Developed/Published by: Jon Perry / Mossmouth Released: “October 1983” (18/09/2024) Completed: 21/12/2024 Completion: Completed it.
After the experience of Ninpek, I played Paint Chase a couple of times and realised I’d have to complete a whopping twenty-five stages in one go to finish it, and I decided that I couldn’t be arsed and put UFO 50 down completely and played a bunch of other things instead. But after finishing Indika I thought I’d load it up and, uh… I guess it’s sort of funny that I should rail against the vision of UFO 50’s creators that you should have to “git gud” in order to finish games in this collection and for me to finish this quite easily on like, my fifth go.
Now, to be fair, Paint Chase isn’t exactly easy. A maze-painter game in the style of Crush Roller/Make Trax, as a wee race car the player is trying to paint in the majority of a level before the timer is up–while enemy vehicles spawn from spawners and paint the level in their own color unless you can destroy them. It’s a very clean, simple and rewarding design, which they evolve quite carefully across the twenty five stages via level and enemy design.
At first, you’ve just go the spawners, some speed boosts and enemy cars that you destroy by smashing into; but quickly the game introduces wrinkles such as buttons that change the level layout, and enemies that blast paint everywhere if you don’t get to them in time.
In fact, you can barely go a level without them introducing a new concept, which is almost certainly what is going to make you fail the game and have to–annoyingly–start the entire thing over again. While Paint Chase does feature some Pac-Man-style interstitials that help explain what enemies do, you still often find yourself on a level, see something like a red bomb, and then have to trial-and-error you way to working out that you can only destroy them easily by driving into them while boosting.
Now, this is a pretty classic bit of game design, really. I mean, I’ve beaten The Tower of Druaga, probably the most brutal “uh, try some stuff?” video game in history, but [taps watch] I don’t have all day here, and having to restart Paint Chase because I didn’t know what an enemy would do until I did it can, frankly, fuck off. For example, there’s an enemy towards the end of the game that I genuinely think is such a clever subversion–if you boost into it, as you want to do with basically every other enemy, you will spread the enemy paint across the screen as you skid. So the game now requires you to carefully plan when to hit a boost or not, adding another layer to the play.
Once I knew that… fun! Working that out by having to start the game again? No thanks!
I won’t lie–I looked up an enemy guide online for this, and once I knew what everything did, Paint Chase was a lot more pleasant. There are still some frustrating levels–the enemies you have to come at from a specific direction are never easy to deal with–but when you’re playing the game on a level playing field, it’s… fun, actually. Whisper it, but I could have happily played it for longer–the enemies allow for way, way more levels to be made than there currently are.
I won’t lie, though–I’m unbelievably happy that I was able to polish this off so quickly, and I think for some players even with an enemy guide this one might be a nightmare. But then I’m also sure that loads of players beat Ninpek on like their third try. Horses for courses.
Developed/Published by: Nomada Studio / Devolver Digital Released: 13/12/2018 Completed: 05/04/2026 Completion: Finished it. Did most of the extra puzzles for the first couple of sections then lost the taste for it and only did extra ones by accident.
Gris has sold over three million copies and been out for eight years, so I think I can get away with saying: it’s bad!
I can be pretty hard on “artistic” games, by which I make a distinction from pure “art games” and the more commercialised form. The kind of game that may have ~themes~ but still feels like a product. Games that, often, don’t really feel like they’ve got anything to say–or at least, nothing that challenges the audience (not that all art has to be a slog.)
I’m aware that this may be uncharitable; after all, it can be personal preference. We come to anything with the knowledge we already have; a work that might seem obvious and derivative to me might be completely mind blowing to another person who has never seen anything like it. So I shouldn’t–really–beat up on Gris too much for being trite.
In Gris, you play the titular character who–after waking up in the palm of a crumbling statue–travels through a 2D platformer world gaining abilities, collecting stars and facing off against a black creature who seems to want to stop her bringing colour back to the world.
There’s no dialogue, but the game is–blatantly–about grief and the “black dog” of depression, and if you think that “binging colour back to the world” and being chased by a big inky black creature that’s trying to stop you is sort of an embarrassing way to explore those themes, well, snap. But I did intend to be charitable on this aspect, so let’s just let that slide.
What I can’t let slide is that Gris is simply not enjoyable to play, with a catalogue of design flaws that make it–despite what should be a breezy, sub-four hour playthrough–miserable. First: the game does an absolutely horrific job in making it clear what is something you collide with or not. What’s foreground, background and so on.
The game is very art-forward, which is understandable, but it feels like there’s no consistency. There are so many sections–especially in a later swimming section–where I repeatedly just hit myself against walls because it looked as much like background as anything else. I admit was on an Steam Deck, so you could argue the game’s reliance on zooming out a huge amount is at fault, but I don’t really think “you need a big monitor or telly” is much of an excuse, or even true.
What do you collide with here?
The level design is also full of the kind of decisions that should have been caught long before release. Pretty much every level begins with you being dropped somewhere so you can head either left or right… with no hint of a critical path. Indeed, sometimes the game takes you back to a hub and every time it happened I thought “oh, I’ve made a mistake here” but I hadn’t. You could argue that’s kind of a magic trick–I was always heading in the right direction–but if I’m still feeling uncertain and unclear, it’s not so much a magic trick as “something confusing that happened.”
A lot of the problem relates to the fact that the game doesn’t make movement especially fun. Gris makes the classic error of making your movement unpleasant at first so it can get better later (rather than starting good and getting excellent; I admit I just complained about this in Promise Mascot Agency.) If I enjoyed movement, I’d be more inclined to explore when hit with a variety of directions I could possibly go.
