Solid gif at least

But there's an Easter egg in there just for you!

Not enough topless geordies in reviews.

11. Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS5) - 28 Dec (20 hrs)
A replay before I tackle City for the first time, at some point in 2024. Not as good as I remember it to be. Controls are a bit fiddly and the bosses are utter shite. But the core gameplay and world design is on point and the performance from Mark Hamill as Joker is just a joy to listen to.
[8]

The bosses are a bit better in AC though, iirc. One of them was anyway. They're worse in AK.

It's bigger but not necessarily better. Less tight.

The gliding is great in City. Both top games. The other one was crap

Asylum was by far the best for me. I liked that claustrophobic feel that it puts on the player at first. The freedom granted later on still feels somewhat tethered.

Love it. Let's Go! Goemon 2: Very Strange General McGuinness vs He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me for left field title of the year.

Did you try Salamander County Public Television over the hols in the end?

Smushi hasn't made it all the way home yet either.

I'm adding another! Tilly's chosen Wild West C.O.W-Boys of Moo Mesa.

Final post

I did manage it in the end!

1 - Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion (Nintendo Switch) - [8] - Review
2 - Splatoon 3 (Nintendo Switch) - [8] - Review
3 - Telling Lies (Xbox Series X) - [7] - Review
4 - Hi-Fi Rush (Xbox Series X) - [7] - Review
5 - Gyromite (NES) - [6] - Review
6(*) - Stack-Up (NES) - [3] - Review
7 - Metroid (NES) - [7] - Review
8 - Metroid II: Return of Samus (Game Boy) - [6] - Review
9(*) - Urban Champion (NES) - [4] - No review (sadface)
10(*) - Pinball (NES) - [3] - Review
11 - Donkey Kong (NES) and Donkey Kong: Original Edition (NES via Virtual Console) - [6] for the retail release and [7] for Original Edition - Review
12 - Recommendation Dog (Playdate) - [6] - Review
13 - Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch) - [8] - Review
14 - Mansion of Hidden Souls (Mega CD) - [6] - Review
15 - Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360 via Xbox Series X) - [6] - Review
16 - Ridge Racer (PS1) - [7] - Review
17 - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES) - [5] - Review
18(*) - Sprint 8 (Arcade) - [6] - Review
19 - Lunar Lander - [7] - Review
20 - Surround (Atari 2600) - [5] - Review
21 - Outlaw (Atari 2600) - [2] - Review
22(*) - Maze Invaders (Arcade) - [7] - Review
23 - The Space Adventure – Cobra: The Legendary Bandit (Mega CD) - [3] - Review
24 - Prize Fighter (Mega CD) - [4] - Review
25 - Venba (Xbox Series X) - [7] - Review
26 - Immortality (Xbox Series X) - [7] - Review
27 - Balloon Fight (NES) - [6] - Review
28 - Popeye (NES) - [6] - Review
29 - Popeye no Eigo Asobi (Popeye Lingo Game) (NES) - [2] - Review
30 - Ice Climber (NES) - [4] - Review
31 - Rad Racer (NES) - [8] - Review
32 - Mickey’s Safari in Letterland (NES) - [3] - Review
33 - Mickey’s Adventures in Numberland (NES) - [3] - Review
34 - Turbo OutRun (Arcade) - [8] - Review
35 - OutRun 2019 (Mega Drive) - [7] - Review
36 - Sonic Drift (Game Gear) - [4] - Review
36 - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600) - [1] - Review
37 - Superman (Atari 2600) - [3] - Review
38(*) - Yars’ Revenge (Atari 2600) - [7] - Review
39 - Oink! (Atari 2600) - [7] - Review
40 - River Raid (Atari 2600) - [7] - Review
41 - Metal Slader Glory (Famicom) - [7] - Review
42 - Hoshi wo Sagashite... (Story of Mio) (Master System) [6] - Review
43(*) - Videocart-1 (Fairchild Channel F) - [3] - Review
44(*) - Videocart-3 (Fairchild Channel F) - [4] - Review
45 - Cocoon (Xbox Series X) - [9] - Review
46 - Gris (Xbox Series X) - [7] - Review
47 - Limbo (Xbox One via Xbox Series X) - [5] - Review
48 - Inside (Xbox One via Xbox Series X) - [8] - Review
49 - Videocart-4 (Fairchild Channel F) - [5] - Review
50 - Planet of Lana (Xbox Series X) - [7] - Review
51 - Somerville (Xbox Series X) - [2] - Review
52 - Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch) - [9] - Review
53 - The Making of Karateka (PS5) - [8] - Review
54 - Karateka (Apple II) - [6] - Review
55 - Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo Switch) - [8] - Review
56 - Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Booster Course Pass (Nintendo Switch) - [8] - Review
57 - World of Illusion (Mega Drive) - [8] - Review

