game. I assumed that in the style of other portable instalments of franchises–lets say, like Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII–the game was set around a tournament to try and make the game a bit more suitable to quick pick-up-and-play sessions, but it’s pretty much a normal Yakuza game, just on PSP5. The cut-scenes are done in a motion comic style that I have to admit I found pretty repetitive, and there are sections of the game where it feels like you’re just running between motion comics, each of which feels like they’re about twenty minutes long (I didn’t time them; they very well may be).

    This really sapped my will to see this through to the end, which is such a bummer because it starts so strong. If you’re a fan of the PS2 originals–and I am–returning to that low res version of Kamurocho is such a pleasure, with your imagination filling in the gaps, and co-developed with Syn Sophia the game features a more in-depth fighting system than we’ve seen in the franchise to this point. Lifting animations and fighting styles from Def Jam: Fight for NY (or likely directly from Def Jam: Fight for NY – The Takeover, the PSP installment) which was previously developed by Syn Sophia as AKI Corporation, Kurohyō is much more focused on one-on-one battles with high/low attacks, grabs, counters, and a serious number of different fighting styles that can be learned and upgraded across the game. Unlike the Yakuza games so far–where fighting can be quite rote–this keeps fighting interesting as you try and level up each fighting style and deal with its quirks, and to try and use the “right” fighting style to counter your opponents when needed.

    Surprisingly, one of the very best fights in the game is the first, which is a raw skill check battle, because it so clearly communicates the stakes. Tatsuya isn’t challenged by any of the usual goons on the streets of Kamurocho, but when faced with a real fighter, you get your arse kicked. You’re likely to only barely survive it, and it feels worth the effort of many restarts, because it’s true to the story. It’s a rare game that can pay off mechanically like that, and it’s simply a shame that as you get stronger (and load up on equipment and healing items) the battles stop feeling quite the same–perhaps until the very final tournament battle, which is a monster. 

    If the game has stopped there, I would have been more than satisfied, but Sega just can’t help but overegg their Yakuza puddings. They want all of the threads to come together to make the final battles an epic conclusion, but when Tatsuya’s emotional journey is essentially concluded… it’s unnecessary. Everything beyond that is just the usual Yakuza cruft.

    In terms of the good Yakuza cruft, though, there’s plenty of that here too. There are tons of side-quests, and a lot of them feature their own threads that are tied into the game’s general themes. Sure, they’re mostly just “go there, beat up this dude” but the game’s wide variety of fighting styles keeps it engaging. There’s the usual bowling, batting cages, claw machines, and even the full hostess experience. I alluded earlier that the hostesses are only for the true maniacs here, and it’s because Kurohyō makes a particular decision to make money far more scarce than it is in the mainline Yakuza. As a result they’ve added new part-time jobs to the game too.

    The scarcity of money, however, is a slight cheat because after a point the main way they keep your money constrained is that levelling up and buying new special moves costs a pretty ridiculous amount of cash. This means that you’re simply not going to want to spend money on doing things that aren’t really useful–like hostesses–and in fact the decision to make both levelling up and new special moves cost money works at cross purposes because at least I personally never ever bought new special moves, believing that another point in punch or kick was simply worth more.

    However, the scarcity is, I think, better than the alternative, because it does make you want to engage with more systems. I never bother gambling in other Yakuza games, but here it’s worth popping into the casino with any of the “cheat” items you’ve found to raise extra cash. I think I’d prefer if they’d simply tried to keep the money you earn low without having an obvious money sink to force it–there aren’t many good ways to raise crazy money here anyway (even gambling has low limits and multipliers.)

    Even if it outstays its welcome–and you could possibly argue that at least partially it outstays its welcome because like the other Yakuza games, it’s so hard to not just keep doing side quests and the other bits and bobs rather than rolling through the story at a good pace–Kurohyō is a great game and a great entry in the franchise. It deserves to be played by more people and it’s very odd–in a series that’s now lousy with remakes–that it hasn’t seen a remake. That said, after running Yakuza 3 into the ground with horrible recasts (Rikiya… look how they massacred my boy…) I’d really rather they didn’t touch this one, and instead people enjoyed it thanks to the great work of TeamK4L and those kings among men: emulator devs. In fact, if you’re interested, TeamK4L are actively working on a 2.0 version of their language patch and you might want to wait for it as it’ll iron out the small issues I had with the current version. No telling how long it will take, and the current version is perfectly acceptable, so if you can’t wait, get fired in. 

