Tag: retrospective

Motocross Maniacs (1989)

Extremely funny that Konami eventually redistributed this as just “Bikers” years later. Guess the Overton Window of what qualifies as “mania” shifted from the 80s to the 90s.

This game is basically Trials’ dad, only the courses are entirely designed around using bursts of nitro to make jumps. On a design level there is something fascinating about creating what’s essentially a platformer where hops are a limited consumable. Where do you add more? How many? How far should you be able to get without them? Do you demand perfection, or make it more of a speed game with emphasis on creative solutions and routing?

Konami answered all of those in the following ways:

Q: Where do you add Nitro?

A: Almost exclusively in locations that require Nitro to reach.

Q: How many?

A: Enough.

Q: How far should you be able to get without them?

A: There will be a ramp on every level that is impassible without use of Nitro.

Q: Perfection or creativity?

A: Get the fuck out of our office.

3/5

01/07/2026
Mario Tennis (2000)
Look – I hear you. The Game Boy/GBC had so many excellent RPGs, yet my list thus far has been devoid of any. Don’t worry! I got you! First RPG down, and it’s one of the best on the system. Classic single party member ala Dragon Quest I, even! Just a bit of an unconventional battle system is all.

My history with Mario Tennis is involved but not especially complex. I played the 64 version to death, always heard this was great, and never tried it until now. Every MT entry after the year 2000 was worse. Shame, that. Camelot, on the other hand, I have plenty of experience with, and I don’t just mean their iffier sports entries. Consider how confident they had to be to make both versions of Mario Tennis only to barely feature any Nintendo properties in one of them! That confidence is earned. Oh my god did they earn it.

As an aside, one of my weaknesses as a reviewer is that I’m better at taking things apart than building them up. It’s easier to praise a game when you have criticisms to use as a springboard, you know? This review will likely be a bit weaker written than some of my others for this project because, spoilers, I barely have anything negative to contrast the positives with. The best I can do is note that I don’t like the font choices, or more specifically the shadows behind them, on a tiny Game Boy screen. I also find myself missing the ridiculously crunchy serve sounds from the 64 version; I swear hitting a Nice! serve in that sounds like a horse chomping into an apple. The Game Boy can’t really do that! These things don’t matter much, not really. The closest thing to a genuine issue is how the game handles leveling/stats, but I’ll talk about that later.

This game has some of the best spritework on the entire GBC. The sprites would have been top notch on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, but they’re here! On the god damned Game Boy! Every player sprite is incredibly expressive, chock full of characterful details, to the point where they’re entertaining just to see in motion. Combine that with the smooth scrolling of the court in play and little to none of the fake 3D depth issues thanks to the immaculate spriting and lack of slowdown, and you’ve got genuinely excellent handheld tennis.

Any game with Motoi Sakuraba music is going to be a joy for the ears and this is no exception. So many quality jams. This version’s rendition of Break Point is simpler but still gives me chills, especially when the rally goes long. Rare is the game that gives you your own boss music, but Camelot was operating on an entirely different level. Music that makes you want to black out and spike the ball directly into a child’s schnoz. Powerful stuff.

God this game’s tennis plays so well, too. Almost everything I internalized from years of the 64 game was immediately transferable. You can steal so many points with an angled serve, drop shot, and crosscourt shot combo. Admittedly that’s true in real life too! What surprised me most in the gameplay itself isn’t its quality, it’s how different the opponents manage to feel. They nearly feel adaptive, even though I know that’s likely not the case. The way they shift to an easier center serve after hitting a fault or start running to the baseline more after getting schooled at the net feels more convincingly Tennis-y than some sim games I’ve played.

The RPG elements are light but certainly felt. Speed ends up being the key stat because you always need to cover the court, but you will need another specialty to close out the tournament arc. Each level lets you boost one of the four areas of your game, but they often come at the expense of others, leading to some awkward break points where you’ll be more interested in what does the least harm VS boosting what you actually want. It’s not perfect, but it is interesting and forces you to adapt to your weaknesses rather than grind them all to dust. Levels don’t come the quickest from just playing matches, so after a few wins in the junior league I entered the Hyperballic Tennis Chamber that is the training building and climbed some double digit # of levels by whacking the ball into a wall 200 times. I made my PC a speed demon with a downright devious net game and my doubles partner became a nuclear gorilla who could barely move, but could plant the ball anywhere on the court at Mach 3. Not that I played much for doubles, mind. I will generally avoid having 3/4 of the game’s participants be bots if I can help it.

In terms of escalation it goes intro, team rank/promotion arc, tournament arc, and The Post-Credits Introduction and Subsequent Destruction of Super Freakin’ Mario. Despite characters being chatty and full of personality there really isn’t much plot to speak of. I’m fine with that, to be clear! I suspect I wouldn’t be a huge fan of there being even more talking between matches. Some folks have complained about said matches being too long, which is a funny way to say you just don’t like Tennis. I do, which means I want to play the titular sport, and Camelot understood that they couldn’t have both words in the title be disingenuous.

