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Aliens (1986) promo shoot

Sonic for ZX Spectrum?

The Typing Of The Dead (PC)

Developed/Published by: Smilebit / SEGA Released: September 23rd, 2001 Completed: 3rd November 2015 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Well, all that talk of The House Of The Dead 2 got me in the mood for it, and as I’m several thousand miles away from my Dreamcast and Dreamcast Gun (probably my favourite light gun, for some reason?) I might as well play through famously loved wacky port, The Typing Of The Dead.

It’s The House Of The Dead 2, except you type to kill the zombies instead of shooting them. Ex-video games journalist/cybernat controller Stuart Campbell wrote an excellent thing about it here, comparing it, in classic Campbell fashion, to a Spectrum game no one has heard of, but his central point—that The Typing Of The Dead is a game about threat management—is bang on. Plus his proposed “mod” (not being able to see the screen and a friend yells out what to type) sounds amazing.

Do you ever think about your typing? Do they still teach it at school these days? Thinking about typing is like thinking about breathing or blinking, indeed as I type this my typing gets worse and worse as I start to over-think it. When I think back, I feel like my secondary school still had two classrooms with typewriters and I must have learned to type “properly” in first or second year that way—I feel like second year, when you’re rapidly shuffled through some different classes before you choose what you’ll do in third and fourth (note: Scotland specific, possibly “Scotland in the 90s” specific). I don’t remember it at all, though. What I do remember though is getting a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on the front cover of PC Format and “playing” it pretty extensively. If you’re looking to learn to type properly, I’m not sure I can recommend anything more highly than the original Mavis Beacon, it’s really great.

Of course, nowadays I type fast, but messily, and I’m pretty sure I mostly type with my two fore-fingers on each hand despite basically keeping my hands on the “home keys.” In fact I’m really exploring it now—screwing my typing up badly—and yeah, I use most of the fingers on my left hand, but my right hand dances about the place and my left hand will do things like type Y, which it’s really not supposed to be doing.

I’ll be honest though, it works. I’d love to go back and learn typing properly again—I’m sure I was very solid after a course of Mavis Beacon—get that right hand better, but I can’t be arsed, because to do so is a bit dull and I’ve got other slightly dull drills I do daily (kanji doesn’t learn itself.) And The Typing Of The Dead hasn’t improved me any. It’s possible that if you’re willing to put the effort into the drills and lessons the game includes you’ll improve though?

Anyway. The Typing Of The Dead is a fun way to play The House Of The Dead 2! The game has all the great dialogue and level settings I remember—a boring lab only takes up the very last level, and while it does recycle all the bosses again, it at least spaces out the recycles a bit. It’s totally one of my favourite campy horror experiences, a bit like watching a crap bit of Italian gore or something (it’s even set in Venice, maybe?) So yeah, whichever flavour of this you choose to play I think it whiles away about a half hour rather nicely.

Will I ever play it again? The Typing Of The Dead, probably not. Typing Space Harrier: I’d love to! The House Of The Dead 2: if I ever get my Dreamcast out of storage, but after I finish the other Dreamcast shooter I own, Confidential Mission. Wait, the Dreamcast only has like two light gun shooters? Man, light guns are such a bad investment.

The House Of The Dead (PC)

Developed/Published by: Wow Entertainment / SEGA Released: 1998 Completed: 1st November 2015 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

I was looking for something spooky to play on Halloween and I was certain that I got a copy of this when I bought my Saturn a few years ago (I had sold the one I had in the UK and hadn’t replaced it until recently) but after an afternoon of digging I couldn’t find it. Which means that I own a Saturn with a Virtua Gun and literally the only game I have that uses it is one third of Die Hard Trilogy.

I did however find that the person who sold me the Saturn had also given me a bunch of what I thought were blank CDRs, but which after testing turned out to be a bunch of unlabelled naughty games. Things like the terrifically dull and mild Girls In Motion Puzzle series, but also a pretty astounding Yakuyen Special, in which you play rock paper scissors with a dancing, increasingly nude Japanese lady.