    Will I ever play these again? I’m already excited to play the sequel. Though surprisingly that’s not next on the chronological Yakuza list.

    Final Thought: I didn’t notice until long after I’d finished this that Kurohyō was actually accompanied by a TV drama based on it, and I’m interested to find out if the story is any smoother in a different format. However, unlike the game, it seems the series has never been given a particularly good English translation, so I guess that’s what I can pine for while crunching through Kanji lessons and the like.

    1. I’m remembering now that they’ve changed the name of the franchise to “Like A Dragon” internationally, but I don’t feel like it’s really stuck, or at least, hasn’t stuck retroactively, so I’m not going to use it, because it does feel a bit like if I referred to the Ghosts n’ Goblins franchise as the Demon World Village franchise. ↩︎
    2. Something I hadn’t noticed before is that the Yakuza games are intentionally set at the time of their release–so Yakuza 3 was released at the end of Feb 2009, and is set in March 2009, Yakuza 4 in March 2010, and so on. It’s a cute detail. ↩︎
    3. This is different from, and unrelated to, the Coliseum in Purgatory. And later in the game Tatsuya will find a side quest that’s another fighting tournament in Kamurocho. People love watching dudes beat the hell out of each other in Kamurocho, and it’s already happening on every street corner anyway! ↩︎
    4. Obviously a lot of characters are going to have exculpatory reasons why they’re behaving that way that are revealed later. It’s a Yakuza game after all. ↩︎
    5. In fact, there are certain things that make the game even less suitable to short bursts, like the removal of the taxi ranks. You’d think that they’d maybe want you to be able to jump between side quests quickly–maybe add, I don’t know, those stupid touristy rickshaws that you see a lot of places (if not in Japan, to my memory) so you can jump between spots on the map even quicker. But no, none of that, run between places and get into a lot of random fights instead and then if you’ve only got a few minutes not actually get to do the thing you were trying to do. ↩︎
  • The exp. Dispatch #19

    The exp. Dispatch #19

    This Month’s Soundtrack

    An easy one this week as the People’s Pop Polls‘ Pop World Cup is coming to a close, with the final a face-off between the old and new as Algeria’s Zohra takes on Turkey’s Eftalya Yağcı after (tragically) Austria’s Dani Lia got knocked out. My vote is going to Turkey, a world-beating banger if I ever heard one.

    Hey, do you hate in-line advertising? We do too! We’re only ever going to do it here at the start of our newsletter posts because we want you to get these missives in your inbox a day early. Sorry!

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    This Month On exp.

    Visual Novel “Theme Week”: Slay The Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023) [subscriber post] / Milk Inside a Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk / Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk (Kryukov, 2020/2021) / Doomed Love (Cooper, 2021)

    I played some visual novels and felt like writing a little more efficiently about them. I actually have a bunch more on the to-play list which might mean another theme week at some point, if I get to them.

    Subscriber Exclusives: UFO 50 #4: Paint Chase (Perry, 2024) / UFO 50 #5: Magic Garden (Yu, 2024)

    Yes, sticking to one of these a month, although (as a peek through the curtain) I’ve got a bunch more I haven’t found time to write up yet. Eek.

    Unlocked Posts: Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works, 2025) / Ozma Wars (SNK, 1979) / Gris (Nomada Studio, 2018) / King’s Knight (Square, 1986)

    Quite a range here, but worth noting again that my King’s Knight piece appears in Pixels and Polygons Quarterly 2026 Q2! I just got my copy, and it looks great!

    From The exp. Archive: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Parker Brothers, 1982) / Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (Nintendo, 1999) / Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo, 2011) / G.G. Series #5: Ninja Karakuri Den (SUZAK, 2009)

    I celebrate May the 4th, I revisit a couple of top-tier Marios, and I remember a series that I 9along with everyone else) had forgotten, even though it was pretty good.