Gris feels like she’s moving very slowly in those massive zoom-outs (you’ll beg for a dash) and when they introduce swimming, it’s so frustratingly slow and gummy it’s just awful (and don’t think you can try and double-jump your way out of the problem–each time you get dunked, making it feel even slower.)
And yet ironically, one of the worst things about Gris is that in key narrative moments–big chase scenes–you lose control completely1 reducing you to a mere spectator of the beats that should be thrilling. It’s not a relief to not have to move Gris; it just makes you wonder why you’re bothering to play any of it at all.
For a game that wants to be about overcoming adversity, it’s a problem that the actual adversity that the game provides is simply a catalogue of tiny frictions that make every interaction with it low-level annoying. The puzzles–which use Gris’ growing range of abilities–are basically fine and paced acceptably. Indeed, one aspect of the level design I appreciated was how they tucked the “extra” puzzles for collectibles around the critical path puzzles so they kind of worked as a second challenge on the “same” puzzle. But after the first level, I just stopped doing them, because I wasn’t interested in struggling with the game feel any further than I really had to.
If I’m being completely fair to Gris, even if I found the narrative at best basic and obvious, you could go over this game, get rid of all of its frictions and you’d have a solid–if maybe uninspiring–puzzle platformer. It feels very much like a problem of not getting the feedback when it could have made a difference, not listening to it, or simply not having the time to act on it. But who am I to speak? As I said, this sold millions of copies. They’re fine!
Will I ever play it again? I’m good. The team went on to make Neva, and I suppose I have some interest if they were able to fix the problems of Gris with it, but not enough to find out.
Final Thought: There’s an extra cutscene for getting all the collectibles, and something I suppose I do find sort of interesting is it makes the exact theme of the game explicit. Now, you might think I’d be against that, considering everything I’ve said, but in a weird way the cutscene does “cap off” the narrative in a way the normal ending doesn’t, and I think it’s kind of a shame that they hide it from most players. I contain multitudes.
Pedants may wish to note that you can slightly move Gris left and right or up and down in some of these. But it’s meaningless. ↩︎
Developed/Published by: SNK Released: 11/1979 Completed: 28/03/2026 Completion: Got as far as I could get! High score: 14150 (I could do better.)
Preface: On SNK (Now)
About a week ago SNK and Plaion Replai announced the Neo Geo+, a modern 1:1 recreation of the original AES hardware, and the announcement was quickly followed by many people raising that SNK is 96% owned by the MISK Foundation1, a Saudi Arabian non-profit and non-governmental organization established in 2011 by Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who is prominently featured in the Epstein Files and credibly accused of ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
This has, obviously, come up before, most notably when Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves was announced/released, because the game’s bizarre inclusion of Cristiano Ronaldo (who plays for Al Nassr FC, owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia) and a DJ with links to Mohammed whose inclusion annoys me so much that I don’t actually want to actually name him directly.
In that case, I think it was a lot easier for people to hand-wave, because even if it did hurt to see a sequel to a beloved fighting game get gummed up with weird garbage, it was perfectly easy for most people to go “well, too bad. I can always play something else.” But the Neo Geo AES has an incredible mystique for the millennial “gamer”: an incredibly expensive, luxury console that at one point offered the only way to play truly “arcade perfect” games at home. If you’re old enough, you played these games in the arcade; but you likely never ever saw an AES in the flesh, never mind played one (I’ve certainly still never played one.) It’s a gorgeous bit of kit, a classic piece of design and the games even came in big beautiful clamshell cases.
It’s understandable why you’d covet it. More than just getting a “perfect” recreation of the hardware, there’s an urge I think from many to hope this succeeds so that companies might simply see fit to reissue their own back catalogues. After all, you can go into a record store today and buy a new copy of an album from the 80s; why can’t you do it with a Mega Drive game?2
What I can’t understand is the people who are so desperate to ignore the reality of what they’d be supporting. The classic fallacy that “if there’s no ethical consumption, I can do what I want.” This take, long tedious by this point, is a position only held by people so intellectually incurious they can’t see their own ignorance.
As Wes Fenlon accepted in his excellent newsletter broaching this topic, people can ultimately do what they like. Of course they can. But to pretend there’s nothing more in our lives than wanting things and getting things is so… diminishing.
Rather I exist in a world where I consider values, what I want to represent, what I accept or justify, what I can’t. To see the world as rich and complicated and to exist in it, not simply consume.
As a result of this entire discussion, it’s made me consider my own planned coverage of SNK. I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my writing here comes from my own urge to play through the many, many games I own, and from my own personal interest in game history. I played through Ozma Wars because it’s the first game on the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, which I own, and which was originally published in 2018 (two years before the Misk Foundation would purchase its first shares in SNK.) Ozma Wars came out in 1979.
These early SNK games have nothing to do with the company’s current ownership. But it’s not quite that clean. In writing about them, I give coverage to the SNK brand. I’ll admit that until the recent announcement it’s likely I wouldn’t have even thought about the ownership issues. It’s be easier not to! As a signee of No Games for Genocide, I’m committed to not covering Microsoft-published games, and I’ve struggled with what that means for my game history coverage. I’m eager, for example, to play through Rare’s back catalogue, but can I? They’re owned by Microsoft now, but they weren’t then?
There isn’t an easy answer here, even if you can play all these games without ever giving anyone a penny after a quick internet search and a couple of downloads.
