Listen to the Rain

A Kirby game that I'm not a big fan of? It's more likely than I thought.

Squeak Squad used to be a meme for me (and others) because the contrast between its beginning and ending is so vast. Despite that, there's a lot of posts across the internet asking if it's the worst Kirby game out there. Since I don't play Kirby games for the challenge, I play them for cuteness and fun, I thought this must be exaggerated and maybe there was some redeemable core stuck underneath all the complaints but honestly, the collective wisdom of the internet is right this time. This game took me close to two months to beat, just because playing it was such a slog. I finally forced myself to sit down, do a level at a time, and slowly ground it over over the course of the last couple of weeks, and "slowly ground it out" are not words you should use with a Kirby game.

The meme is good though:


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It's frankly amazing to me that Blaster Master Zero ever got made at all, considering the mess that were the Blaster Master sequels throughout the years. And it's even more of a miracle that it was so good, since Inti Creates mined the original Blaster Master, the Worlds of Power: Blaster Master, and the Japanese 超惑星戦記メタファイト (chō wakusei senki metafaito, "Super Planetary War Record: Metafight"), threw them all into an oven, and somehow created a delicious cake from the results. And what's more, they did it again with a sequel and it was still good!

It is definitely anime as hell, though.


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Back in 2015, I learned about the Kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night from people who had watched it and noticed its similarities to my favorite platformer of all time, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In the video, Igarashi Kōji promises to make a game in the style of the old Castlevania games now that Konami isn't interested in doing anything with the IP other than making uncomfortably sexual pachinko games, and basically that's it. There's almost nothing about the actual game in there other than that it would be in the style of Castlevania, but that video! Igarashi walks around an old castle lit by torchlight, he sits at the head of a table and takes a swig from a wineglass before hurling it to shatter on the ground, and he walks outside and transforms into a cloud of bats. I fully admit that I was sold entirely on the game based on the pitch video without even really knowing what the game would be like.

Maybe it's a good thing that I didn't follow the development very closely, then. Through reading USGamer I heard about bringing in Inti Creates, who made the excellent Blaster Master Zero, to help work on the game. I saw the video of all the complaints about the art style where Igarashi once again threw down a wine glass and shouted "I will prove them wrong!" This had all the ingredients of a disaster in the making.

Then Curse of the Moon came out and it was great. And now Ritual of the Night came out and it's fantastic. We wanted Symphony of the Night reborn, and by G-d, that's what we got.


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The Eternal Castle first came to my attention at the end of last year when the developers posted a trailer. I watched and thought it was rad as hell with a bitchin' synthwave soundtrack, so I immediately put it up on Facebook with a comment about how excited I was for it. shane.suydam watched it and had a similar opinion, and he immediately bought it. And then he bought a copy for me as well, so full disclosure, I received a copy of this game for free from a friend for the purpose of bathing in the cyan and magenta glow.

The game claims to be a remastered version of an old 1987 game the devs played and half-remember from their childhoods, but that's all marketing copy. The game is supposedly from 1987, but that's the year that VGA was introduced and CGA was long out of fashion by then. I mean, the EGA version of Quest for Glory I is from 1989. So is Prince of Persia, which is clearly one of the major inspirations for The Eternal Castle's gameplay. The opening faked-up "boot screen" is stylized as a DOS sequence but occasionally uses a Linux command. None of that backstory matters to the gameplay, but some people got lost chasing down a bit of cheeky humor from the devs, so I thought I should bring it up.


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I know that November is supposed to be the spooky month, but after Stasis, I wanted something a bit different.

We had a Wii back in 2007, and then when we moved to Japan, we left it behind under the mistaken impression that it wouldn't work with Japanese televisions. That meant that I lost track of basically anything to do with console games, and even series that I liked a lot, like Legend of Zelda or the Kirby games, fell off my radar. Kirby's Return to Dream Land came out at the end of the Wii's lifespan, around the time that Skyward Sword did, but I didn't hear of it until a couple years ago. I heard that it was pretty good, a return to platforming form after Kirby's Epic Yarn had changed up the formula. Sure, it was easy and fluffy, like most Kirby games, but it looked good and was fun to play. And both of those things are true, and those are really exactly what I was looking for.