I do kinda love the Mario Section though. Spoilers? I guess? Do we really care? Have a courtesy warning, but I will think a smidge less of you if this is a legitimate cutoff.

After the award ceremony ends and credits roll you find yourself back at the academy standing in the headmaster’s office. Out of absolutely nowhere he informs you of the following facts:
- Mario exists in this setting. He has been offscreen, watching from the shadows the entire time.
- Mario is the single greatest tennis player to ever do it.
- Mario has taken an interest in you specifically, because your defenses are impregnable and your style is impetuous.
- You must take a flight to Peach’s Castle immediately. The headmaster will not take No for an answer. I tried.
Once you arrive it immediately becomes clear that you’re out of your depth. There is some kind of political situation going on, and I don’t mean the kind where the video game has women in it. The room has been split into factions, good and evil specifically, and the latter is absolutely intent on having your character play and defeat Mario on the court upon arrival as they haven’t managed to. Bizarrely, the imperial side informs the villains that Mario actually just invited your character there to chill post-tournament, which…isn’t true? As far as we know? This is clearly an attempt at deescalation, truth be damned.

Anyway. The brothers Wa and Bowser insist that you do battle on their behalf. I accepted, of course, because I know where my loywalties lie. Mario was destroyed in straight sets and it wasn’t particularly close. The game ends abruptly afterwards, presumably due to committing the equivalent of a tennis-themed Franz Ferdinand assassination. My love of the game transcends my general aversion to causing international incidents. Obey Wario. Destroy Mario.

4.5/5
01/07/2026
Galaga: Destination Earth (2000)

Hey, quick question for Pipe Dream Interactive: why? Why this? Why any of this? Galaga is basically a perfect video game, why would you do this to it? Hasbro was going to approve whatever you turned over, that much was clear, but have you no pride? Failing that, no shame?

This is a godawful Space Invaders game with a spotty Galaga coat of paint. If it wasn’t for the tractor beams and double ships it would be unrecognizable as Galaga. You still shoot vertically, but the play field scrolls horizontally so you can’t see all the enemies at once, there’s a moderate amount of sprite jitter only when it can do the most harm, the technicolor background jpgs look like shit and are so visually busy that they make it hard to see the bullets, and every time you finish a wave it does a stop/start transition that makes the whole thing just feel awful.

It’s not even satisfying once you adapt to how rickety it is! If you get a double ship it’s a breeze, if you’re down to a single it’s a Sisyphus reenactment on crutches, and either way you’re going to want to fling yourself down that hill. There’s just no fun to be had here beyond poking fun at its ugly-ass menus and stage transitions. I’m sorry I said Backloggd users don’t actually play games, alright? Y’all got this right on the money, this sucks ass.

1.5/5

01/07/2026
Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (1999)

1.7? One-point-seven average score on Backloggd, and that’s after my rating??? Do we not actually play the video games we rate on there? When Mario kills a thousand turtles it’s “cute” and “peak” and “formative game design”, but when Acclaim/NEON has you shoot a couple dozen it sucks? Boris Triebel was the director on this, did you think one of the creators of P. P. Hammer and His Pneumatic Weapon suddenly forgot how to make a damn video game?

A terrible opinion that I earnestly, sincerely hold is that Acclaim was overall a good publisher. Good, not great, but good! Sure they were a license farm for the most part and stuff like Chef’s Luv Shack is indefensible, but a lot of their output represented better attempts at adaptation than most in their heyday could manage. Armorines, though, may as well had been one of their original IPs for all it mattered. Even Valiant doesn’t consider Armorines worth remembering; you have to hit up the Wayback Machine to see it acknowledged on any of their sites. These people want you to remember Bloodshot and they can barely be bothered to add this to their long-ass list?

Anyway, Acclaim realized the Armorines squabbling with their handlers in D.C. wasn’t going to make for much of a video game and opted to just make Dollar Store Satire-Free Starship Troopers for the 3D consoles. The GBC game developed by NEON took the same tack, but turns it into a top down shooter that’s far better than most on the system. The criticisms I’ve seen of it are that it’s easy to get lost, is annoyingly hard, looks ugly, and repeats itself. I’m here to tell you that exactly one of those is true.

Armorines GBC sees you playing as an exterminator named Sgt. Snider having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. The escalation of said day is fairly gradual and your power scales to match. At the start of the game you’re using a glorified bug zapper, weak and limited in range. The enemies are similarly tiny, both in size and number. Not the best first impression! Fortunately you get guns fairly quickly, the enemies get more dangerous, and the reasons to complain start to fade. You even get to destroy a few oil derricks midway through! Armorines confirmed based!