The copy of Yakuyen Special is so beat up, he used the hell out of it.

Moving on! I’m fond of The House Of The Dead, I played it a bunch in the arcades but had never finished it, so I thought I would. The lack of the Saturn version required me to fiddle about and get a PC version running and play it with a mouse. It at least looks as bad on PC as it does on Saturn…

What to say about it, really? It’s a rail shooter released at a time (and you may have to stretch to remember this) zombies weren’t totally overexposed. The hilarious amounts of gore and exploding body parts offer great feedback to your shots. Every level—though I doubt it pioneered this—has a bunch of different routes you can find either by saving certain people or shooting certain background objects (i.e. shooting a lift’s buttons, or whatever.) It doesn’t rely on too many cheap unavoidable hits to kill you fast, and the only truly annoying boss is the final one, an utterly irritating bullet sponge. I’m almost surprised by how fair it is.

It’s really (really) short though—four levels, and level four does that annoying thing where it recycles a few of the earlier bosses, which is just unforgivably dull. And the only way you’re going to be able to play this most likely is via the (awful) Saturn port, or this (also awful) PC port (unless maybe you can get it running in MAME, I don’t know.)

I’d be interested to know more about the development of The House Of The Dead, though. The arcade version came out just six months after Resident Evil and has almost the exact same setting (spooky zombie-infested mansion turns out to be secret lab.) So who knows, maybe it’s only got four levels because they only had a few months to knock it out as quickly as possible. I do wish they’d just kept to the mansion though—the lab setting is pretty uninspiring compared to the opening of the game.

Anyway! The House Of The Dead is fine but it’s clearly ok to start with The House Of The Dead 2. Which has a great Dreamcast version, so get on that.

Will I ever play it again? If I find an arcade version on free-play?

Final Thought: I probably seem a bit down on this but it’s just due to accessibility. Strange how old arcade games are so hard to “re-experience” in a lot of cases. The House of The Dead, for example, got me thinking about one of my favourite early rail shooters—Sega’s own, very literal, Rail Chase. The game was great because it was played on a mad hydraulic chair that reacted to every bump of the in-game rails. If you played it in MAME or whatever you’d think it was crap, I imagine. Tell you what: come round to mine and shake my office chair about while I play it and I’ll do the same for you.*

Splatterhouse (Arcade)

Developed/Published by: Namco Splatter Team / Namco Released: November 1988 Completed: 26th October 2015 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Today I’m going to tell you about the scariest game I’ve ever played.

The scariest game I’ve ever played is… Kung-Fu Master on the Amstrad CPC. It’s terrifying… when you’re, like, five.

Now, it’s not going to be that apparent from that long play up there, but what makes it so horrifying—in the arcade too—is the way that the baddies rush you to just… hold on to you. And you have to waggle the stick like mad to get them to fall off. Every missed kick or punch leads to a desperate waggling as your health drops, with more and more baddies rushing and hanging onto you until you die. It’s chilling. They’re relentless, there’s no break, you just have to keep traipsing through the level fighting without error. That sense of no escape, no rest, just always horrified me. Even the pause button offers no respite. When you start again, they just go back to rushing you.

After all, what’s really more disturbing than the inevitability of death, eh?

When I got a bit older, though, something like Splatterhouse—despite being largely inspired by Kung-Fu Master—seemed amazing. I’ve never actually liked gore or horror movies particularly—I’ve never seen, for example, any Hellraisers, Nightmare on Elm Streets or Friday the 13ths—but that opening level of Splatterhouse, what’s not to love? Slicing baddies in half, or smacking them with a bit of wood so they explode across the wall. There’s a lot to be said for the slight abstraction of pixels when it comes to something that would have freaked me out properly in a movie as a kid (I count my lucky stars I never actually saw An American Werewolf in London as a child, like pretty much everyone else I know.)