Obviously, I won’t be covering the Neo Geo+ and I won’t be covering any modern SNK games. And I don’t have any games from the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on my to-play list any time soon. I think Ozma Wars is an interesting piece of history, and loathe to discard this piece of writing, I’m going to share it. But I’ll have to consider if I’ll write any more. Perhaps that’s frustratingly inconclusive. But at least I’ve made it clear here that the company I’m writing about is a very different one now than it was then.
If Lunar Rescue was Taito taking Space Invaders and stinking it up with some Lunar Lander, Ozma Wars is SNK taking literal Space Invaders and they… maybe create the vertically scrolling shooter?
[Update (06/05/2026): Cosmo over on Bluesky points out that my research has failed me here, as Avenger, by Taito/Electro in 1975 is almost certainly the first vertically scrolling shooter, and vertically scrolling shooters Phantom II (Midway) and Astro Fighter (Data East) both came out in the same year as Ozma Wars. Simultaneous discovery strikes again!]
Its status as a vertically scrolling shooter is, possibly, a controversial take. I know Wikipedia definitely has it down as a fixed shooter, because the scrolling star field is only giving the “impression” of vertical movement. And Galaxian came out before it, which also has a vertically scrolling background and far better tech, so it’s not really defendable, right?
Well, maybe not. But it sure does feel like a vertical shooter! Galaxian doesn’t cut it on that score for me simply because of the way that the aliens simply hang around in a Space Invaders-style formation moving back and forth. Don’t get me wrong–I like Galaxian–but that’s a fixed shooter. By comparison, in Ozma Wars, the enemies are flying right at you–and they keep flying past you. Sure, it’s a “trick” but–and I hate to break it to you if this is news to you–almost everything in a video game is a trick. It’s not really happening!
“Ah, well if you’re so clever,” I assume you want to fire back, “what about those enemies in Ozma Wars that don’t fly towards you and off the screen, then? Check and mate.”
Well, when a boss appears in a scrolling shooter, does it suddenly turn into a fixed shooter? Maybe technically, but that’s not what we’re talking about. For the majority of Ozma Wars, it feels like you’re flying forward, dodging and weaving through enemies, taking down the ones you can hit. The only game that I was able to find that beat Ozma Wars to this feeling was Namco’s SOS, a much more basic monochrome game that came out, oddly, around about the same time as Galaxian where fighter planes fly towards the player’s fighter plane at speed, with the object to not let more than 100 pass you3. There’s no background in that one, though, so that one really is just the impression of vertical movement.
Another tick on the “scrolling shooter” checklist: that Ozma Wars features a range of different enemies that appear in waves. You’ve got basic enemies, that fly towards you, shooting or not, but the game mixes it up far more than you’d expect. Some enemies turn on their side to be harder to shoot, some shoot missiles (that you can destroy) and there are even some “boss” type enemies; for example a ship that spawns a mass of small ships that crowd the screen.
Indeed, there are aspects of this that might make one argue that even if they didn’t invent the scrolling shooter they maybe invented the bullet hell. After each set of waves, a comet flies on screen; after it, an enemy appears that throws so many bullets and missiles at you it’s kind of unreal–and you have to defeat it!
The game being flooded with bullets is probably the reason they made a unique decision when arcade players were only getting used to lives systems: the game has a health system instead of a lives system, and after each set of waves a ship that’s transparently meant to be Space Battleship Yamato4 comes and refills your health.
It’s not a perfect system. For one, your health is constantly counting down–meaning they really tried to split the difference between the old timer systems and having lives–and the other is that you can really only take a few hits even at full health before you die. It’s worse than that, too, because if you take a hit there’s no invulnerability after, so when you face one of the more bullet hell-esque enemies, you can just die automatically, and with health counting down, at the end of a set of waves you can be taken out in as little as one hit if you’ve had to waste time on certain waves.
I found Ozma Wars surprising, because I assumed it was really just, well, a cheap Space Invaders conversion kit. But there’s a real attempt to make something that pushes the form forward, which makes it a real shame that we have next to no information on the people that made it (well, my research hasn’t dug anything up.) The major issue with Ozma Wars isn’t so much that the design isn’t quite there but that the tech isn’t. There’s tons of flicker and a weird, slowdowny pacing; it really doesn’t play smoothly at all, and despite the ambition, that pales when compared to the reliability of Space Invaders’ big, chunky, thumping beat.
But for 1979 this is still pretty good! It’s exciting, which is definitely more than could be said for Lunar Rescue. It would probably have been too frustrating to really stick with, but there’s something here.
Will I ever play it again? I’d play it if I saw it in an arcade, but that seems unlikely; the only machine I have been able to source seems to be in someone’s house just outside Indianapolis…
Final Thought: But at least it’s playable, considering SNK’s first original game, Yosaku, is currently lost media. I do sort of hold out hope it’ll be found and dumped one day, though.
By way of a subsidiary, the generically named “Electronic Gaming Development Company”. Interestingly, this is a completely different entity than the Savvy Games Group, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, of which Mohammed bin Salman is chairman. That fund owns 8% of Embracer Group, of which Plain Replai is a subsidiary! ↩︎
Obviously this is a fraught comparison and the modern vinyl industry is a mess, and emblematic of the messy way capitalism drives people to consume beyond reason under the guise of fandom, creating basically ever more waste on our planet of junk. But that’s an entirely different essay. ↩︎
SOS is fairly amusing for featuring “coffee breaks” every 2000 points in which you get to see a (sort of muppety) girl in a bikini. Cheekily, Namco included a nudity dip switch, so in certain establishments you’d see her entirely in the buff. It’s really not that exciting, but it’s remarkable to think of Namco doing that! ↩︎
Update 12/06/26: John Anderson on Bluesky dug up some SNK patents from 1979-1982, and the second patent is for Ozma Wars and directly mentions Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト). I know copyright in games was the wild west at the time, but that is… bold. ↩︎
I’m a fan of the weekly pinball newsletter This Week In Pinball, and one of the things I really like about it is the decision to open every newsletter with a song of the week, which is a cute way to provide some music you can stick on in the background while you read the newsletter (or not, if you’ve already got something on, or you just love silence.) Well, I’m nicking the idea, as a low stakes way to share some music I like when I feel like it.
This month I’ve been voting in the People’s Pop Poll‘s “Pop World Cup” on Bluesky, which has been a really fascinating way to get exposed to music from a lot of countries that I just otherwise wouldn’t—or to try and push deeper cuts from the more ubiquitous Western countries on other people, like I did by nominating Secession’s The Magician. Rather than pick that though I thought I’d share this absolutely joyful bit of… uh, to be honest, I’m not quite sure what it is, but it’s from Cote D’Ivoire, a country I doubt I’ve ever heard a song from, and it’s great fun. If that’s not your speed, I’ll also highlight the Austrian entry, Dani Lia’s schwindelig (omgomgomg) which I just can’t stop listening to. Feel free to check out the whole playlist though!
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!
My highlight of the month—of any month—is when they let me on The Insert Credit Show, and I’m slowly earning those credits so one day I can force the panel to play a game on the Amstrad CPC or something.
This was a tough one to write, because I really wanted to like this so much more than I did, and the state of the industry these days really can make you second-guess yourself as a critic. But better to be honest.
Technically a hat-trick of Taito releases, unintended but with the sad passing of Yoshihisa Kishimoto it felt right to share these pieces, even if in at least the second one I’m hard on Double Dragon. It really is close to unplayable in 2026 though.
As the Famicom version hit Switch Online, I thought it was worth sharing my coverage of the original and its Famicom version, because the game is simultaneously incredibly important and utterly baffling to the uninitiated. It’s more a game that’s for learning about rather than playing—at least, don’t feel like you have to complete it. There’s a reason I’ve only done it the once…
An unusual month in which nothing I saw graduated to front page status and I avoided writing about a few movies that I didn’t feel like I had anything particularly useful to say about. So why don’t I share Ripple Rock, which I watched on the NFB’s website, which informed me that once in Canada they used over a thousand tons of explosive to blow up an underwater mountain, and reminded me that the NFB is an incredible resource that Canadians including myself mostly forget about but which should be cherished.
“~6000 words (and lots of images) on the 90s games that shaped my gender identity, including windows 3.1 amazons, sapphic crpg romances, and my own teenage fetish games.”
And Finally…
The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me.It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."
I think this might be the greatest piece of writing in the Onion, ever. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. It’s just a masterpiece of tone and phrasing.
Relatedly, I didn’t realise you could subscribe to The Onion internationally for no additional postage costs. I should do that when I’m not skint, especially to support their great work making Alex Jones even more of a laughing stock than he already is.
Next week on exp.: The first vertically scrolling shooter?
Developed/Published by: Kaizen Game Works Released: 10/04/2025 Completed: 10/03/2026 Completion: Finished it doing pretty much everything outside of getting all the garbage and signs.
I was a big fan of Kaizen Game Works’ Paradise Killer, even though I came to it late, and I’ll admit to being a bit hesitant about Promise Mascot Agency, considering the risk–a UK company making a game about wacky Japanese mascots?–but I was concerned before playing Paradise Killer that it’s vaporwaveyness was going to be grating, and it more-or-less worked, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Well, Promise Mascot Agency is a textbook example of that “difficult second album.” There’s a lot to like here, but there’s also a kind of messiness to it. If it was literally an album, there’d be some really discordant stuff on there, the kind of album where you want to skip every third or fourth track because it doesn’t work, and on which none of the other songs are quite fully-formed enough to quite get their hooks into you. Not an album, even, where you feel ambition got the better of them, just one where they noodled too much, for too long, and ended up with something that almost–but not quite–works, and to do anything else would require throwing away all the work they’d already done, and what’s there isn’t terrible, so it doesn’t deserve that.
In Promise Mascot Agency, you play Michi, aka “The Janitor”, a classic, Yakuza-series style honour-above-all super amazing guy, which means it makes perfect sense that he’s voiced by the literal Kazuma Kiryu, Takaya Kuroda. Michi and his yakuza brother, Toki (who doesn’t seems sus immediately at all) are ambushed on a job, leading to his family owing a truly absurd amount of debt and his death a requirement. Lucky for Michi, however, the family happens to own a failing mascot agency in Kaso-Machi, a town where Yakuza never go because… it’s cursed! The kind of curse that kills any Yakuza who goes there. Considering he’s a dead man anyway, Michi heads to Kaso-Machi in his shitey old kei truck, aiming to raise as much money with the help of a sentient finger before he croaks from whatever it is the curse does.
Promise Mascot Agency is, in a lot of ways, a mechanical follow-up to Paradise Killer. Both games are open world genre mash-ups: if in Paradise Killer you were playing a sort of first-person Crackdown smooshed into a deduction game–leaping around to collect clues–in Promise Mascot Agency you’re (kind of) playing Burnout Paradise, but driving around to collect the mascots and other things you need for the management sim. You never control Michi outside of the truck, so if you’re not driving around, you’re either in cut-scenes or menus.
Like Paradise Killer, going around the world collecting stuff is great! It’s a complete pleasure to explore, smash signs, pick things up and so on—well, past a certain point. Again like Paradise Killer, there’s an upgrade system, and while it’s better here–there are more upgrades–it’s got a problem which upgrade systems sometimes face: the upgrades don’t make the kei truck more fun they make it less shitty.