There's also a couple of others like Sonic Superstars and Pikmin 4 that I've seen the initial credits on but am waiting to fully complete to formulate a final score.

Favourite reviews

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES) - This was the difficult second album for the Zelda series, replacing the previous open-world action adventure with action RPG gameplay. Playing it in 2023… You can look at it and see bits of what would later become the Souls games in here. But I think however much you try to reassess it in a modern lens, it’s just objectively worse than the original.

It isn’t great action RPG. I think there’s a section in the middle where it’s a solid action RPG. But it’s bookended by an opening that is pretty dull until you start unlocking the more powerful magic and then the content towards the end starts to feel cheap and frustrating.

I think the EXP economy is busted. It’s OK for the first few levels. Then you have to stop and grind for levels because the game becomes too hard to unlock them organically before you game over. Then at the endgame it’s best to just use the automatic level up upon completing a boss to fill out your levels. It never feels like it works properly - I think the Souls ability to pick up your EXP where you died would have actually had a huge positive impact on this.

It doesn’t look particularly great. The overworld map doesn’t look anything amazing (they removed the animation from the sea tiles from the original Famicom Disc System version because they wanted to use a cheap mapper chip apparently). The environment graphics in the side-on sections are pretty dull. It doesn’t feel like the NES being worked to the full unlike, say, SMB3. You would think they would push the boat given the success of the original Zelda but apparently not.

I do think there is a certain level of competence here. I genuinely enjoyed the middle of the game a fair bit. Once you unlock healing magic then there’s an interesting interplay between magic (which can be restored via items in dungeons) and health (which can only be restored via magic in dungeons) - it adds an interesting resource management element. The nonlinear nature of the game is also interesting - while getting to Palace 6 starts to feel a bit backtracky, it’s interesting how the world map is designed to make it relatively easy to get to the various locations from the starting point.

I think what it all comes down to really is that they made a game that no-one had really asked for and, to be honest, wasn’t especially fun. And in a modern context has dated much more badly than the original Zelda. [5]

Prize Fighter (Mega CD) - This… isn’t the one. This is basically a live-action FMV take on Punch-Out!! with the live action sequences directed by one of the stunt co-ordinators of the Rocky and Raging Bull films and four very credible Hollywood stunt actors playing the role of the four opposing boxers (fun fact: the director and three of the boxers have also worked on the Star Trek franchise during the course of their careers). Your digital boxing gloves are super-imposed over the image and when you connect there is a brief cutaway to a video sequence showing the hit connecting.

There are also RPG elements as you can direct points to each fist and your stamina, and you gain additional points for winning matches. Unfortunately, this is where half the issues with the game lie. The boxing gameplay doesn’t feel great. Perhaps if you were into boxing you would be able to intuit the openings and the appropriate move to use (to be fair, this was published as a Sega Sports game) but I never felt I really knew what I was doing. The difficulty curve feels really harsh at first and it is very difficult to win your first match. As soon as you’ve done that, the difficulty immediately breaks. Subsequent matches with Opponent 1 are very easy and Opponents 2 and 3 are a breeze with a bit of preparation. The final boxer is significantly harder and requires tedious grinding of the third match to build up enough power for it to be do-able. Then you get a perfunctory ending sequence.