But why have I gone back to finish it? Well, I was just at Fantastic Fest in Austin, the best film festival where you spend far too much money on food because they serve it to you in the cinema and you’re like “sure, apparently I do need a $6 milkshake” (but also, generally, the best film festival?) They’re not only a film festival but have Fantastic Arcade, which did lots of cool stuff this year (including the amazing Super Russian Roulette for NES) but, most notable here, a beautiful restoration of a Splatterhouse cabinet by (I believe) Estil “Doc” Vance (who may actually be a doctor based on Google searches.)

I thought to myself “what a nice opportunity to play a game to completion” and I had a bunch of goes of it but by the time I got to stage 5 (not bad going) the annoying nature of the level (or, hell, the entire game) meant I gave up and just came home and beat it in MAME. (Which is still a huge pain to set up, by the way.)

Splatterhouse is one of those great old games where you kind of feel like the developers didn’t really know what they were doing, and they were also pretty sure very few people were going to finish it, so there are several ideas that go half-implemented and the game gets less interesting as it goes on. In fact, I’m not super clear why the game has seven stages when it feels like it should conclude at stage five, I wonder if they were told it was too short.

Really, when you get down to it, you see everything interesting about Splatterhouse in the first level. Enemies don’t get more interesting, and the weapon pick-ups are absolutely sparse, in a “is this really intentional?” kind of way. My favourite being the spanner you pick up in stage 2, throw once at a completely ordinary baddie, and then never ever see again. It’s real weird! (Actual favourite: the shotgun in stage 3, which allows you to blow dogs up in an enjoyable fashion, and also never see again.) There’s some level branching for replayability, I guess, but it doesn’t add all that much (it’s most apparent in stage 5.) And the two levels after stage 5 are so boring. In one, you fight bubbles against a generic organic background, in the last, you jump over enemies on fire in a slight modification of an earlier background (insanely frustrating—the jumping in this game is awful and you always seem to land short) but I suppose at least the final boss looks like Marilyn Manson if he’d melted slightly.

So yeah, Splatterhouse, totally one of those games you put 25p in, play the first level, see the fun weapon effects and then die. At which point you are, if you’re sensible, done. There’s definitely a pretty cool Kung-Fu-esque game here—I mean even if the game just had more weapons and unique kills it would be instantly more fun—and I wonder if the home console sequels managed it.

Will I ever play it again? No, and I can’t be arsed to find out if any of the sequels managed it unless someone chimes in and says I’ve got to play X or Y with a good reason.

Space Invaders Extreme (Sony PlayStation Portable)

Developed/Published by: Taito, GULTI co., ltd. / Square Enix Released: June 17th, 2008 Completed: 21st September 2015 Completion: Finished it on the easiest path, saw the final level of all the other paths. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Should I count this one? I’m not completely sure. I saw the credits, but the final levels of all but the easiest path (the game uses an Outrun-esque branching path… well, not that Outrun-esque, it’s performance-based) the final level is so annoyingly hard I just couldn’t be bothered. I saw them. I felt like that was enough.

Anyway. Space Invaders Extreme! A tribute for Space Invaders’ 30th Anniversary, it took the “modernisation” approach of things like Pac-Man C.E. (which, now that I think about it, was probably one of the only things like that about at the time) where the game is, you know, similar, but given a modern look that’s supposed to feel retro without actually being retro, and made faster and more intense in the meantime.

And for the most part, this works! There’s a fairly clean basic system at hand here. The game has your invaders slowly creeping their way down the screen the way they do, and you want to kill four of the same colour to get them to drop a power-up for your weapon, and basically keep doing that to keep yourself killing efficiently. There are some kinks, of course, with special flashing UFOs and so on that let you enter special little challenges and unlock “fever time” for even more points, and if you get down to it the scoring system is really, really complex, but overall it’s got that nice aspect where there are only a few things you really need to do to understand enough to challenge yourself on a higher level than “just survive” (and those things help you survive, anyway) that it’s pretty good!

