I just did my regular playthrough of Super Castlevania IV for the Halloween season. This used to be a yearly tradition for me but it’s been a while since I’ve play it so it was nice to revisit it. This time I did it through the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, which includes a lot of the early games. I suspect that anything I say in this post has been repeated a billion times better by other folks but it’s still a lovely game. It’s always been one of my favorites in the series, with some of my favorite bits of it being the directional whipping and the jazzy soundtrack. Neither seems to really come up in later entries and that’s a shame. I know Mode 7 effects only make sense on a SNES but you know what? Later games should have had those too.
I’ve always been fascinated by this being a loose remake of the first game but still being labeled the fourth game of the series. It feels like something we probably wouldn’t see today with a lot of this stuff being more standardized. At the very least it feels different from how the industry does remakes today.
Screenshot taken from MobyGames. The background in this level rotates.
If I did have any complaints about the game, it’s that I personally feel like it starts to become a slog once you get to the castle. The game moves so quickly up until then and it has a wonderful variety of environments but then you get to the castle and the variety seems to drop and there’s a big difficulty spike. It remains this way for a few levels and then I think the level design becomes a lot more interesting again towards the end. It’s still a fantastic game though and the one I probably go to if I want to recommend a level-Castlevania game, partially because I haven’t played that many that aren’t on a Nintendo console.
Super Castlevania IV is part of the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, available on Switch, XBox, Playstation 4, and Windows.
Developer: Oh, a Rock! Studios Publisher: Oh, a Rock! Studios Year: 2022 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Photo from Itch.io page
The Lost Oregon City Gold is an adventure game where a dad and his two daughters stumble across an old letter from an ancestor with clues pointing them to $25,000 in lost gold. It’s up to you to explore Oregon and find it. Most of the game is played in a first person view where you click on arrows to navigate various spaces in Oregon, made up of photos, and talking to people or solving puzzles that will point you to the next clue in your treasure hunt. Occasionally you make choices in dialog but they’re pretty low stakes decisions and there are parts where you can answer questions about Oregon’s history that you learn by playing the game. I suppose that technically this makes the game an edutainment title, but that might be a stretch.
As you can see, it’s not a very serious game. Photos of people, played by the devs and family and friends, are used for all of the characters and the plot itself is very silly. It all works for me though. Something I really like about the games by Oh, a Rock! Studios is that they all feel like a group of folks having lots of fun making games for each other but without all the inside jokes so they’re still very approachable for folks outside the group. They’re all just like a nice, relaxing, and goofy hangout session and would also recommend Internet Court and The Awkward Steve Duology for the same vibe. They don’t take themselves seriously but the games aren’t doing any sort of ironically bad FMV either.
The Lost Oregon City Gold is available on Steam and Itch.io for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse is platformer where you play a Mickey Mouse and must save Pluto after he’s been kidnapped by Emperor Pete (Spoiler: The whole thing is a dream). You do all your standard platforming stuff while going through a variety of environments. The main gimmick in this one is that you get a new type of power in each new area. I had played this one a long time ago and thought it would be fun to revisit and…..eh…..it’s fine. I thought I would have enjoyed it more since I have such a soft spot for this era of Capcom games but I often found myself getting frustrated by how finnicky the controls felt to me and the hit boxes on some of the bosses, which ended up being my least favorite part of the game. I was surprised by all of this because I remember it being a fairly short game back in the day, which must have warped in my mind to it being easy. Although I probably did play it on easy mode back in the day instead of at a harder difficulty.
Anyway, sometimes you revisit a game from your childhood and it ends up being merely ok. At least all the art and music is great and what I would expect from an early 90s Capcom game. The game eventually got a rerelease on the GBA where you can also play as Minnie and I believe this version also adds some mini games, but I don’t think there’s any way to play the game today.
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse has not been rereleased and is available on your favorite emulation site.
Developer: Taylor McCue Publisher: Taylor McCue Year: 2022 Genre: Visual Novel System: Game Boy
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is a short Game Boy visual novel created in GB Studio about the developer’s experiences being a transgender sex worker and the trauma that came from doing that work. The player advances the story by walking around different scenes and talking to various characters and is about 40 minutes long.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me was one of my favorite games of 2022 for many reasons. It’s incredible to see someone put out a semi-autobiographical story like this where where they are so vulnerable. The game uses the limitations of the Game Boy so well and I think the artwork in this game is fantastic. Another thing I loved about it was that it was for a platform created by Nintendo. Even today, Nintendo is known as a company that does not approve of adult queer content on their platforms and I loved seeing someone use one of their consoles to tell a personal story. It’s inspiring seeing retro consoles and computers being used to create experimental games and tell stories that we didn’t see very often in games thirty years ago, when queer games like Caper in the Castro and GayBlade were a rarity.
Unfortunately this is one of the games that has been hit by the Itch.io deindexings, making it harder to find. I know the developer has put it on the Internet Archive and encouraged other people to host downloads of it, but it’s still heartbreaking that queer stories like this are under attack because of pressure by Mastercard and Visa. I hope that one day people will be able to create their art without capitalism trying to stamp it out.
Five Years Old Memories is a short interactive experience where you listen to people in Japan talk about memories they have from when they were about five years old and interacting with animations that play while they talk. It’s very short and only takes about 20 minutes to play through. I’ve played it a few times now, with my most recent playthrough happening because I thought it would be fun to revisit and also get all the achivements, which rewarded me by stumbling upon an element or two that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The art is fantastic and it’s really cute seeing this storybook-like pictures animating as you listen to their stories. There’s not a whole lot to say about this one other than I really like it and think it’s worth checking out if this sounds appealing to you since it’s only $3.
Five Years Old Memories is available on Steam, Itch.io, and iOS.
Developer: On-Line Systems Publisher: On-Line Systems Year: 1980 Genre: Adventure System: Apple II
I finally played one of the first graphic adventures (the first I know of but I thought “this”very first” was under debate?) and the first game by Roberta Williams and Sierra and: It’s cute.
Mystery House is a text adventure with very basic line graphics where you are locked in a house with other folks and must find some hidden jewels. You start seeing dead bodies showing up and need to figure out who the murderer is and stop them before it’s too late. The actual design of the game is very basic, as you would expect for an adventure on home computers at this time, and you type in commands to walk around the house, find clues and items, and use them to progress elsewhere. It’s a pretty short game where you restart a few times since it relies on learning through failure a little bit but it’s not as cruel about it as a lot of later adventure games. The biggest thing I actually fought with was the parser. Even though it’s incredibly early in the genre’s lifespan, other text adventures already had better parsers at the time. I also found that the graphics also make the game harder since pure text tells you everything you can interact with, this game needs you to guess what the correct object name is to interact with it. Sometimes it’s also just hard to see what you should be trying to use. The game also features a pretty annoying maze. So maybe not a game I would really recommend to folks for the plot but I still had a fun enough time playing something of historical importance. Renga in Blue has a very good writeup of the game and I definitely liked it more than him, but I agree with all of the criticisms of it.
One of the weirdest parts of the game to me is that there is an optional person you may never see, a grave digger named Joe. You can walk to a graveyard outside of the house (so I guess you aren’t actually locked in?) with six graves dug in the yard. If you walk into one of the graves, he buries you alive. But you don’t actually need to see him or go into the grave to complete the game so I have no idea why this screen exists. You can also stab him and kill him, which seems a bit excessive. But he does try to kill you if given the opportunity so I guess he deserves it? It’s all really weird.
It also got a release in Japan a little bit later with some slightly better graphics. I don’t know how the rest of the game or its parser is.
Anyway, glad I played it. It’s dated and simplistic but it’s also short enough that I think if you’re a little generous with the walkthrough to deal with the clunky parser, you might have some fun with the novelty of playing the first Sierra game.
Mystery House is public domain and available for free to download such as the ScummVM website.
Developer: Art & Magic Publisher: Psygnosis Year: 1992 Genre: Arcade
I am still going through my retro gaming phase and thought I would finally check out a game that has been in my Amiga backlog for a long time, the shmup Agony. It’s a pretty straightforward arcade shooter. You’ve been transformed into an owl and must stop an evil wizard by flying through levels and shooting at stuff. You occasionally pick up powerups that you can use at any time to briefly help you through obstacles but there aren’t any innovations in this one. It’s not anything I’m upset about and I enjoyed the shooting quite a bit, but that’s not why people still talk about the game today.
Where the game really shines is the art and music. The vibes are amazing. Everything is gorgeous and features incredible animation. I wonder if people lost their minds over Psygnosis finally publishing a game where you play as an owl. Between each level is a transition screen where you have some really nice art to look at as the game loads the next level.
The game itself mostly isn’t too difficult to play except for the big difficulty spike at the end. I guess that’s expected because it’s an arcade game and people would beat the game in 15 minutes without that, but I actually found the first few levels to be cozy and relaxing. Like I said, it’s pretty simplistic and why there isn’t much to say about this one, but I had a good time with it and would recommend it if you’re looking for some games that are exclusive to the Amiga. I’m surprised that this one didn’t get ported anywhere else since it probably could have worked in some form on other platforms.
One of the developers wrote about the making of the game on his site and it also includes a download of the game. I don’t know if that means it’s officially freeware but clearly no one cares and no one is selling it today so have at it. I also just recommend looking around the site if you want to see more Amiga game dev history.
Agony is available on your favorite Amiga rom site.
I don’t know why this became RoboCop video game week for me. I completed that Unfinished Business game and then I guess RetroAchivements got me to start playing old British games. I believe this is a loose adaptation of the RoboCop arcade game by Data East. It’s a 2D scroller where you walk through stages shooting various gang members with the game switching things up at a couple points, like two levels where you have to shoot someone taking hostage
I think this is actually the first Amstrad game I’ve ever played and thought it was pretty neat. The use of color was really interesting to me and I’ll have to check out more games for the platform, especially if there are any exclusives. I’ve heard the ZX Spectrum version is better but wanted to give this computer a shot since I’ve played games similar to this one before like RoboCop 1 and 3 on the NES. While the game is clunky, movement is awkward and I thought the mini games don’t really work, I can see why it was a hit and has its fans. The NES already had better arcade games at this point and I think the Amiga was out there as well, I imagine that it was fun to have something like this on the home computer.
The inclusion of mini games feels like a thing that’s very specific to British computer games in the 80s? I suppose the thought is that it adds a lot of variety but I don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed any of these in any game? In this game the hostage saving is frustrating because you have to shoot the hostage taker a lot of times like it’s a boss fight and I hated the Suspect Identification mini game because I felt like it’s incredibly fussy about getting everything right or else you lose.
I still had a better time with this than RoboCop 3, where I was constantly fighting with the controls and got frustrated with the instant deaths. Like that game, it’s only a handful of levels but once you’re done, it loops around back to the first level, giving it more of an arcade game-like feel. Little quirks like the game only having music and no sound did not bother me and it was fun dipping into an area of gaming I wasn’t familiar with.
RoboCop is probably available on your favorite rom site.
Well, after completing RoboCop: Rogue City ‒ Unfinished Business, I wanted to finally play this one since I’ve been a fan of the soundtrack of it for a long time. This post will be the farthest thing from a hot take because I’m here to confirm that like the movie it’s based on, RoboCop 3 is not an amazing game. Like the previous RoboCop NES games, it’s a platformer where you walk through levels and shoot bad guys. While those were developed by Ocean, this one is by Probe and only published by Ocean. None of the RoboCop NES games are that amazing but this is the worst one. The controls just feel off and the difficulty is cranked up to a very high degree to make up for the game only having five levels. One of these levels is just a repeat of the previous level but in reverse order.
RoboCop 3 does a really “fun” thing where if your body takes enough damage, parts will malfunction. You can repair parts between missions by finding powerups that you use on the Repair screen between missions. It’s a really interesting idea in theory but is just not executed well. It’s too bad because I don’t really like criticizing games that are ambitious but it turns a game that was already hard to control into something even more frustrating. I watched Jeff Gerstmann play this and agree with his take that this is more frustrating than when RoboCop 1 is just frustrating to play because of clunky controls. Choices were made to make the game more difficult and it just makes the game worse.