There is a little boy with this apparently psychosomatic trauma-induced disability who appears during the FMV sequences and it feels like the game is building up for him to finally be able to walk again after you defeat the final opponent, but this doesn’t happen, perhaps because they decided very late in the day that the whole plotline is a bit weird? Anyway, I generally found this to be not great. [4]

Popeye no Eigo Asobi (Popeye Lingo Game) (NES) - This is an edutainment game based on Popeye. You translate Japanese words into English using a 500 word translation sheet that came with the game (I had to really hunt around for a good photo of this on Japanese auction sites to use as a substitute). It's meant for Japanese kids to learn English but you can kinda use it the other way around. There is actually a fan translation and unofficial MSX port that translate the title screen and convert the katakana characters to romanji but then you can't use the translation sheet plus it still isn't a perfect solution - ideally you'd have a version that displayed both the katakana and romanji. That said, it's not like it would ever be a great language learning tool anyway. I just used the original untranslated Japanese ROM. There are three modes - in the first, you translate words from one of six categories (as you can guess, I played through this mode six times to get all the categories). In the second, you basically play a game of Hangman with the words from a particular category (again, I played through this six times to do each category). I had to abandon the idea of getting the maximum possible score with this mode since it would be based on pure dumb luck and would be an utter grind. The third and final mode is intended as a multiplayer mode where you try and build one of three words displayed in Japanese at the side of the screen using the letters that Olive drops down onto the stage. This is a bit of a tedious nightmare as collecting the wrong letter wipes out your word and Olive is extremely shattershot with her letters. Overall, this game is extremely dull and unhelpful for language learning - this was possibly one of the most tedious experiences of my gaming career. [2]

Mickey’s Safari in Letterland (NES) - A disturbingly colonial Mickey Mouse is on a quest to steal 26 ancient tablets carrying the letters of the alphabet from various nations so that they can be displayed in an American museum. In each stage, you collect three optional letter gems to create a three-letter word, plus one of the aforementioned tablets. Mickey then spells out the word with sampled voice clips and utters a couple of catchphrases while an illustration of the word is displayed on screen. There are some Easter eggs such as DOG being one of the Dalmatians from 101 Dalmatians. Then Goofy cleans off the tablet using frankly dubious restoration methods, then you add the letter to your letterdex. Once you’ve collected all 26 letters, Mickey Mouse bizarrely dumps them in a big pile outside the museum in a probable breach of conservation best practice, while the alphabet song plays. The game is available in various modes including semi-automated ones for very young children.

This game is a bit frustrating. It has all the charm you’d expect from a classic Disney platformer - lovely animations, well presented backgrounds, charming music. But it has the boring gameplay of an edutainment game. Compared to other NES edutainment games I’ve played, this is closest to being a normal game. I just wish they’d gone all the way and made it a normal, if relatively easy for the kids, platformer as it wouldn’t have been of detriment to the educational content at all. Also in an apparent oversight, on one level it’s easy to permanently miss one of the letter gems, requiring you restart the level to complete it properly, which seems completely contrary to the child-friendly design of the game.

So far, this is at the top of my league board of NES edutainment titles but it’s not exactly facing stiff competition. [3]

Mickey’s Adventures in Numberland (NES) - Mickey has apparently been fired from the museum and is now just a basketball lovin’ street kid. When Pete steals the ten number molds (sic) that Numberland requires to manufacture its numbers, Mickey offers to help Sheriff Donald retrieve the molds. (Incidentally, you would think ‘0’ would be one of these molds so that Numberland could create any number, but actually it’s ‘10’.)

Mickey is tasked with travelling through ten stages. In each, Mickey must find that stage’s magic number then enter a phone box that is the secret entrance to one of Pete’s hidden lairs. Mickey must then complete a simple addition or subtraction sum to retrieve the mold.