Or, so I thought.


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This game caught me completely by surprise. I backed Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night as soon as I became aware of it based mostly on the strength of the Kickstarter video--and apparently I backed a physical copy, so I guess I'll be getting that at some point in the future--but I haven't really been paying much attention to the updates. I rarely do, especially with games, because I don't want too many spoilers before I actually get to the game itself. So as it smashed through stretch goals and climbed up the Kickstarter rankings, I completely missed the "Free 2D, pixel-based, retro-styled prequel mini-game" that they promised. And then all of a sudden it came out at the end of the last month and it looked amazing.

It is amazing.


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​Super!

This is another game that I first heard about through Nintendo Power. I never played it, though I do remember Simon's eight-direction whip swinging so I must have seen it at someone's house somewhere. You can tell it made a strong impression on me.

Super Castlevania IV was originally intended to be in the style of the original Castlevania, and in Japanese it even has the exactly same title--悪魔城ドラキュラ (Akumajō Dorakyura). But it has expanded levels, even more bosses, more control of Simon on stairs and through whipping, the enhanced graphics and level design that the SNES was capable of, SNES-quality music, infinite continues, and other quality-of-life improvements.

I'm not that impressed in the end.


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I heard about Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight on Bonfireside Chat, as a game that was similar to some aspects of the Souls games that they really liked. Then I heard it was a metroidvania game. Well, that's all I need to hear. Sign me up.

I bought it, loaded it up, and took in the beautiful pixel art and moody music. And then I moved forward and was brutally murdered by a chibi with a shield.


A deadly ambush.
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Owlboy is a gorgeous game with great music and a touching story that I can't recommend because it doesn't know what it wants to be.

Owlboy first came to my attention the same way Hyper Light Drifter did, by reading an article on Rock Paper Shotgun about it. A later review cemented it in my mind, with John Walker, who hates everything except puzzle games, gushing over the gameplay and story. And, of course, the art.

Well, I'm not sure how far Walker got into Owlboy. I suspect he never beat it, because if he had, he would have written one of his rants about difficulty preventing his enjoyment of a good game. I did beat it and that's what happened to me. I had nothing but goodwill for Owlboy when I started, but it was slowly worn away by the course of the game, and for the last hour or so I just wanted it to end. And then it finally did, and I put down the controller, and I deleted the game, and I'm almost certainly never going to play it again.


This game is beautiful, though.
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I still remember the day that I first played Super Mario Bros. 3. My grandparents were visiting, one of the few times they came out to visit rather than having us come to them, and my grandmother had brought a copy of the game just released that year. I had already read all about it in Nintendo Power, and I think to this day it might be the present I have anticipated the most in my entire life. When she gave it to me I literally danced all around the room, yelling "Thank you!" over and over again. Then I sat down with the Nintendo, then plugged in at the TV in the living room, and booted the game up.

It was just as great as I was led to believe. I've never seen The Wizard, but I understand why Nintendo used it as an opportunity to market the game. People call that movie a feature-length commercial, but honestly, SMB3 deserves a commercial of that length. It is, to this day, my favorite Mario game.



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As of an hour after sundown today, Yom Kippur ended for another year. Due to our local synagogue refusing to take our money for reasons we still haven't really been able to figure out, we didn't get tickets to services, so instead schoolpsychnerd and I watched a simulcasted Kol Nidre service put on by Nashuva last night. I took a few of my vacation days and took the rest of this week off, so I stayed home, and one of the things I did during Yom Kippur was read the book of Jonah, as is traditional.

