Mento's Month: August '25

Game of the Month: Lies of P (by default)

Time(othée) just wasn't on my side this month.

I really dropped the ball this month, taking on way too many longer games for my usual features—the two Game OVA candidates and half the IGotW subjects clocked in at around 15 hours apiece—that I barely found any time at all for more Pinocchio Bloodborne. I'm just past the cathedral and its weird slug guy, probably barely halfway through the story, so I'm planning to dedicate every fifth day of September to pushing further through it. I've not made much of a dent in my backlog this year despite buying fewer and fewer games to replace them, in part because I've fallen down this RetroAchievements hole in addition to my usual amount of retro gaming blogging and playing the Indies I've been sitting on forever.

So, yeah, excuses aplenty this month but not so much in terms of any substantial progress that can give me more to say about Lies of P beyond "it's still pretty good, yo". My new sword has some kind of engine on it, at least? So that's neat.

Other Gaming Tomfoolery

Our heroine, everyone.

Game OVA took its toil this month as we had two more entries to finish off this current season, seeing as summer is drawing to its merciful end for another year. Those two would be Episode 5: Gulliver Boy and Episode 6: Slayers. The duo of games that accompanied those blogs include the late-era SNES RPGs Gulliver Boy (or Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy to give it its full title) and Slayers. Both I would say betray certain budgetary and/or deadline restrictions involved their construction but are otherwise OK RPGs for the system, presenting a few original ideas apiece even if neither of them are anywhere near the system's many fine nonpareils of the genre. Gulliver Boy styles itself as an action-RPG similar to the Mana/Seiken Densetsu games due to a quickly regenerating attack gauge which regulated how often you could attack but wasn't so stringent that it let enemies run roughshod over you. It rapidly moved through the plot of the show (there wasn't a manga, at least originally) to the extent that you could get whiplash from how quickly you went from arc to arc. Overall, though, I think that pace helped because it meant an overall breezier experience with way less grinding or overly elaborate dungeon design, both issues that conversely hit the Slayers RPG quite hard. However, that game had its own strengths too with its art design (created by the original novel illustrator and later anime art director Rui Araizumi), a revolving cast of playable characters that often forced you to change your tactics to account for new party compositions, and plenty of funny writing and situational comedy befitting the license that was ably localized by the Dynamic-Designs fan translation team (maybe the funniest game for the system? Or at least it's in the same conversation as Super Mario RPG and EarthBound). Neither felt like a waste of time—I typically don't complete Game OVA games if they don't offer something substantial—but still not quite on the level of the system's peaks (which would be extremely difficult, in fairness).

Remember the beloved character, 'guard dying in the alleyway after getting merked by Ganondorf'? No? Whaaaaat?

Speaking of peaks, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is typically regarded as the greatest of the N64's output—along with Super Mario 64 and a real small handful of others—and when a game is that beloved it traditionally sees a lot of scrutiny over on RetroAchievements when they develop and compile their list of objectives to pursue. The Ocarina set proved to be an engrossing combination of tough challenges and a "did you know about this?" exhibition of its less well-publicized Easter eggs and other quirks. I checked it out with the goal of getting the full set in a single run—very possible, though time-consuming—where the various three-heart boss challenges offered the biggest hurdles to overcome. Hardest of all was completing the game with only three hearts while also skipping all the maps and compasses, which also meant remembering where they all were so I didn't accidentally take any of them. One tense zero-damage battle with Ganon later and the set was mine: arguably a far cry from the horrors presented by some of the other subjects covered by this "Kobayashi Mario" series but still a high-level playthrough that would be enough to make anyone sweat. I'm all Ocarina'd out for quite some time I suspect, unless they figure out how to do achievements for an OoT randomizer.

Doing this in thirty seconds is... not easy. Even with a stylus.