I get it from a narrative standpoint–the truck isn’t really supposed to be some incredible off-road super car–but much like Paradise Killer, one of the very first things you’re going to want to do is just find most of the upgrades and be done with it. You don’t need them all immediately, but there are a couple that make exploration so much nicer (and more rewarding) and those ones do feel like they probably should have been handed out on the critical path close to immediately, leaving the others as nice to haves.1
But really Promise Mascot Agency’s true problem is–sadly–the whole “mascot agency” bit. Game director Oli Clarke Smith has said that the original idea came from the team’s art director, Rachel Noy, and the original idea was a 2D Kairosoft-like, but that Smith and tech director Phil Crabtree “wanted to create something bigger.”
They have certainly created something bigger, but it betrays the entire concept of the game. There’s no real management at all. You hire mascots–choosing their compensation–send said mascots on jobs, and that’s about it.
That really wouldn’t be the worst thing–I’m fine with simplicity–but for the fact that for some reason there’s also a card game jammed in. When mascots go on a job, there’s a percentage chance–higher when they’re new and low rank–that they’ll fuck up the job somehow (getting stuck in a door because their head is too huge being the classic example.) The way you solve this problem is that you have “hero cards”–collected in-world–with which you can play a simple card game to defeat the problem. The problem has HP; you play cards of the required type to damage it.
It’s not a difficult or in-depth game at all. It’s basically Top Trumps, though as you upgrade the cards by playing through the story or collecting more collectables, some cards will give you more actions or allow you to draw more cards, but generally you just play the cards with the highest damage. It feels like a really half-formed idea, and the problem is that you do it fucking endlessly.
Now, the game gives you the option of sending mascots off with consumables that will make this game show up less, but that bumps up against the game’s design otherwise, where you’re really trying to make as much money as possible. The kind of player who doesn’t use health potions on bosses “because they might need them” isn’t going to buy and burn thousands of yen worth of consumables just to give themselves a 50% less chance of a mini game that’s “quick.”
And as quick as it is, it’s unbelievably annoying to send a bunch of mascots off on jobs, think “ah, now I can do the thing I like: driving around collecting shit” and drive 30 seconds only to have a bunch of alerts meaning you have to play the card game three or four times.
It’s really disastrous for Promise Mascot Agency. Unlike Paradise Killer, where collecting stuff really ties deeply into the conversations, and getting to do another conversation with new stuff is a pleasure to aim for, in Promise Mascot Agency the actual mascot agency is just an annoyance. If you’ll allow me to return to that album metaphor, it really feels like if you got an album and there was a car alarm that set off randomly in every song. And not in a good way (I feel like I need to say this for everyone who’s a fan of experimental, car alarm-based music.)
It’s just really hard to get into an enjoyable flow with Promise Mascot Agency until you get to the point where you don’t need money any more, and when you don’t need money any more… you don’t need to send mascots off anyway!
To be honest, the whole game is just quite oddly paced. You can blame my min-max brain again, but they introduce the idea that you need to send money back to the family in a certain chapter fairly early into the game, but before that chapter you don’t have to, and you can do basically everything else in the game. So… as soon as I realised that I could play it without slowing my accumulation of money by having to send cash back (and I could instead spend it all on town upgrades or other things that increased passive income) I did that for as long as I could stand, and then basically speedran the actual plot.
And that plot is… ehhh. You obviously know why the job went wrong immediately, and the mystery of Kaso-Machi is… fine. Paradise Killer’s plot is pretty messy, but I found it came together well, but Promise Mascot Agency just doesn’t feel that rewarding. And it’s actually a problem of the mechanics.
In Paradise Killer, the reason the ending works is because it’s building on everything you’ve done: your entire time spent building a case (or cases) is all used at the end, and you really do shape what happens by your play. In Promise Mascot Agency, the climax is a big mascot competition where the odds are unfairly stacked against you. Going into it, I thought “oh man, this is actually where the card game is going to matter. It’s going to really require me to have upgraded all my cards and play them in the right order to do enough damage to win.”
But… it doesn’t. The entire end of the game is completely scripted. You can just not bother to try at all because you get deux ex machina cards in your deck after some forced losses.
This sucks! It sucks so much! It makes all the effort you expended feel wasted and it hammers home that the card game isn’t really anything at all other than something to gum up your time spent playing this.
I got to the end of Promise Mascot Agency completely and utterly deflated. It’s a game that just works against itself. I had a jolly time driving around and collecting stuff, and while the story isn’t any great shakes, I liked the character designs and enjoyed some of the mascot story beats. But what’s portrayed as the core not only isn’t really there, the game would probably be better if it was removed.
Ah well, third albums are usually good, aren’t they?
Will I ever play it again? Rinsed this. Well, I didn’t do the races, or some of the other extra content, but I didn’t have much urge to do any of it.
Final Thought:
Speaking of the character designs… Matriarch Shimazu. If I didn’t think everyone at Kaizen Game Works knows what they were doing with Matriarch Shimazu some of her later character poses makes it exceedingly clear they knew what they were doing. Let me simply say: 🥵.
I suppose the argument could be made that the most necessary ones are pretty hard to miss, but they can still be missed… ↩︎
Developed/Published by: Technōs Japan (Published by Taito in North America.) Released: 22/04/1987 Completed: 12/03/2026 Completion: Finished it (no need for saving until that ridiculous final level.)
This essay on Double Dragon follows last week’s on Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun as a tribute to the recently departed Yoshihisa Kishimoto, even though, to be honest, I’m pretty hard on it.