I’m not completely convinced by it, though. It’s obvious that the designers felt that the main game wasn’t quite enough, and the mini-challenges that take you out of the main game (dumping you back in fever time) are jarring and pretty dumb (they feel unnecessary and flow-damaging) and the range of invader types isn’t quite as clever as you’d hope. Some invaders are pretty much impervious to the otherwise best weapon (the laser) with the other power-up weapons not having the same kind of handicap, which just feels like an irritating nerf rather than good design, and as the game gets harder, some invaders just bomb right down at top speed as soon as they’re hit once and kill you. You can prepare and work around this, but in some cases you’ll find yourself on the other side of some enemy fire as they’re bombing down, and you’re like “well, I guess I’m losing a life here.” Instant kill bullets hitting you is fine, instant kill enemies that don’t even need to hit you? Pretty bad.

It’s those, actually, that made the last levels so unpleasant and so give-uppy, because they’re outright unfair, and the game got down to that thing that I’m just not a fan of in shooters—memorisation. Unless you were willing to know to have this weapon here, that weapon there, to be in this place, which I wasn’t, I don’t think you can get through them.

So, yeah. Great game until they over-egg the design in the name of creating a stronger challenge. Not a bad game, just an unnecessarily flawed one.

Will I ever play it again? I have Space Invaders Extreme 2 on DS! I’m gonna play that one, maybe it’s an improvement?

Dark Sector (Microsoft Xbox 360)

Developed/Published by: Digital Extremes / D3 Publisher Released: March 25th, 2008 Completed: 11th September 2015 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Played this for a few reasons, some of them faulty: firstly because developer Digital Extremes are based in Ontario, secondly because I thought they were defunct and I wanted to see what kind of stuff they did (but they’re not—they famously did the awfully-received Star Trek game, but it didn’t sink them.) Thirdly… because I heard it was vaguely ok? It’s got a Krull-esque “glaive” in it! (As we all know, glaives are actually a kind of polearm, not a throwing weapon.)

But yes, the glaive, the amazing looking spinny-blade that the forgettable hero of Krull gets right at the beginning, and he goes to throw it, but the wizard (or whoever it is) goes “no, you’re not allowed to throw it” so he doesn’t for basically the entire film and when he does it’s pure disappointing.

Krull’s shite.

Dark Sector however, is… kind of exactly a D3 game? It’s basically a Simple Series version of Gears of War, with more Resident Evil 4 all over its sleeve than even Gears, and it’s Simple Series-ey because it’s got several ideas and none are particularly deeply implemented and thought out, they’re just “there” and you can take or leave them. Consider the glaive, which is a decent idea, but the game has also got tons of guns, so you can pretty much play the game completely as a shooter. Or the way the game swings wildly between Gears of War-esque cover shooter sections (lots of spawning baddies, use cover, shoot them, repeat) and Resident Evil 4 swarm battles (mutants try and punch you in the head, or magic up your business) without either being particularly deep. Or the way your hero keeps gaining new abilities, but they never seem that important to the point where I kept forgetting them (the magic shield is real useful, but I never remembered it. I used the ability to “explode” the glaive straight after they told me about, but only actually remembered it while writing this…)

And the world is grey, repetitive, and large segments you get the sense more stuff was supposed to happen but doesn’t (some levels are long, some are short, and some huge areas you just run through, like they forgot to finish them.)

Plus: I could not tell you what this game is about. At all. There’s some sort of metal disease? Our hero is maybe a CIA operative, but it’s not clear what he’s doing? There’s an old man there? Sometimes a lady?

Despite all this, I didn’t mind Dark Sector. It’s kind of like one of those films you’d pull up on Netflix or from a petrol station bargain bin—not a “Mega Shark vs. Killer Bees” kind of winking twattery, but like one of those films that stars Scott Adkins with a generic title (you know, like Dark Sector.) Totally workmanlike and with some small thrills—shooting people and slicing their bits off with the glaive works well enough—so it passes the time pleasantly enough. I even quite enjoyed the weapon upgrade system, which is utterly half-assed but once I had my pistol and assault rifle all set up, it made me pretty happy? So there’s that.

Will I ever play it again? Life is too short.