Still plugging away at Picross DS too. It's real tough on an emulator because of its extremely precise little stylus mini-games and they've only gotten harder after I entered the Free Mode portion of the puzzles (and the latter half of its content). I did at least get the highest score on all the daily timed puzzles for their related achievements, which I was concerned about before starting this game, but in the end I'm really not quite sure what to make of all these decidedly non-picross related challenges Jupiter threw in here for flavor (or because Nintendo asked its partners to make an effort to highlight the touchscreen whenever possible). At least it does the modern QoL thing of graying out the numbers after you've completed some or all of their related lines: when playing some of the older games released on SNES, it was clear that there was plenty about the UI that these picross game developers hadn't quite figured out yet. Still, Free Mode is the best mode (it's the one that doesn't penalize you for errors like a joyless scold) so it feels like it's going to be more engaging from here on out. Like going down a mountain rather than climbing up.

Finally, we have the DeJig series. Not sure what compelled me to give this series of four super-casual jigsaw puzzle games a shot but I think it boils down to wanting to build up my Sega Saturn bodycount. It's a system that passed me by but after playing through Dungeon Master Nexus a few months back I think I'm ready to see what I missed with a new Saturn-focused feature next year (or maybe this year; I've no solid plans for October yet). The DeJig games each provide twenty jigsaw puzzles of usually around 72-108 pieces, which isn't much but probably best suited for a game of this vintage without a huge amount of screen resolution to work with, and each game has a specific theme as well: Aqua World involved a lot of fish (and even more blue pieces with nothing else on them); Tin Toy was a bunch of '50s classic toys with aesthetics that were usually more eerie than playful; Lassen Art Collection presented a bunch of paintings by some surfer dude that invariably looked like the sort of thing you'd see painted on black velvet inside a double-wide trailer; and McKnight Art Collection had a different artist dude who kept drawing the same Mediterranean-looking homesteads despite setting them in places like Connecticut, most of which I swear I've only seen before in waiting rooms at the doctor/dentist office. I'm still searching for viable alternatives for my podcast gaming since I'm getting burned out on putting crosses in boxes but this might be a bridge too far. Maybe I'll check out some of those girly sliding puzzle games on Saturn instead next? I'd much rather see boobs than a neon dolphin frolicking in the twilight. (Evidently I'll need to add more of these to the wiki as well.)

The PlayStation had Resident Evil and Silent Hill but the Saturn had... this. Sega might still be coming out ahead in the scares-per-minute stakes.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Cryptmaster (Paul Hart and Lee Williams, 2024)

'What runs but does not walk'. Turns out that riddle has several right answers.

The rare quintuple-play on this occasion since this was a month with five Fridays, adding no amount of extra Indie gaming time to an already hectic month of Game OVA business. The highlight for me was Cryptmaster (#431), a sardonic first-person dungeon crawler that conveyed everything—combat and exploration both—through a text parser and wordplay puzzles. Fighting boils down to quickly tapping in single-word text commands appropriate to the situation, such as using an armor-piercing word like "shatter" to break an enemy's shield, while having to solve riddles and guess at hangman missing letter puzzles when it came time to claim treasures or level up my team. Really loved its ingenuity and monochrome aesthetic and it reminded me how much I want to get back into first-person dungeon-crawlers again (I have a few Wizardry-likes sitting in the wings just in case).

The rest are all three-star types that offered plenty of cool ideas but were lacking in their execution. Majotori (#430) is a fun concept for a nerdy trivia game in how each round focused on fixing a different person's problems but the way you could get a bad ending for any of its vignettes out of pure misfortune made grabbing achievements for it feel like pulling teeth, though I did appreciate the way that even if things fall apart for them it could still lead to a potentially more interesting route for that individual. Grapple Dog (#432) is a game I wanted to like because its aesthetic, its soundtrack, and its heavy use of grappling hooks all appealed to me very much. Some irritating imperfections with the way its mechanics worked plus an insistence on time trial BS really rubbed me the wrong way though and I was eager to move past it once the irritating final boss came and went. Deliver Us the Moon (#433) is another one of these "aftermath purveyor" mystery adventure games I've been enjoying again lately after the thematically similar The Station, though Deliver Us the Moon had some lofty aspirations about making itself more suspenseful with several poorly conceived action/timed sequences. Perhaps another case like SOMA where it might've been better off being a pure walking around investigative adventure game type of thing. Finally, Shadows of Adam (#434) seemed like a very competent 16-bit JRPG throwback with a decent enough script, some pixel art that shines in battles, and a combat system that while repetitive is rarely boring in the sense that you can just keep tapping attack and be done with them—no enemy group is a pushover here, not unless you're backtracking for some reason. It's just... after those two Game OVA RPGs for Super Famicom I guess I'd hoped for something a bit more innovative for a modern spin in that genre. Been a real "middle of the road" sort of August on IGotW, that's for sure.