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and if I’ve got an Egret Mini II and I’ve paid to own Double Dragon again, then I might as well play it.
In my write up of the NES version, I mentioned that I’d played and completed the arcade original in the form of a now long-delisted Xbox 360 release (written up for Eurogamer.) I absolutely put the boot in, but re-reading that now, I notice how it’s definitely a review of the Xbox 360 release rather than an examination of the arcade original. But there’s something I mention in the review I had completely forgotten about: Double Dragon’s astonishingly poor performance.
I initially thought the Egret II Mini was at fault–I’d remembered someone saying that if the power supply is too low there are issues–but I’d plugged it in with a decent charger. It’s simply that the game’s original hardware wasn’t up to the game design, and the Egret II Mini stays authentic to that (it seems that people can, and do, overclock the game when emulating it through other means; it might have been nice if Taito had offered something like this, but I understand why they didn’t.)
Ultimately, the game suffers so much slowdown it is agonising to play. The game slows down as soon as there are as few as two enemies on screen, but speeds up if (for example) you’ve knocked one of them down. The speed of the game undulates in a way that’s completely discombobulating. It makes playing the game unpleasant in a way that’s unusually unique; like trying to build a card tower in front of a rotating fan. And you’ve got jam all over your hands.
Now… just because I feel that way doesn’t mean that the arcade audience of the late 80s felt that way, with Double Dragon “America’s highest-grossing dedicated arcade game in 1988 and 1989.” I find that baffling, because it’s nigh unplayable!
(The only assumption I can make–and it very much is an assumption–is that because the game was using older 8-bit chips, maybe the board was cheaper and so a lot of machines were sold, so it won by sheer numbers. But I certainly don’t have any sales numbers.)
The thing that makes this all a bit of a shame is that, well, even if it’s stupidly hard, I sort of like Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun, and Double Dragon, as the next game from Yoshihisa Kishimoto–and the one that truly defined the side-scrolling beat-em-up by featuring proper levels that you have to progress through to complete–should be better than it is. Kishimoto is really trying to make another leap here, and you can feel the game straining within the limitations of the obvious technical problems.
For example: the game is clearly intended to improve on Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun’s enemy AI, one of that game’s most interesting aspects. And while the enemies here do try and position themselves to take you on, the thing you’re most going to notice is that they’ll just refuse to get close to you if you’re holding a weapon (making holding weapons a complete waste of time) and then otherwise they’re really as dumb as rocks, happily walking into dynamite they’ve just thrown or off cliffs.
And the player’s abilities are supposed to be deeper, more interesting, more situational, with new moves like a headbutt and a spinning jump kick. But it’s ruined by the fact that–I’m sure inspired by Kunio-Kun’s powerful back kick–heroes Billy and Jimmy Lee have a “elbow smash” that attacks enemies behind them. Possibly aware that the back kick was frustrating–because you couldn’t use it unless you had an enemy behind you–you can now do the elbow smash whenever you like, and because it guarantees an immediate knockdown… the entire game becomes about turning your back on enemies, performing the elbow smash, and then performing it again as soon as they get up.
I want to be clear: I don’t think you can play this game “properly.” It’s simply too frustrating, with no sense that anything that happens is related to your own abilities because of the slowdown. So instead, the actual and I suspect only way to get through this game is to elbow smash every enemy you face–the ones you can’t make drop off edges, anyway.
The only reason this game isn’t an easy single credit win is because the final level is, frankly, nonsense. The first section features some blocks that spring out from the background and some spears that statues attack you with that knock off half of your health. They don’t have any tell (the blocks in particular are infuriating) and it means that you will almost certainly lose a life (and the default settings only start you with two.)
(There’s also a jump across a bridge in the previous level that will probably take a few lives from you, but at least you can see that.)
Once you get past all that nonsense, the main problem is just that every enemy has a ludicrous amount of health and (yet again calling back to Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun) the final boss can kill you in one hit by shooting you. He goes down easily to the elbow smash like everyone else, however.
I really, really wish I liked Double Dragon. It’s a hugely important game, but when you play it, you almost can’t understand why. The design is coming from the right place. I can see that Kishimoto is trying to move the genre forward. But it’s still a bit half-baked, and the performance is too poor for you to appreciate it anyway.1 I wasn’t that hot on the NES version–with its awkward platforming, and still including those annoying stupid blocks–but it’s a much better way to spend your time than this.
Will I ever play it again? Right, that’s twice. That’s absolutely enough times.
Final Thought: You know what? There’s one thing they nailed straight off with Double Dragon. The theme music. Absolutely gets the blood pumping.
I’d love to read Florent Gorges’ Enter The Double Dragon to see if it has anything on Kishimoto’s experience making this, but it’s 1) in French and 2) not easily accessible. ↩︎
Writer and Game Developer Mathew Kumar joins an episode hosted by Esper Quinn, covering live service games, personalized Silent Hills, and the Kentucky Loan Ranger.
It’s been too long since I’ve been on Insert Credit! But I’m finally back and please enjoy this episode ably hosted by the excellent Esper Quinn where we delve a little too deeply into my subconscious.
Developed/Published by: Technōs Japan/Taito Released: 05/1986 Completed: 08/03/2026 Completion: Finished it (Saving after each level.)
It was announced on April 5th that the designer of Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun, Double Dragon and more, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, had passed away. There’s a sad coincidence here, as I’d just played both Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun and Double Dragon for an unrelated reason. These weren’t Kishimoto’s first games–he started at Data East and created some well-regarded laserdisc games, Thunder Storm and Road Blaster (also known as Cobra Command and Road Avenger) but they are his best known works, so as tribute I’ll be posting my articles on them this week and next.