Your inputs are movement, A to shoot with free aim while moving, and B to shoot while strafing. Being able to swap between both is a godsend as several rooms demand that flexibility, though for whatever reason you can’t strafe while aiming diagonally. The last button of note, select, pulls up a reminder of your current objective in case you took a bit too long of a break. Nifty! It’s a simple control scheme without any kind of movement tricks and the gameplay is built around that, opting to gradually increase the difficulty of its combat encounters rather than do too much with level hazards until the late game. There’s even a nice QoL touch where enemies announce their awareness of you with various squawks, even when entirely offscreen, so you almost always get a heads up before things get spicy.

Environmental interactables only require you to walk into them, so you’re unlikely to miss important items or objectives. This is further assisted by a color palette that makes good use of the GBC, meaning it’s the polar opposite of its 3D counterpart, which loves nothing more than dumping you into the darkest bug-filled caves this side of an Earth Defense Force game. It’s surprisingly easy to parse for a Game Boy game, and I never found myself unsure of how to progress with one exception in the second to last area, which was only because I needed to walk up a cliff and just kind of assumed I couldn’t because it was the same color as the walls. Look, I’m dumb as hell and got through this, you can do it too.

Odds are if you’re on this website you won’t struggle either. Armorines is honestly pretty easy past like, level 2. I didn’t lose a life until I touched an instant death trap in the last area, and was shocked when the game informed me that I had 11 more banked that I ended up not needing. Health pickups are generous, enemy placements are fair, their respawns are nonexistent for the first 3/4 of the game (in a nice touch they wait until there’s a thematic justification for doing so), and your weapons get crazy powerful by the end. I was a particularly big fan of the short ranged plasma gun and the laser, and the game likes to hand you special weapons for boss encounters so you’ll never be stuck with something that doesn’t work. The greatest sin this game commits in terms of its gameplay is having a fairly weak spread gun, but you’ll make do. My only piece of advice is to break out the Ghouls & Ghosts tactics and skip picking up the lightning gun whenever it shows up, that thing never gets meaningfully better.

The only notable criticism I have for this is fairly obvious – all you’re ever really doing is moving through levels and shooting guys to secure the prize. I’d be more annoyed if the areas weren’t varied or if the game wasn’t so short. We’re talking a couple hours tops here, and while they aren’t amazing or anything they’re hardly dull unless you just don’t like the gameplay in its own right. If this came out on the NES it’d be heralded as a “hidden gem” on every retro YouTube channel, but instead it was a Game Boy game with an Acclaim logo, which means it can’t possibly be good, right guys? Like and subscribe so you won’t miss when your next opinion arrives!

I will always advocate for playing games past the first level. First impressions aren’t everything, especially when you’re sampling seemingly-infinite roms for games that were meant to be stuck with, not taste-tested back to back. I just wanted to play an action game a bit better than Annihilator – imagine my shock when I was actually having fun! There’s a very real chance this is the best piece of Armorines media that’s ever existed, and you know now that I say that, maybe Valiant was right to chuck it into the memory hole.

…seriously though, Acclaim released some of the best games of the era. All the Turoks are good, even Rage Wars, and Shadow Man is better than Ocarina! I’m not afraid to say it! Fuck you, nostalgia police! Re-Volt is better than Mario Kart 64! I liked Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls! Get your hands off me, you pigs! Just wait until I tell you how South Park Rally isn’t even a bad game! AIIIIIIIEEEE!

3.5/5

01/07/2026
Kirby’s Block Ball (1995)

You mind a personal intro? Actually, fuck it, I’m just gonna. This one’s already entirely self indulgent anyway.

I’m planning a move. The farthest I’ve ever done, in fact. Lotta anxieties around that, lemme tell you! One opportunity this avails me is a chance to trim my belongings down, which includes my game collection. Don’t feel bad for me – I genuinely see this as a positive! I’m absolutely not a minimalist, but I am one of those weirdos whose mental state deteriorates proportionally with clutter. As I picked through my stuff playing “should it stay or should it go” I got to my GB/GBA carts, a pre-trimmed collection I wasn’t planning on reducing given that it all fits in a tiny container, but I picked through ’em anyway and locked eyes with Kirby for the umpteenth time. Yeah, sure, why not.

Kirby’s Block Ball was the first video game I ever owned. Not played, but owned, mine. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid but my fascination with friends’ systems combined with 90’s purchasing power eventually saw my Mom and me heading to a Target with intent, then walking out with a Game Boy Pocket bundle. She scouted that deal like a hawk and I was absolutely not going to complain regardless of the included cart; video games were the sickest shit ever and now I was going to have one! And my system was red!!!

I feel like in hindsight she probably realized a Game Boy was the wrong choice from a financial perspective. Sure a home console would have cost more up front, but the money we saved on batteries would have paid for college. Sorry mom!