There appears to have been some attempt to address criticisms of the original here as Mickey can now take damage, attack enemies with bubblegum and die. However, this step forward is accompanied by a step backward in other areas so it’s ultimately not any better than the original overall. The game is uglier than the original and the music is consistently annoying. There is some reuse of animations from the original, which generally is fine but Mickey still labouriously brushes himself down after big falls which no longer matches with the slightly more frenetic gameplay and becomes annoying. The new ‘harder’ gameplay can be frustrating with enemy spawning often making it difficult to avoid damage. Yet it is still pretty much bereft of challenge.

Mickey can open vaults that display a cycle of numbers - tap the vault when it displays the stage’s magic number and you get a bonus star. Unfortunately, due to the level design you will frequently tap the button by mistake - often I would jump across and suddenly find a vault on the landing location. The bonus stars also do literally nothing. Additionally, in two levels, you have to walk through solid walls to find the magic numbers. These seem like odd oversights in a game that is supposed to be designed to avoid frustration for small children.

With the level count reduced from 26 to 10, this is a boring, stingy game. I think I would go as far as saying I would take Donkey Kong Jr Math over this, since that game at least provides some genuine maths challenge. [3]

OutRun 2019 (Mega Drive) - It’s OutRun but set in the implausibly futuristic world of 2019. Your car is now rocket-powered and after travelling at top speed for a while will boost at incredible speeds. You race through four levels, each of which has branching pathways like in the original (but they all reconverge at a singular goal).

There’s some really cool stuff in this. There are now full-enclosure tunnels, bridges made of glass and sections where a second elevated track run over or alongside the regular track, reached by these little ramp car things. I had a quick go of the MD ports of OutRun and Turbo OutRun before this and given those are merely passable and a pale imitation respectively, it’s quite impressive to see these features on the Mega Drive along a decent attempt at putting OutRun style visuals on the Mega Drive. It feels like a technically impressive game. The soundtrack is also pretty nice, not as good as the original obviously but I preferred it to the Turbo OutRun soundtrack.

The game sometimes feels difficult to control. It doesn’t help that the boost is applied automatically, which is honestly pretty annoying. I played in Manual mode and never gear changed after the initial switch to High - I think they should have made the game Automatic only and used the gear-change button to control the boost.

I had a good time with this but it feels slightly less refined than OutRun, Turbo OutRun and Rad Racer. [7]

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600) - Well, here we are. There’s clearly some quality that separates particularly poorly received media from merely mediocre or moderately poor media - not necessarily the same quality each time, but a quality. In the case of this game, it’s a core gameplay loop that is fundamentally out of step with anything a gamer might want to play. I just don’t want to spend my leisure time throwing myself down a digital hole over and over, having to levitate myself out each time. I just, putting this game’s many other significant flaws to one side, do not want to do that. It’s a gameplay loop that is fundamentally repulsive on a deep, guttural level. You won’t understand it from reading these words but play it and you’ll see.

From broken foundations, the game manages to, somehow, continue to fall apart. The game’s design is bafflingly convoluted. Pressing the button without holding a direction causes E.T. to use one of his special powers. These ten powers are depicted by ten different symbols, which must be memorised from the manual. The powers are location-based and thus the power you can use is ever-changing. The power to call Elliott is subject to further complicated rules regarding the number of candy pieces you hold. The frenetic nature of the gameplay makes it borderline impossible to use the powers anyway - Elliott’s convoluted power? Didn’t use it once. Collecting more than 31 candy pieces penalises you in the next game. Why? I do not know.

The game famously has issues with collision detection. The gameplay revolves around throwing yourself down holes to search for one of the three pieces of E.T.’s galactic phone. You throw yourself down a hole, inevitably find nothing in there, have to slowly levitate out and then try again. And again. And again. Except the game’s collision detection is designed to be unforgiving. Slowly drag yourself out of a hole and you are likely to find yourself falling straight back into it again. Trying to escape from the humans that relentlessly peruse you? Whoops, you accidentally fell in a hole while you were doing it. Trying to find the spot where E.T. has phone reception? Whoops, you fell in a hole again! And while you were in the hole, an FBI agent appeared and now he’s stolen part of your phone and thrown it down, you guessed it, a hole! Now you’ll have to search each and every hole all over again!