Mastering the Master System (Part 8)

We have a slightly off-kilter group of Master System games this month; plans to play through the original Phantasy Star fell through due to a lack of time (plus I'd already played three interminable JRPGs already, see above) so I went with some slightly more straightforward action games for my two selections here. The randomizer found another weird homebrew for me in the meanwhile so... good for it, I guess.

Shinobi

Type: Selected
Developer: Sega
Release Year: 1988

Shinobi's been popping up in the news recently, in a showy manner unbecoming of ninja, due to the well-rated reboot Shinobi: Art of Vengeance so I figured it was probably a convenient time to check in one of the first game's many ports. Shinobi debuted in arcades in late 1987 and was quickly ported to Sega's Master System console the following year, with others for Famicom, PC Engine (both in Japan only), Atari ST, Amiga, C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, PC, and MSX following thereafter. A side-scrolling action game, Shinobi casts you as master ninja Joe Musashi as he fights back against a crime wave led by bad ninja (a.k.a. ninjerks) to rescue a series of identical child hostages before defeating each area's boss and moving onto the next with a combination of martial arts, shuriken tosses, and ninjutsu magic. The most noteworthy element of the first Shinobi is its first-person bonus rounds, where you attempt to take down as many roaming ninja as possible with shuriken before they can get close enough to pop you. This was a game I didn't play on Master System but did quite a lot on Atari ST, so I'm definitely curious if a 16-bit computer port from a third party measures up to an 8-bit version made by Sega themselves. It was an attractive game at the time with its large sprites and many characters on-screen during those bonus rounds so this should be... I was going to say "exciting" but maybe "sobering" will be the better descriptor.

This game is as bastard hard as I remember, turns out. Well, maybe it's fairer to call it a Contra type of game where you just have to memorize the tricky parts and keep a cool head throughout. The SMS version does at least give you the courtesy of a health bar though at the cost of the arcade's Bushido Blade-type damage registration system, where you have to actually get hit by a weapon to die instantly and enemy collisions are otherwise harmless (though they still knock you back). You also don't have to rescue the hostages in this one, though the incentives to do so are pretty strong: weapon upgrades, bonus round activations, health bar extensions and refills, and the occasional extra guy. Who doesn't love an extra guy? It's a relatively short game with five "missions"—each between two or three sub-sections long—and the five bosses. The third boss, Mandala, was always the one that killed my progress dead in normal playthroughs on the ST because you need to out-DPS an approaching wall of death and if you fail the first time all your power-ups are taken away and you're pretty much screwed on any subsequent attempts. It's very much like getting your ass beat by a Gradius or R-Type boss and thinking "oofa doofa, now that I'm back down to my peashooter I'm sure this'll go a whole lot better".

Nothing says 'ninja game steeped in Japanese culture' more than Marilyn Monroe, Macaulay Culkin, and Spider-Man.Gotta love the ol' frogman ninja ambush. Incidentally, that water is about a foot deep (unless Joe can just walk on water and I wouldn't put it past him).Scooby Doo-ass villain.

