It Was Effect, The Droste Effect

Yikes. It's been just a little too long since I've posted to this blog. There was something I wanted to cover here shortly after the last post, but I forgot what that was, and I just lost interest. I'm pretty sure it was important, which is why it's so galling that it slipped my mind.

Anyway! Rolling Thunder is set to be released for the Switch- again- courtesy of Hamster's Arcade Archives. Is there any point to buying Rolling Thunder when the game was already released twice for this system, including in a collection of arcade hits that quite often costs less than Rolling Thunder on its own? Probably not, but it's there if you want it. For the third time.

image from some guy on Reddit

So, in St. Patrick's Day news, I've been playing Tunic on the Xbox One, which stars a little fox who thinks he's Link from The Legend of Zelda, trapped in an isometric world with a stubbornly immobile camera and various creatures who hunger for verdant vulpine flesh. You will get confused by the perspective, and you will die frequently, complete with an off-putting "REE REE REE" noise seemingly robbed from the old Hercules television series. No, really, I don't want to hear this a half dozen times over the span of fifteen minutes. I keep thinking Hera is sneaking up behind me with a knife.

Yet for all my frustration with the game, I keep coming back to Tunic, for both those tiny morsels of progress I make after hours of struggling (typically dropping a bridge or unfurling a rope to connect two distant areas), and for its occasional moments of genius. Take for instance the dark cavern which can only be explored with a lantern, and which is chock full of gargoyle busts with targeting lasers set in every direction. The trick is to break each sculpture in the proper order, so the lasers from the heads in the back remain blocked and you don't get blasted into Swiss cheese. Having to collect pages from an NES-style instruction manual is also a nice touch, and reminds me of importing Saturn games in the 1990s, trying to decipher each page of the included manuals in a language I could barely understand.

I CAN'T READ THIS CRAZY MOON LANGUAGE!
(image from Game Informer)

There was something else I felt like mentioning. The Sega Genesis homebrew train just keeps chuggin' along thanks to Brazilians dedicated to this thirty-four year old system, because they realistically don't have other options. (For more information, watch Stop Skeletons From Fighting's review of the Zeebo. Basically, if you live in Brazil, you either play the Sega Genesis, or shell out two months' pay for a ten year old console.)

The latest Genesis homebrew to come from the land of towering Jesus statues and green-furred feral men is Space Invaders, a port of the decades old arcade game. Is it as good as Space Invaders '91 for the same system? Ha ha! No. Is it even as good as that weird Super Game Boy cartridge that had a Super Nintendo version of Space Invaders hidden on it? Not really... the color limitations of the Genesis add unwelcome dithering to the lunar background which looked just fine on the Super NES. 

Still, it's a strong conversion in its own right, as you can see from the link above. At forty three years old, the arcade version of Space Invaders is a little crusty, but for Brazilians, retro gaming is an inescapable way of life. If you're not willing to play older video games in that country, chances are you won't be playing anything.