The game is generally very irritating. It is remarkably irritating having to carry out an already annoying search while having enemy characters constantly undermining your progress and disorienting you in the game world. The penalties for being affected by them are steep yet you are pretty much helpless and they suddenly appear from off-screen at any moment and almost immediately accost you. The game manual provides you with a helpful strategy to deal with the humans. The strategy? Throw yourself down a hole.

This is more than just a poorly designed game, it is pure ‘Do Not Want’ incarnated in videogame form. I do not want to play E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. My soul rejects it utterly, down to its very core. [1]

Metal Slader Glory (Famicom) - Metal Slader Glory is largest and most graphically ambitious game for the NES/Famicom. It weighs in at one megabyte and uses Nintendo’s most advanced memory management controller chip. It look four years to make, largely taken up by the effort required to optimise the many large and elaborate pieces of pixel art into the system’s limited graphical memory.

The game is a sci-fi visual novel not entirely dissimilar to Snatcher. You play Tadashi Himukai, a 17-year-old who is drawn into a conspiracy when you purchase a used worker mech from a local dealer in the hopes of starting a construction company. The resulting mystery takes you from Earth to outer space colonies and the Moon. The plot eventually becomes quite engaging, although is a bit simpler than Snatcher and ends quite abruptly, perhaps due to the limitations of fitting the game in the cartridge.

Unfortunately, like many classic visual novels, Metal Slader Glory features significant misogynistic content. The game starts sexualising the main character’s 12-year-old sister before you can even finish reading the manual, you can disturb your girlfriend with your sexually predatory behaviour and can sexually harass pretty much every female character in the game. The ‘Look’ feature in visual novels is usually used to produce a simple textual description of the item you are looking at - in this game, it is clear when you ‘Look’ at a woman that you are eyefucking her, perturbing the in-game characters in the process.

It is a shame that this content somewhat overshadows the game’s aesthetic achievements, which are significant - the game is a sumptuous treat by the standards of the NES/Famicom. Massive illustrations fill the screen. Characters’ lips animate in sync with rudimentary synthesised speech, the absolute closest the NES/Famicom can come to producing anime-style production values. Mechs fly across the screen with elaborate animations. Aside from the use of synthesised text beeps instead of full voice acting, the game wouldn’t be out of place on the likes of the Mega CD. The production values are unrecognisable from those of the Portopia Serial Murder Case, the first ever visual novel, which was released on the NES five years earlier.

The game invites comparisons to multiple other things - Snatcher (obviously), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (the game prophesies some of its major plot points despite being released years before it began broadcast), even Shenmue (an admittedly quite dull search through an office building is quite reminiscent of the detailed exploration of the FREE system). The game is an easy recommendation for fans of classic adventure games, for whom it may currently have escaped noticed due to a lack of fan translations until very recently.

Metal Slader Glory was the brainchild of Yoshimiru Hoshi, who carried out the bulk of the work on the project, assisted by none other than Satoru Iwata. Hoshi worked at HAL Laboratory as a contractor and was due to be paid in royalties for the game - unfortunately the advanced specifications of the cartridge meant only a single small print run was able to be produced. The game was not able to earn back its costs and HAL Laboratories faced bankruptcy. Nintendo salvaged HAL on the basis that they became a second party studio and promoted Iwata to its president. The rest is gaming history.

Today we can look back on Metal Slader Glory as something of an extravagant folly. To this day, Yoshimiru Hoshi sells Metal Slader Glory merch on his website in the hope of one day being able to continue the story - perhaps the game truly was the Shenmue of the NES era. While some of its content has aged very badly and the depth of the story is still hampered by technical limitations despite pushing the console to its limits, Metal Slader Glory is still worth a look, both as one of the closest comparables to Snatcher and as a spectacular showcase for the NES/Famicom’s capabilities. [7]

Videocart-1 (Fairchild Channel F) - It's time to go all the way back to the start... The Fairchild Channel F is the first videogame console as we know them today. It was the first games console that was programmable with ROM-based cartridges as opposed to circuit cards that merely selected a game already built into the console. It was also the first microprocessor-based console, with a CPU that was capable of providing an AI-based competitor for the player. It was capable of a resolution of 128 x 64, a limited palette of eight colours, and rudimentary beeps and boops for audio. Has the Fairchild Channel F left any kind of aesthetic or single-player gameplay legacy that will stand up to the scrutiny of the 2023 player? Let's find out.

Like most of the cartridges for the Fairchild Channel 1, Videocart-1 is a compilation featuring a few different game experiences.

Tic-Tac-Toe - Beat the AI. This is a game of tic-tac-toe against a computer opponent. A number of early computers were able to play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe vs a human opponent. This version has an appreciably rudimentary AI that appears to be programmed with pre-fixed strategies. Once you become aware of these strategies, you have essentially broken the AI and will always win the game. If you lose against the computer, the message YOU LOSE TURKEY appears on the screen. This was considered hilarious back in 1976 and was apparently a selling point of the console for people who saw it on display in stores, as it showed it was a device with personality. Unfortunately, it only takes a few minutes to exhaust the possibilities of this game.



Shooting gallery - Maxed out the counter on all speed settings. This appears to be an attempt to create a single-player variant of Pong (Breakout was released shortly before this cart, perhaps too late to influence it). A clay pigeon repeatedly flies across the screen. You are a static Pong paddle and shooting fires a bullet that will hopefully hit the target. This is a game of timing. Once you destroy the target, you are moved to a different location at a different angle (the locations/angles are pre-fixed and you cycle through them in turn). While this is very basic, it is actually more entertaining than it sounds. I like videogames that seem like a fictional videogame seen on a movie or TV show - this has a minimalist elegance to it and if you manage to string a few successful shots together in a row it has that kind of vibe of watching a character proficient in games showing their stuff off in a 1980s movie. It's unfortunate that there isn't anything in this to make it more experiential or longer-lasting. You just kinda hammer away at it until you get bored of it and that's that - there's not much to it.



Doodle - This is a screen-drawing tool. I feel like it's easy to be snobby about early drawing tools these days but this seems reasonable enough. I don't like that 'turning off' the pen effectively changes it to white, which will leave eraser/white all over your drawing if, for example, you wanted to move from the inside of a drawing to the outside. There's also no clear indication of where the cursor is. I feel like there is reasonable 'hours of fun' potential for a child of 1976 here, although as an adult of 2023 it is not that interesting.



Quadra-Doodle - This transforms Doodle into a trippy, computer-driven cross between a Spirograph and a kaleidoscope. As with Tic-Tac-Toe, I guess this is an attempt at showcasing the possibilities of the microprocessor. This is really not that bad, the results are vaguely interesting even in 2023, although perhaps not as trippy as the manual had led me to believe. You can switch back to Doodle to manually tweak the results to your liking and then return to Quadra-Doodle for more AI-based antics if you want. According to a Channel F podcast I've been listening to, this kind of light drawing/post-1960s trippy-ness was very much tapping into the pop culture zeitgeist at the time and would have been of interest to kids in that era. It's a mildly interesting curio.



Overall, you can see what they were trying to do with this in terms of offering a bit of a smorgasbord of single-player experiences but they lack longevity even by the standards of the era. The best games of that console generation you could play for hours. You might not choose to in 2023 due to competition from other stuff, but you happily could. This would very badly lose its lustre after a single afternoon (this is particularly disappointing when you consider that Fairchild had issues with manufacturing capacity and struggled to manufacture cartridges other than this one during the launch window). It doesn't even seem like Channel F fans remember it that fondly. This cart was $19.95 at the time, which adjusted for inflation and currency apparently comes out at £84.17 in today's British money. Perhaps, being generous, it equates to the £70 full price releases of today. For full price, you would really want something that offers hours of fun. This doesn't really provide that. The harsh spotlight of 2023 casts it in an even more unflattering light. [3]