You may have gathered from the playthrough description, or just from the nature of any game involving ninja, that this achievement set was a bit of a nightmare. A big chunk of them are tied up in the bonus rounds, which I sucked at, and then there's the usual thrown-together assortment of no-damage boss clears and no-death full playthroughs. There's one for never rescuing hostages past the first stage—ninja have no time for heroics, those guys are just going to have to fend for themselves—and a few for never using magic, so in a way they're helpful for tacitly implying there's a reason you'd want to do those things in a normal run. To achieve as many as I did is something to be mildly proud of, I guess, though it's clear I'm going to have to make up this deficit in the final quarter of the year before it gets too much lower... man, how I wish there were more picross games on this platform.

Achievements: 22 (of 39) / 56% / RR: ×13.54

The Lucky Dime Caper starring Donald Duck

Type: Selected
Developer: Sega
Release Year: 1991

This one goes out to Mikey. Not Mickey though, since we already played one of his games a few months ago (Castle of Illusion). The Sega-Disney platformers are a pretty special breed, comparative to what Capcom was doing with the same license over on the NES (or SNES by this year), so I thought I'd get at least one more in since I wanted (OK, needed) something a bit more relaxing than Shinobi so I could remember what it was like to enjoy gaming. That's why we're here with the angriest cartoon duck that isn't Daffy or Subaru, searching for a lucky dime—that would be Unca Scrooge's famous lucky dime, which got stolen by Magica again, making this feel like a DuckTales-in-all-but-name outing—through the usual selection of platforming challenges. Nothing too outlandish here but one of my secret shames (it's not really either of those things) as a platformer fan is that I've never deigned to complete any game that featured Donald Duck in a starring role... excepting Kingdom Hearts, of course, where's he more of a support act anyway. After this I might even be confident enough to take on a QuackShot or a Goin' Quackers or a Quackdown 3 or a .Quack//INFECTION or [ed. note: all right, enough of that.]

If I had to describe this game in one word it'd be "unobjectionable". It's fine. Super adequate stuff, where every trope and easy boss and bizarre single-room difficulty spike had a very welcome QoL feature or an unusual game design choice to make up for it. Donnie T. Duck first visits various places across the Americas—a forest, the Amazon river (or it could be the Mississippi except it looks a bit far west USA on the world map, so maybe the Rio Grande? Except it's full of piranhas and has a lion so... *shrug*), and some sort of twisted variation on Machu Picchu. After he saves all three nephews he then has to recover their respective lucky dimes that Scrooge gifted to them, sending you after Magica's henchcrows in Egypt, Hawaii, and Antarctica. With both of these groupings you can attempt any of the trio of levels in any order (another DuckTales connection) with the game always ending with the seventh level, set inside Magica's haunted castle somewhere in Italy by way of Transylvania. For the most part it's some standard platforming though you do get some set-pieces that I swear I saw a bunch of times back then: a room that slowly filled with blocks that you had to avoid falling on you, then climbing your way out once they were done; a waterfall where you gingerly made your way down while eluding the river detritus; and a neat Sonic-style sequence where the ground you're on tilts and you have to simultaneously leap over rocks rolling down from behind you and those coming up on the path.

I'm not sure how I feel about Donald Duck taking notes from Sonic. It starts with level design tricks like this, but eventually it'll lead to MPreg sketches on DeviantArt.Dude seems so uncomfortable in this one and only swimming section in the game. I figured he'd take to it like a... well, you know.A nice (ice?) little touch in the Antarctica level has the game switch out the usual idle animation (he stomps his feet) for this pitiful shivering. The Hawaii level also had volcano caves where he'd start panting due to the heat too.