So overall I wouldn’t recommend the game but I can recommend the soundtrack Jeroen Tel. It absolutely rules. Listen to this theme!
From listening to it, it sounds like something that was made for the Commodore 64. I do want to give that version a shot because from reading the YouTube comments and watching a few seconds of it, it does seem like a better version. It still seems to have some clunky movement but something about it being on a computer makes it more acceptable to me.
RoboCop 3 isn’t available legally anywhere but it’s easy to find on your favorite rom site.
Just wrapped up RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business, a standalone DLC to 2023’s RoboCop: Rogue City. I had enjoyed that one quite a bit as a AA budget FPS/RPG even with its flaws, which I think were covered pretty well in outlets like Bullet Points. Since Unfinished Business is a standalone expansion, it’s essentially more of the same, so I also enjoyed this despite it not being as well designed as the original game. Unfinished Business is sorta similar to the film Dredd (or what I remember of it) in that you are now investigating a large apartment complex that has been built by the mega corporation OCP and is doing everything in their power to get people to leave their homes and move into it, so they can knock everything down in Detroit and build a new city on top of it. Mercenaries have taken over the building For Reasons and you learn what they are as you walk through the building shooting bad guys.
You can now pet cats
Just like with the original game, the shooting and movement still feels good to me and it’s fun seeing Peter Weller come back to do more RoboCop voice acting. One of the fun things in the original game was that you got to walk around Detroit doing some mysteries and exploration, and that part was cut down a lot in here. You still get little hub areas once in a while, but there’s a lot less exploration, which I thought was a shame. The parts that still exist are a lot of fun to walk around in so I wish we could have had more of that.
Something I really wish these Robocop games would do, but probably shouldn’t expect if we’re being honest, is leaning into the politics of the films more. OCP is clearly an evil corporation and throughout the game you’ll find little notes and emails of them doing evil stuff, like internal communications about how they can jack up the prices of insulin since it hasn’t hurt sales yet, but I wish there was more of this. I think it’s some of the more interesting bits but the games aren’t really that interested in being anti-cop or digging that much into the evils of OCP.
Throughout the game you find notes and emails that build on the world
The game is also shockingly buggy. I have a pretty high tolerance of bugs in games as long as they are still playable, but it was still jarring how much weird glitches would pop up and how poorly optimized the game seemed to be.
This one mixes things up a little by having you switch to different perspectives during the game to move the story through flashbacks. You play as Alex Murphy, pre-RoboCop, as well as some other characters. They’re pretty brief, a little clunky, and 2/3 of the flashbacks are more walking sim-like bits, but I still liked them? I just think the variety was nice and the one that was hyped up the most, the Alex Murphy bit, was probably the least interesting one to me.
I am fascinated by how much this game references RoboCop 3, which is no one’s favorite in the series. It’s a bad movie but I think it has some interesting ideas in there (along with quite a few bad ones) that are in a film constantly being tripped up by studio mandates like how it must be PG-13 and appeal more to kids. It’s definitely not a Clone Wars/Prequel movies situation where it elevates the prequels, but it’s still interesting to me that it helps setup the events of the third movie a little by making people tired of OCP and introducing early versions of the robots in that movie and the jetpack and helps soften some (and just some) of the rougher parts of that movie like the kid being able to hack the ED-209 by saying that it’s always been an easily hackable pile of garbage. It’s too bad it’s such a poor movie because I think it’s really interesting that it’s a movie about homeless people vs cops and making the homeless people the good guys, but the movie is bad. I also don’t like Robocop 2 as much as other folks either, which means this is a franchise I know a lot about even though I really only like one movie in the series and one or two video games.
Anyway, this is a lot of complaining but I did enjoy my time with this expansion. It took me about 10 hours to complete and I think if you enjoyed the original game then you’ll like this. If you didn’t like that one, you’ll also not like this. Sometimes I just like my weird AA budget computer games that are a solid B that I won’t think about a ton after I finish them! I heard their Terminator game is like this too and should play that sometime.
RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is available on PS5, Xbox, Steam, and GOG.