Videocart-4 (Fairchild Channel F) - It’s early April 1977. The rings of Uranus have just been discovered. Red Rum has just won a record third Grand National. Fairchild had a challenging Christmas keeping up with demand for Videocart-2 and Videocart-3 for their newly launched Video Entertainment System console but have now caught up with back orders and are ready to release some new games. But wait! 1977 is a time of change, of new thoughts, new ideas. The Fairchild Video Entertainment System is now the Fairchild Channel F. A new brand for a new time. Children frolic in the streets, droplets of water gathering on their Wellington boots as they splash in the puddles. They gobble down their sherbet dip dabs and flying saucers, like bees eating sweet nectar. It’s a time for fun. Storm clouds gather. Strong winds blow. Some of the children have umbrellas but they are turned inside out in the gale. The children weep. It’s a time for fear. A darkness is approaching on the horizon. The Fairchild Channel F allows you to change the fun. But 1977 isn’t going to just change the fun. 1977 is going to change everything.

This cartridge contains only one game: Spitfire. Spitfire is a historically incoherent game. It features the Red Baron (World War I German fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen) battling against the Blue Max (a World World I German military decoration, rather than a specific person) in World War II era Spitfire planes. Thus the game is actually about two German pilots friendly firing at each other in anachronistic planes.

You can play Spitfire either in single-player or two-player modes and at four speed settings. You get all Retro Achievements by achieving a 20-point score differential over the computer, so that’s what I did on all four speed settings to complete the game.

You start with both aircraft on the ground with a control tower in the middle. You automatically take off and then fly across the screen, firing at your opponent. If you strike them, they fall down to the control tower and you score a point. The screen loops around and you can also hide slightly off screen in a manual-sanctioned strategy that is meant to emulate hiding in a cloud.

The AI becomes harder the more you win but if you keep losing it becomes ‘cocky’ and decreases in skill again. The game gradually increases the speed even if you start at a lower difficultly setting. On one level this works but in 2023 I guess you would call this bad accessibility since you can’t keep playing at a slow speed if you need to.

The AI is pretty decent for such an early game and is actually pretty fun to play against. It’s quite impressive for such an early, small game to have an AI that ‘learns’ from battling the player. It took me quite a while to achieve the 20-point score differential the first time. It got easier as I kept going though and eventually I started to get bored. This was after playing the game for maybe an hour? Which isn’t a good sign. This is more like a decent Atari 2600 game than anything on the Channel F so far but it still isn’t a game with any kind of real longevity. [5]

PS Spitfire was programmed by Michael K Glass. We know this because there is an Easter egg wasting 11% of the cartridge space that does not actually work on retail hardware and that is so obtuse to unlock it would be unfindable without decompiling the game anyway.

Somerville (Xbox Series X) - What a stinker. One of the designers of Limbo and Inside attempts to do a similarly themed game in 3D with absolutely disastrous results. This feels like an artefact created by an alien, completely incapable of the basic insight into human nature required to create something recognisable as adequate, never mind good, game design. I have never failed to vibe with a game as badly, as consistently, as this. I hated it right the way through from the very beginning to the very end. The poor controls which result in an entire game of careening about as though the main character is drunk. The inexplicably distant camera and frequently poor lighting that make it difficult to see what you’re doing, right throughout  the entire game with never any reprieve. The shoddy, incomprehensible ‘puzzle’ based gameplay which resulted in me spending half the playthrough simply mimicking a video walkthrough from YouTube because I had no fucking clue what I was supposed to be doing. The vacuous plot, which has the audacity to have multiple fucking endings! As though I’m going to waste my life playing this nonsense multiple times.

If I had to describe this game in one word, it would be ‘illegible’. It is the most illegible game I have ever played. There is a basic level of aesthetic and technical competence that places this a step above E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial but aside from that it is every bit as bad as that low point in gaming history. [2]

Love it. Inside, Planet of Lana and Somerville in fairly quick succession. Like watching Jaws followed by Jaws 2 then skipping to Jaws the Revenge.

JonB wrote:

I'm going to cheat and 'make it' based on games that I didn't finish but played quite a bit:

I don't count that as cheating tbh - my ones are always based on when i'm done with the game, regardless of if credits are rolling or not. Once i've seen enough, it counts imo.