Little me eventually got Mario Land 2 and was gifted some other carts here and there, but Kirby’s Block Ball always remained a favorite. I’d go back to it to chase high scores, or do that weird child thing where you fixate on a very small piece of an overall package, which in my case meant finding a level that allowed me to trigger the Air Hockey minigame as quickly as possible and 3-0ing that thing over and over again. I wonder if it explains a lot about my tastes and tendencies. Of course my long-term entry point was a weird-ass spinoff nobody played. I was always going to be this way.

As an adult with critical faculties who’s played thousands upon thousands of games and even occasionally gotten paid to do so, my relationship with the medium has changed. I’ve had my sentimentality burnt off by sheer exposure, my enthusiasm for games remaining just as intense, but manifesting in an entirely different way. I am fully capable of separating myself from my experience and evaluating the game in front of me, I swear. Watch!

Kirby’s Block Ball is more clever than it is good. It’s a wildly innovative take on Breakout and its ilk, with Kirby’s transformations allowing for significantly more finesse and the stages feeling almost more like puzzles than the traditional walls’o’bricks, but its refusal to layer its ideas until the final world limits its replayability and to some extent its appeal. It almost feels distrustful of the player (which to be fair was likely to be a literal child so that may have been warranted) and their ability to retain all of the mechanics, so it almost never asks that you utilize more than one at a time. Combine this with slow ball speed and stages that trap your ball inside unbreakable blocks, and you’ll often find yourself watching the game play itself as you think about how you could do it better.

…ok but also, like, this game is sick as fuck sometimes? The powerups are mostly movement-based but the Needle in particular letting you stick yourself back on a paddle to re-aim? OH my god. In keeping with Kirby as a franchise the bosses are hardly a challenge, but I really like how their attacks can shrink your paddles down to a single star, with all the ball control and defensive issues that implies. I like the “border line” par scores you need to achieve on each level in order to get to Dedede, and how that final gauntlet does ask you to tie everything you learned together for the most part. They demand you fully master each area as you need to generate as many extra lives as possible so you can convert them to points at the end. Neat! Really, genuinely neat! I’m doing the Marge potato meme with the cart right now, you gotta believe me.

In many ways I believe nostalgia to be a poison. If you’re constantly looking backwards, the best case scenario is that you’ll stay where you are. I’m especially distrustful of anyone who’s overly engaged in the “retro” hustle. No amount of money or time can buy your childhood back. We need to be willing to have new experiences, take risks, push yourself to become someone better. I don’t go so far as some and say that people experiencing this yearning are fashy “retvrn” types or anything, that’s incredibly uncharitable towards most folks, but I do feel pity. Surrounding yourself with artifacts, the toys you had or maybe wish you had, will stunt and barricade you more than support you. Injection molded plastic makes for a poor foundation.

The thing is, these old games? They hold up in their own way, even when they aren’t great. It helps that they were designed to just be games, not lifelong commitments with complex monetization schemes beyond what to set the MSRP to on a retail shelf. The state of contemporary gaming is sickening, dog. I hate that if I turn my Switch on the first thing I’ll see is an advertisement. I walk past the Xbox in the living room that we basically only use for movies and am reminded that Microsoft is actively committing war crimes right now. I hop on my PC to play my beloved indies and some bigass multiplayer mess is trying its damnedest to squeeze money and attention out of me, uneven value prop be damned. I didn’t ask for any of this shit. I don’t want any of this shit. This industry is unfathomably ass. I just want to immerse myself in someone’s interactive world, to dissect their ideas, to see what they wanted me to see, to play, and to come out of it with something to talk about. Instead I’m surrounded by clutter, only it’s against my will and I’m not allowed to clean it.

The Game Boy is a toy. It was designed by a toy company so they could sell more toys compatible with it. It was relatively complex from an engineering perspective, but as a user it couldn’t be much simpler: a d-pad, a few buttons, a slot to pop a game into, and a power switch to fire it up. You play until you flick that the other way or run out of battery, then you go about your day, hopefully a bit happier for having had the experience and maybe willing to try more carts. It was still transparently transactional, but it was only as invasive as you allowed it to be. When I turn Kirby’s Block Ball off and put it back in the box where I keep these old things, I will not receive push notifications enticing me to pick it back up. If I choose to it will only be because I have genuine interest in doing so.

I like that. I like being able to say “when”, and I don’t know that I fully realized how much I missed it. I want to retain that agency over my attention, even if it means I get some funny looks or miss out on the flavor of the month. I want to choose anticipation over trepidation.

Also, god damn this game’s music goes so hard. Have you heard this boss theme? Do you have any idea how hard I popped off when they finally acknowledged its existence again??? I didn’t even play Kirby Fall Guys or whatever, but if you give me slap bass this good I will always bob my head on beat approvingly.

I’m not giving this one a rating.

01/07/2026