Yoshihisa Kishimoto (1961-2026)
I hadn’t originally planned to play this–in fact, in my write-up of the Famicom’s Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun I said I wouldn’t–but I had a research-related reason and the Egret Mini II’s most recent release, Arcade Collection Part I meant I suddenly had easy access to it, so it would have been an absolute dereliction of duty to not play it.
Best known as Renegade, Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun is a cornerstone video game the likes of The Tower of Druaga or Xevious, in that it would spawn an entire genre that would end up in an almost entirely different–arguably simpler–place. It’s the original “brawler” style beat ‘em up (or, as it’s known in Japan, “belt scrolling action”) though as it exists pre-genre convention, it will surprise any modern player with its stages, which are arena battles (rather than continuous levels) and combat that requires savvy positioning and careful timing, as there’s no way to credit feed (although your health is restored after each stage, there are no continues.)
Renegade was created by Techōs Japan for Taito to appeal to a western audience and was directly inspired by Walter Hill’s New York-set The Warriors (despite that hardly being a contemporary reference; the film was over seven years old by that point) but Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun is remarkable for being an early example of an–at least mildly–autobiographical game. Designer Yoshihisa Kishimoto based Kunio on himself, who as a teen found himself getting into fights on a daily basis.1 The game is strongly inspired by the unique culture of delinquency in Japan: the hero, Kunio, is a high school student driven into action to defend his bullied friend: first against “banchō” (male high school delinquents) then against “bōsōzoku” (custom motorcycle biker gangs) then “sukeban” (female high school delinquents) before finally the deadly yakuza.
The level intros, where your pal gets his beaten up and even shot(!) aren’t replaced with anything in Renegade, to its detriment, I think.
Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun is deceptive. It can be beaten in as quickly as six minutes, but only the very best players could even attempt such a feat. The game is crushingly hard even on its easiest difficulty, with enemies that intelligently swarm you and a boss in each arena who can seem invincible. The trick is that there are three buttons: a left attack, jump, and right attack. You hit the attack in the direction you are facing, and if there is an enemy behind you, you can hit the opposite attack to do a powerful back kick to make space. This is, honestly, pretty confusing if you’re more used to later games that quickly discarded such a system, but it’s a large factor in the game’s richness. You don’t try to overwhelm enemies in Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun; you have to carefully position yourself to avoid getting stunlocked by attacks from multiple directions, and when you face bosses, you have to consider your tactics. The bōsōzoku boss can be taken down easily with jump kicks, but the sukeban boss will always duck; meaning you’ll have to take advanced tactics like keeping a lower-level enemy on screen so that you can face them and instead use your powerful back kick on the boss.
It can be frustrating–and it certainly doesn’t feel fair–but the game is so quick that there’s a draw to trying again with a new tactic in mind. The game does push it a little too far with the yakuza level featuring enemies who all one hit kill. With the boss able to fire a gun and kill you from afar, you have to take extremely conservative hit-and-run tactics that can make a loss absolutely gutting (with a lot of luck you can just wail on the boss as soon as he appears; if the other enemies don’t surround you, they might similarly get stunlocked and you’ll survive; it’s far from a consistent tactic, however.)
I’m a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Maybe it was the novelty of my Egret Mini II, maybe it was that I let myself save after every level, but I had fun trying to “solve” each level after getting over the initial hump of difficulty. There’s depth to the mechanics–you can throw enemies into other enemies, or off the edge of the train platform–and as your health gets restored after each level there’s a real value in trying to survive each brawl at any cost.
This motorbike section must have felt like such a slap in the face to those who finished the first level in arcades. You have to time your jump kicks perfectly.
Normally I wouldn’t be so in favour of a game this hard, but my memory of the Famicom version is that– though the game was far more expansive, with multi-stage levels, a motorbike mini-game, even a maze–it was just too easy to cheese your way through. It’s better, but not as thrilling. I felt like I really had to work for my win here, and for whatever reason, that just worked for me.
Will I ever play it again? No, but maybe this will lead to a reappraisal of Double Dragon, also on the Egret II Mini’s Arcade Collection Part 1, which I remember being straight cheeks when I played it on (of all things) Xbox 360.
Final Thought: As much as I like the Egret II Mini (despite some issues previously mentioned) they really dropped the ball on dip switches. Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun has four difficulties, but they’re listed in the menu as A, B, C, D, and it’s set to B difficulty. Feels like that would make it easy to assume that’s “normal” difficulty, but the default on the machine was normal, which would maybe make that actually A position. I beat the game on A, which I thought was easier than B, but honestly, having switched difficulties around, I can’t really tell. The game is balls hard no matter what, I guess. I’ve played it longer than I would admit and when I start a fresh run I still can’t beat the first level consistently.
This is sourced from a Polygon article in 2012, though as that article notes, there’s an entire book on Kishimoto’s career by Florent Gorges, Enter the Double Dragon, if you’re interested in learning more. ↩︎
Developed/Published by: Taito Released: 11/1979 Completed: 27/03/2026 Completion: Played it as long as I could stand, getting the high score (with a mere 5520)
It’s been some lean times over here at exp. Towers, but FOMO is real and lives beyond the realm of the sensible, meaning that I finally treated myself to a Taito Egret II Mini because–after foolishly not picking one up previously–the system got reissued in Japan after a period where they were only available for eye-watering prices.