Notably, the game gives you infinite continues and there are treasure rooms in the Egypt level where you can stock up on as many extra lives as you want. Both of these boons meant the achievement set for this game was as much of a cakewalk as the game itself. The way Lucky Dime Caper's weapon system works is a bit like Sonic—you either have a hammer or discus and will lose it if you get hit, so it incidentally acts like a shield—and many of the bosses required you beat them with either the hammer or discus: the sneaky part is that you weren't allowed to get hit and lose the weapon, so it was really a bunch of "no-damage boss" achievements in disguise. Bosses in this game are pretty easy at least, or they are once you have their patterns down; that lion was the only truly unpredictable one. The only achievement that gave me any serious issue was earning a 500,000-point high score. Even if you beat the game without ever continuing (that'll wipe your score) you won't quite have enough, so I spent some time in those treasure rooms collecting diamonds worth a bunch of points along with as many 1Ups as I thought the game would let me hold. Kinda worried I'd cause some kind of overflow error because I'm near certain I went over 255 lives just grabbing gems for what felt like an hour. A strangely grindy achievement to throw in there but it would've been the only one remaining had I avoided it and, well, that's just not how I roll. Still plenty more Disney platformers for this thing if my completion average ever starts dipping again (obviously avoiding The Lion King, the nightmare that it is).

Achievements: 23 (of 23) / 100% / RR: x2.00

Weka Invaders

Type: Random
Developer: Disjointed Studio
Release Year: 2017

No real clue where this came from but I feed all the SMS games with RA sets into the randomizer and sometimes it spits out a bizarre homebrew like this. Weka Invaders is a combination of Space Invaders and an Arkanoid/Breakout type of game where you have a character (a penguin, in fact) that can only move left and right across the bottom of the screen and you shoot down objects floating in the sky above you. These objects are all blocks to start: you need to shoot each one twice to fully destroy them though they'll also slowly deteriorate on their own. Inside some of these blocks are the Wekas: angry little red blobs that descend while shooting at you a short period after you remove the block they were hiding in or once that block naturally disintegrates over time. Any Weka that make it to the ground can no longer be shot and make a beeline towards you, however you have a finite supply of quake bombs to take out anything on the ground level (besides yourself). As with Arkanoid, broken blocks that don't contain Wekas will sometimes drop power-ups instead (or a power-down) which can help you clear out the Wekas faster.

This game is a surprising delight for a random obscure homebrew. That combination of quickly eliminating blocks, strategizing by going after the lower hanging ones first to reap their power-ups faster (or eliminate troublesome Weka that will quickly make it the ground from that low down), makes for a tense but not too difficult playthrough. Every ten floors has a "boss" which is just the usual Space Invaders bonus UFO hanging around instead to take pot shots at you while you proceed as normal to clear the level. Maintaining a decent number of bombs without wasting any is essential as later levels have more Wekas and you'll run into more situations where you'll be unable to pop them all before they drop down to the ground, where you'll need a supply of explosive ordnance to survive. There's far less leading enemies than there would be in a Space Invaders or its variants but you still need to learn to zip around quick and line yourself up right so bullets don't pass through the gaps between blocks if you plan to progress through all forty levels here (and this game moves fast: I doubt a full run would take more than 30 minutes total, with most courses over in about a minute).

That gray block restricts where I can move and now there's a couple of Wekas heading towards me as I deal with this one. Fortunately, the quake bombs can take care of everything on the ground.Whoever said video games have violent subliminal messages?I was voted most likely to be an amazing penguin in highschool, so this checks out.

The achievements are reasonable enough, though a few are based on luck so I had to keep plugging away at them. The two rare power-ups of Time Freeze and Laser have conditions where you need to kill ten Wekas total while either is active in a single run (though not with a single power-up, thankfully, since they both wear off quick). Another requires stocking up on nine bombs—you start with three and they seem to get rarer the more of them you have—and finishing the game can be tricky too if you run into a spate of bad luck, since extra lives are very rare and I was never quite sure what I did to acquire them. Still, one solid run was enough to net all of them so I'm pleased I didn't have to exert myself too much here given the reflexes many of these arcade-like games demand. Actually kinda happy with the randomizer for digging up this one, if I'm being truthful.