As with most "why do you..." questions in Judaism, there are multiple answers as to why Jonah on Yom Kippur. The two I know are first that it shows that G-d is like the Terminator and will follow you to the ends of the earth such that there is no escaping his sight or knowledge, and second that it shows G-d's mercy because Ninevah was wicked but when Jonah delivered G-d's message, they sincerely repented and were spared, just as we hoped that sincerely repentance will ensure we are written into the Book of Life. I'm sure there are multi-page dissertations on the exact meaning of the withering tree at the end even though G-d spells out what he was trying to demonstrate exactly, but those I don't know.

One other thing I did, once the sun set, was play a game:



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Did you know that Metroid is a girl?!

(I used that joke on schoolpsychnerd earlier. If looks could kill...)

My first exposure to Metroid was the original game, which I sadly seem to have lost somewhere over the years. It's also one of the original NES games that I beat on the original system, after hours of wandering around through Zebes, using JUSTIN BAILEY to get a preview of later areas with an overpowered Samus build. JUSTIN BAILEY also meant that I was spoiled on the secret of Samus Aran's real identity. I heard it on the playground, as you did in those days, went home and tried it out, and my mind was blown. I mean, the wave beam? What madness was this?

Oh right, also Samus Aran was a woman. I don't remember having strong feelings about it at the time, but memory is fallible.

My strongest memory of the original Metroid is actually the time I ruined a game through idiocy. There's a part of Norfair that has a series of one-block pillars over lava pits that you have to navigate to progress:



While I was jumping over them, I wondered if I would be able to get out if I fell in, so I deliberately fell in. And then I spent a while trying to bomb-jump my way out and continuously failing over and over again. No matter how hard I tried, at times getting within a block or two of the top, I would fall back down into the lava again. Eventually I gave up, turned the game off, and went to go do something else.

"But dorchadas!" you say, "Metroid had a password system! If you had died in the lava, you could have put in the password and just restarted that way!" And you are absolutely right, but let me direct your attention above to the word "idiocy."

The next time through, I ended up falling down into the lava accidentally, but that time I managed to get out and go on to beat the game. Not under the time limit, of course, but a win is a win. And then I didn't play another Metroid game for over a decade until my roommate in Ireland lent me his GBA and copy of Metroid Fusion, which I barely remember except that I wasn't a fan of the constant AI companion. Metroid is space horror at its roots, and that's always been a thorn in the side of any attempt to make it more narrative-based. The point of space horror is that you are alone and there is no one out there to save you. Adding companions and commanding officers and so on works against that in a way that I don't like.

Even adding extra info is a problem. Take Metroid Prime's Space Pirate scan data:

Phazon mining is under way. Several garrisons have been established, and terraforming of the Chozo Ruins is under way. Security systems are operational, and Science Team continues to make progress in their biotech research. The Phendrana Drifts have proven to be an optimal location for Research Headquarters, and soon it will be joined by a fully operational Combat base and starport. If Command's predictions are half true, we shall rise to dominance in this sector within a deca-cycle. Truly, these are glorious times.

Blah blah blah blah. All the additional information is like that, and you have to scan all the time. My main memory of Metroid Prime is entering a new room and immediately switching to the scan visor and scanning every available surface. Compelling gameplay!

I didn't come to Super Metroid until 2009, two decades after my first Metroid game, but even then I didn't beat it until later. I wrote about that already here.

Other M and the fan reception to Federation Hunters seem to have killed Metroid at this point, but it was always a lot more popular in the west than it was in Japan. And Sakamoto doesn't seem to understand what bothered people about Other M and isn't that interested in doing another Metroid game anyway, so who knows if it'll come back any time soon. In the meantime, though, the fans are stepping up to the plate: Another Metroid 2 Remake finally came out today after eight years of development! Get it before it gets C&Ded!

Also, this fan film is pretty neat:

"METROID: THE SKY CALLS // a Rainfall Films Intergalactic Odyssey" (Watch on YouTube)

And while Nintendo might not care, and Sakamoto might not care, Hirokazu Tanaka (the composer) does: