so many modern beat em ups want to advertise "deep fighting game-like gameplay" and yet urban reign is the first one I've played that means that by way of making opponents with kits that match your own to create similar decision making instead of like, long combos and lots of special moves.

an hour into strangers of paradise. terrible discovery: after playing spikeout, you will yearn for shift in every game with a traditional lockon system.

pitch: emulator plugin that replicates console style action game checkpoints for arcade beat em ups. those games are either brain off credit feeding or hardcore 1cc runs. this would make a more approachable middle ground to take them seriously without dedicating quite so much time.

oh wow, that's cool. so. around 1990, some mega man devs left capcom to form their own studio, takeru, which made some incredible stuff but quickly dissolved, after which point a bunch of them went to mitchell corp. I never realized mitchell worked on xtreme. that's a really cool full circle moment.

still going back and forth on if pragmata has the sauce or not. landing a melee finisher on a grunt to explode the nearby crowd has been the biggest sign pointing to "yes" so far. that's that re4-esque "shooter with brawler dna" I'm looking for. just hoping this game gets properly hectic.

the antagonist I have in mind is inuart btw.

dozens of game formats tried and nothing has yet beat "a short sequence of linear action stages."

Proud to announce my next game: 💣LURRUNA - The Island of Towering Automatons 💣

i'll never stop thinking about ko takeuchi's art of the homestar runner cast

look at my boooooooooys

In the spirit of trans visibility, lemme just plug my ongoing project to document as many pre-2010 games as possible that had a trans person on the dev team. You might be surprised by what's on there. There's games going right back to the sixties! dotmaetrix.neocities.org/classictranslist

balan wonderworld is an expressive platformer where you can plainly see the intended solution to every obstacle but you can also bring any powerup to any section of the game to bust it wide open and it rules. I love games where no solution is strictly prescribed. happy balanversary.

I just built a model of the viper II! and then I painted it bc everything but the pink was a sticker and it looked really bad. I was in over my head but I had a great time.

what I've come to understand about myself is that I will learn your mechanic when it becomes necessary, not when it's introduced. give me explanations up front and they'll probably bounce off me. give me a manual to read when I'm stuck and I'll slurp it up like the fountain of knowledge it is.

I've 3D scanned this large keshi figure depicting Agent 17 from Elevator Action! This is a 1985 figure by Amada, part of their Family Computer Color Pose Doll line. Grab the model here: archive.org/details/kesh...

GIRAFFES? GIRAFFES! - I Am S/H(im)e[r] As You Am S/H(im)e[r] As You Are Me And We Am I And I Are All Our Together: Our Collective Consciousness' Psychogenic Fugue

New on Gaming Hell - Gunvalkyrie (Smilebit, 2002) www.gaminghell.co.uk/Gunvalkyrie.... ARMORED VALKYRIES HEAR OUR CRIES!

She can pick him up but at what cost

It occurs to me that many people don't know about the GameFan coffee incident. In 1993, GameFan published a manic 6-page review of the game Cybermorph that was written while tripping on LSD that somebody put in the office coffee pot The review declared that Cybermorph was the first "real" game

Here's a vid of the extra suits for Saburouta in GunValkyrie's Challenge Mode, documented in the game's Perfect Guide Book and nowhere else on the internet AFAIK 1st: Standard 2nd: Hold L/R, press Up, X, Right, X, Down, X, Left, A on 'Send to insertion point?' prompt 3rd: As above, replace X with Y

media thread 2026

ninja baseball bat man mention! probably my favorite beat em up rn. so good. get me outta them grimy alleyways and into some goofy cartoon shenanigans *please*

this is the realest post because video games did not get better after. at all. online play with your buddies? herb shit. massive open environments? tell it to the shareholders, fucking whatever, that is for babies. xevious. xevious. xevious

crazy that two decades of indie devs decided they'd rather make symphony riffs than castlevania 1 riffs... it's like being served a steak dinner and going "no thanks, I found this hot dog on the ground outside"

mr sweetness, we meet again... mappy kids is a really excellent retro co-op title btw. split screen platforming, 20 minute playthroughs plus alternate routes with different stages for replays, competitive scoring component. extremely solid.

...some stupid stuff #bombrushcyberfunk

I started this year by bouncing off ninja gaiden 2, spent a long time journeying through different action games, and have now returned. I think the distance from black helps, but also, I have such a hard time keeping enemies in view. come back dmc fixed camera, I didn't mean what I said.

As prominently featured in one of my favorite games history articles of all time, courtesy of @mrbiffo.bsky.social: web.archive.org/web/20231008...

youtu.be/phiWRZ_VCCA fun video about an arcade genre that doesn't seem quite as well-remembered as, like, shmups. i had a little difficulty picking out the voice over from the background music but it's definitely worth it. you gotta share videos like these so they don't fly under the radar!

More random NES things on a WedNESday? More likely than you'd think. www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3pR...

friday soapbox: as a designer, if you want something to be a skillful action for players, and you want growth in this skill to be very deep/meaningful, then you need to also let players be bad at it. sometimes horrendously bad. players hate this pain, and designers often want to mitigate it away.

Welcome to the Robotic Romance Jam, hosted by @ophanimkei.com and yours truly~ A jam for stories about robots and the people who love them. All mediums are allowed and encouraged! Tell us about your love of the artificial, the mechanical, in all its many forms 💻 More info: itch.io/jam/robotic-...

I often think about how katamari damacy was a quick $20 shot of a beautiful experience and everyone loved it. but instead of getting the message and providing more experimental experiences at that scale, they just made bigger versions of it that cost more money.

DISASTER ARMS IS OUT 30 BOSSES 2 ARMS 1 SOLDIER 0 TURNING BACK

how_it_feels_dolphin.png cheating infinite experience points into dragon's crown to just skip to the level cap endgame

I <3 banjo

oh yo, I saw these folks at a convention recently. really loved their setup. looking forward to the game!

my beat em up fixation folded back in on an old dos game import fixation from a few years ago. korea has all the cool ones. thinking about Eojjeonji Joheun Il-i Saenggil Geot Gateun Jeonyeok again. I found pictures of the physical release, lookit. no leads on how I might get a copy though.

the point of a game is not to beat it, it is to play it. difficulty is only "a problem" if it is "in the way" of beating the game, which is an issue in the mindset of the player, not in the structure of the game. redoing parts of a fun game is not a punishment, it's an invitation to hang out

was watching @onemillionpower.com's brilliant scrolling down the belt series and raised an eyebrow at the mention of a custom rigged alchemy button for final fight. did some digging, and sure enough! this is so cool. I'd love to try this. rapidturbo2000.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-8...

Here's a fascinating interview with the developer behind Virtual Lab! I'm not surprised to see it excluded here, though www.badgamehalloffame.com/interview-me...

if the virtual boy replica is 1:1 then I'll be able to get a new official eye shade and stand for my original virtual boy. finally I can ditch the repairbox stand that's built backwards.

There's a *lot* of mechanically interesting and carefully planned arcade-like design going on under Panzer Dragoon Zwei's gorgeous surface. Let me show you just how special this game is: kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2020/04/27/o...

watching a bunch of final fight retrospectives and reeling at how revenge is treated in them. you'd think it was unplayable from the vitriol. people don't know how to play fighters and let the game's reputation validate any silly comment. istg someone complained that the AI blocks too much.

referring to metroidvanias as "hollowslop" to simultaneously piss off people who like metroidvanias, people who like hollow knight, people who want a better genre name for "metroidvania", people who are sick of the word slop being misused, and gradius fans who want to see more checkpoint recoveries