Achievements: 18 (of 18) / 100% / RR: ×1.19

The Weeb Weeview

I exhausted my first impressions of the new anime last time and I'm saving any rankings or final reviews for the end of September, which is also when this season ends. That puts me in a sort of awkward place here, so I'll just summarize how this season's been up until now:

Dandadan Season 2 has been perfect so far, from beginning to end. We're about to be properly introduced to the character of Kinta, whom sounds like a fan favorite, so he'll be an exciting revelation for these last few episodes. Reborn as a Vending Machine S2 has likewise been trucking along as it always has, with a surprise betrayal leading to a lot of outmaneuvering; if I can say anything positive about this series besides "dang how weird is it to have a sapient vending machine in a fantasy world" it's that they actually have some clever writing and ingenious solutions to problems, even if they miraculously always seem to involve goods available from vending machines. On that note, the second season of the dubiously titled I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I Can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability—never a good sign when your title is that literal and/or that long—has had a whole arc's worth of table-setting plotting leading up to the current slate of one-on-one fights and, man, those have really been visually spectacular so far. Love a show that knows how to do an OP hero right. Similarly, To Be Hero X is rapidly approaching its denouement and the achronological storyweaving of that show has been absolutely masterful, to say nothing of its superbly choreographed superhero combat scenes. At this point the only superhero stuff I really care about is the animated kind; we'll be seeing soon if One Punch Man S3 can course-correct after the disappointing last season (OK, fine, I do kinda want to check out the new season of Peacemaker as well).

I swear the action scenes for this show keep getting better and better. Okarun's certainly improving with his powers at least.

With regards to the quieter slice-of-life/romance fare, this season's really been spoiling fans of the softer side of anime too. The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity is a beautiful and wholesome show that always puts a big smile on your face; My Dress-Up Darling is consistently finding imaginative ways to deliver its jollies as Marin and Gojo fall ever more in love with the world of cosplay (and each other, eventually, presumably); There's No Freaking Way I'll Be Your Lover is proving to be a little more measured and earnest about its troubled lesbian love quadrangle than its zany title would have you believe; and magical HS drama Secrets of the Silent Witch continues to quietly deliver one quality episode after another with an underappreciated wallflower charisma entirely germane to its heroine.

My Dress-Up Darling season 2 has really been demonstrating what it can get away with now that it has a much higher budget.

Over in the Low-Budget Yet Oddly Appealing Trash zone, I'm still watching the "fugly dude with a heart of gold" isekai Busamen Gachi Fighter, the "Overlord but nice" villainous grand strategy riff Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra, and the non-sequitur gag parades that are Detectives These Days Are Crazy! (which parodies Detective Conan among others) and Bad Girl (the petite protagonist of which increasingly reminds me of Vtuber Laplus Darknesss and her present masochistic derangement arc (slight NSFW warning on that one, though only in the audio sense)). I might also still occasionally check out Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl to see how that British accent is coming along (it's sorta improving?). I'd struggle to recommend any of these without reservation but they're passing the low bar I have for animated entertainment.

These three people-shaped plague doctors from Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra are total bros. They also love humans, but couldn't eat a whole one.

Finally, some shows I've been meaning to get into and might binge towards mid-September after some of the above have ended: The second half of this season of Sakamoto Days (heard promising things), the second season of Kaiju No. 8 (ditto), Gachiakuta (if I can stomach the edge), City: The Animation (first ep was a bit slow but the animation really is incredible), Lord of Mysteries (speaking of jaw-dropping animation), Clevatess (really seems like my kinda thing), possibly more See You Tomorrow at the Food Court if I'm ever in the right mood for it, and perhaps some others if I remember they exist but almost certainly won't have time left to see. Easy for plenty of shows to get lost in the shuffle in a season this packed.

That'll do it for the August rundown. You'll find out what my September blogging plans are around this time next week but it's going to be retro-gaming-inspired because when is it ever not? After that I'd like to make some weak gesture towards getting more of my backlog squared away in October and then it's time to avail myself of some free Game Pass, possibly for the last time, as I blitz through as many of the year's biggest (and longest) games across November and December. Well, that's the plan, anyway. Given how this year's gone so far I should consider myself lucky if we're all still alive by GOTY season, let alone worried about finishing everything I wanted to. Nice to end another blog on a positive note. Toodles.