That means, of course, that I can start playing all the Taito games I’ve got in chronological order! I’ve previously written about Space Invaders (exclusive to exp. 2601) and there’s not much to be said about playing that on an Egret II Mini, but the system also includes Lunar Rescue, which I hadn’t played before. So after a quick detour to play Head On, I decided to not get hung up on playing any earlier Taito games (Space Chaser is just Head On, Field Goal is a weird Break Out, etc.) even though I could easily get Taito Memories working on now after all that falderal with Sega Ages. I’m sure I’ll end up playing games that I didn’t plan to, but let’s try and put my best foot forward here.
Lunar Rescue seems to be Taito’s most notable post Space Invaders title, and serves also as a notable post Lunar Lander game too. It’s an interesting one in this early wild west of plagiarism because it’s really not very much like Lunar Lander at all, but it does–surely intentionally–include the word “Lunar” in its title. Lunar Lander is–of course–simply a rip-off of Moonlander, which had been kicking about since 1973. So one does have to wonder if Lunar Rescue was merely inspired by the same “inspirations”, considering that Lunar Lander came out–if release dates are even close to correct, of which I admit I have no guarantees they are–mere months before, which does seem like a pretty short turnaround even for a cabinet which uses the same tech as Space Invaders.
There’s possibly even some simultaneous discovery going on here, because Lunar Rescue is basically a two phase game: you’re trying to land and rescue astronauts while avoiding asteroids, and then get them back to your mothership while avoiding space invaders. Yet Asteroids came out in the same month (dates allowing) so there’s really no chance that they were inspired by it!
Unlike Asteroids or Lunar Lander, however, Lunar Rescue isn’t about the physics at all. It’s all digital control in the style of Space Invaders. There’s no slow rotations or fine control over speed here. You move left, you move right, and you can slow your ship with the fire button when landing, or speed it up (and fire lasers) when taking off. The asteroids move from left to right (and vice versa) and so do the invaders.
As someone who genuinely appreciates Space Invaders, I had high hopes for this. Indeed, I can tell there’s some fondness for this game; a near-arcade perfect port was released for ZX Spectrum just a couple of years ago(!) but it’s slow, boring and unfair.
Landing is boring, and hard to mess up even with your limited movement. So the real issue is taking off, where because you’re flying up the screen into invaders who shoot at you, you can easily find yourself shot by bullets you couldn’t react to–and there’s the added quirk that some ascents feature comets which you generally don’t realise until you’ve died to one.
Despite not featuring anything physics-based, the game still manages to lose all of the lustre of Space Invaders; the rhythm, so important to this kind of game, goes from a driving march to a kind of slow waltz, but one where your toes are constantly being tread on. After a couple of goes I really just didn’t want to play it any more, but persevered till I could beat the first level without deaths–inconsistently.
It’s not exactly that Lunar Rescue is bad–it’s competent, but it’s just so unbelievably unexciting. Honestly that makes it one of the very worst things I’ve played in ages, which I know is unfair, but I longed for the snappy if punishing loop of Head On every second with this.
Will I ever play it again? No thank you!
Final Thought: Oh! You might be wondering how I feel about the Taito Egret II Mini. It’s great. Certainly the nicest example of one of these things you can imagine. My main quibble is that it doesn’t have any scanline filters, but that problem was somewhat solved for me by RetroRGB, who recently(-ish) recommended a HDMI to component downscaler that works well enough, so now I can plug my mini systems into an actual CRT. Which is good, because the scanlines on the Astro City Mini are horrific anyway, and I’ve got a game on that system on the backlog…
Took a little time off from the relentless grind of new articles to celebrate my favourites of the previous year. It gave me an opportunity to talk up Evil Egg in advance of me writing it up, because it’ll probably be a long time before I do—I’ve been busy and had to put it down for a while, so when I return to it I’ll have to grind my skills back up if I want to eventually beat the boss.
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!
Head On piece is a really great example of the perils of self-publishing. I probably should have cut all the Sega Ages waffle and drilled down on the story of Lane Hauck, but absolutely no one is making me kill my darlings.
And in my latest UFO 50 subscriber exclusive, I really struggle with Ninpek. In later essays I’m going to be thinking a lot about difficulty when it comes to this collection, and I think it’s interesting to see how my feelings evolve as I face each game.
I’d held onto that Smash Ping Pong article for a bit thinking I might like Marty Supreme enough that I could do a mild Ping Pong theme week, but I didn’t find Mary Supreme interesting enough to write more than a few words about it. However, Smash Ping Pong is great, I genuinely recommend it. Consume Me… not so much. Not throwing shade, but I really do wonder how far the IGF juries actually got in it. But then I suppose we all know that the Oscars are largely voted on by people who see the ballot on their kitchen island and mark down the people they recognize (Sean Penn??? Again??? Come on.)
I finally get into 2015 with the exp. archive, and it’s interesting how much I played mobile games at this time, which I basically don’t do at all now—outside of the vice of a daily Puzzmo mini crossword, which just feels like something else entirely.
A movie that warns us of the completely soulless slop future that tech companies want and a completely soulless streaming slop movie produced by a tech company. Huh.
“Do you like wrestling? Are you sure? Did you maybe really like it once and now you’re trying to figure out why you aren’t as jazzed about it but also you found a copy of the American Wrestling Association’s 1998 pay-per-view SuperClash III and so you watched it to see how it felt and then you wrote about it but didn’t fully address the issues tied up with how you feel but you’d written a long thing so you published it anyway? I did.”
Hmm, that’s all I had bookmarked this month. Be sure to get in touch if you’ve got a zine that you’re trying to publicise!
And Finally…
TOJam 2026 has been announced! May 8-10th, with registration opening on April 2nd.