    Zine News

    “Fuck AI, Make Zines” badge from Pen Fight.

    The Oath #1

    “This is the first issue of a brand new games writing zine, The ‘Gippocratic’ Oath. Much of its 6000+ words are fast-paced, frenzied games writing from me, Stuart Gipp. Features on Zelda, Yoshi, Lego Batman and more.”

    Pixels and Polygons Quarterly 2026 Q3

    “This issues theme is “Whoa, that’s heavy, Doc!” The games covered inside this new issue are: Gravity Rush, Low G Man, and VVVVVV! All are games that feature a creative use of gravity mechanics.”

    I’m not in this one, but you should still back it!

    And Finally…

    An Incomplete Catalogue of Games Media in 2026

    Chris Plante of the already venerable Post Games Podcast has put together a pretty incredible spreadsheet that tries to list as much of the currently existing games media landscape as possible: an excellent tool for anyone trying to fill out their RSS feed (hey, we’ve got one) or who might be trying to make webrings happen again (I heard you talking about this, Video Game History Hour.) I’d link what Plante had to say about this but I only just noticed his website is hosted by Substack. Eurgh! Could be worse I suppose, he could be posting about Microsoft games despite the efforts of No Games For Genocide and posting about games that use genAI while selling a “Destroy AI” T-shirt. That would be so wack if he did that. Disqualifying, honestly. Anyway…

    Next week on exp.: Maybe it’s secretly the best game in a beloved franchise?

  • UFO 50 #5: Magic Garden (Yu, 2024)

    UFO 50 #5: Magic Garden (Yu, 2024)

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  • Slay The Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023)

    Slay The Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023)

    Developed/Published by: Black Tabby Games
    Released: 23/10/2023
    Completed: 28/03/2026
    Completion: Completed it twice. I couldn’t leave them there.

    After Milk Inside…/Milk Outside… I wasn’t feeling particularly positive about this one, feeling a bit concerned that another delve into inner-voice horror might not be the right move and I should just play something nice again. But I was surprised to discover how much I loved this; it absolutely deserves its plaudits.

    It opens with a simple ask–get up to that cabin and kill a princess. I think initially this is going to go a few ways depending on what kind of player you are–you might just do it, you might fight it, or you might simply get stuck arguing with the voice that’s telling you to do it, as the game offers an either impressive or annoyingly self-aware amount of options for the kind of player who like to see where the edges are. Whatever happens, pretty soon you’re going to see some fucked up shit.

    And before very long at all (well, depending on how long you spend arguing) you’ll learn you’re stuck in a loop. I think it’s that aspect where the wheels of the game come closest to coming off, because what starts as a simple story (“just kill the bloody princess”) becomes really huge and weird and existentially complicated. There’s a lot of detail that I admit I don’t really feel is necessary (I almost longed for the abstraction of Milk Inside…); the game could benefit from leaving at least a little more to mystery.

    But it doesn’t take away from the enjoyable puzzle of trying to play the game your way. You’re not choosing who to date, here, but you’re trying to live up to your own code, reacting to what the game throws at you, and I appreciate the game often forces you into unwinnable situations. 

    Of course, like any choice-based game, they haven’t been able to cover every eventuality. On my second playthrough, where I really tried to stick to my guns, that I was occasionally forced to do things due to lack of other options really stung. At the end of the game I genuinely cared what happened, which I think really proves how well the game works (admittedly helped by the rich art and excellent voice acting.) I’m really surprised it never garnered more than an honourable mention at the 2024 IGF for Excellence in Narrative.

    It’d be a bit rich to say the game was overlooked–lord, they’ve got enough money now that they’re publishing other games–but if there’s any possibility you have overlooked it, as I had until this sudden burst of research… don’t?

    Will I ever play it again? There are a lot of more paths in that I could explore, but I’m completely satisfied.

    Final Thought: I really wish I had a more consistent theme across this “theme week”, but I’m not ashamed to admit it came down to length. Sorry Raptor Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club and more, once you’re creeping past an hour or two I go back to looking at my pile of unread books. It should really stand out, to be honest, that I played Slay The Princess twice. That’s how much I liked it.