Silent Hill: Origins (Sony PlayStation Portable)

Developed/Published by: Climax Studios / Konami Digital Entertainment Released: December 6th, 2007 Completed: 8th September, 2015 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Been trying to grind out a bunch of the physical games I’ve got so I can get rid of the clutter (I’ve got a “spring clean” that’s, as you can tell by the current season, somewhat overdue) and I remembered picking this up for about $5 a long-ass time ago, so it was next on the chopping block.

This isn’t, actually, the first Silent Hill game I thought I’d review here, because a while ago I started Silent Hill 2 (the poorly-received HD version, though) and after hours of wandering around a dark, samey apartment complex trying every door I was like “fuck this” and decided to stop. I have to be honest and say Origins has sapped any interest I had in going back.

Like, are all of the Silent Hill games 90% about wandering repetitive and dark places trying every door? Because that’s what this one is about. It’s actually sort of pleasantly OCD in that the map marks every door/dead-end you hit, so you get some tiny sense of accomplishment there. It’s also possible that the other Silent Hill games are actually pretty scary, unlike this one, where all the enemies are so dumb you can avoid them entirely, and you control any visits to the alternatives Silent Hill world (you know, the one inspired by that bit in Jacob’s Ladder) so it’s not even like that bit’s freaky. As close as it gets to an emotion is frustrating, because the camera is hilariously terrible—I defeated the first boss without ever seeing it.

This is one of those games where you struggle for something nice to say and resort to “well, it’s short?” but it is, at a deep level, one of those things that just does not need to exist. Even for a Silent Hill maniac there’s nothing here—the plot is slight, and as a prequel it’s totally unnecessary, adding nothing to the whole core story of the series that hasn’t already been covered in a few sentences. It’s like getting a prequel for Halloween where you watch Michael Myers shopping for his overalls. You’re like “ok, I guess this happened, but I don’t really see why this is important?”

Here’s the one thing I’ll say for it: I think it looks nice. It’s been long enough apparently that I’m nostalgic for low-poly textured graphics, and man, the PSP is an a real sweet spot where it’s all low-quality enough, but not so totally garbled it’s ugly (especially with the game’s noise effects and lighting.) That’s about it, I guess.

Will I ever play it again? Nope!

Final Thought: I don’t think me and Silent Hill will ever get on. I enjoyed the plot and world of the first one but the intentional ammo scarcity boned me completely for the final boss, and I’m not sure how you make games where you make the player feel like ammo is scare while also allowing them to enjoy using the weapons they’re finding*. You probably know the experience—any RPG where you get to the end of the game having used none of the special items you’ve collected because what if you need them? I got to the end of Origins with the hero’s pockets unrealistically full of portable TVs and typewriters (one-use weapons) about three katanas and hundreds of bullets because I never wanted to use any of them. Would have I enjoyed the game more if I had? Probably not to be honest.

LocoRoco (Sony PlayStation Portable)

Developed/Published by: Japan Studio / Sony Computer Entertainment Released: June 23rd, 2006 Completed: 28th August, 2015 Completion: Beat all the levels. Didn’t collect everything though. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

I hate LocoRoco. Hate it. Might as well start there.

LocoRoco is… I’ve been banging on about developing games on this blog a bit, but I think this is illuminating. When I started working on Sound Shapes, I can’t remember how it came up, but I remember LocoRoco came up. Because I’d played, like, one world of it and hated it so much I put it down. In a conversation with Jon Mak, we agreed LocoRoco was an example of how not to do interesting/whimsical level design. Why?

Well, the game is about collecting 20 berries, while also finding three “Mui Mui” (wee guys that give you new LocoRoco house parts) and, if you want, collecting Pickories (coins, basically) and/or doing the level as fast as possible.The thing is though, 90% of these collectables, even the main ones, berries, are totally hidden. Not in a “this wall has a crack on it” way but in a Wolfenstein 3D-style “rub yourself against fucking everything bashing the space bar” way. There’s absolutely no joy in LocoRoco’s level design. It’s just horrible. Basically, everywhere you go you have to try all walls and potentially every bouncy pad or whatever to explore every single space of the screen or level you can. And, to make things better, levels are often designed so you can miss something and not be able to backtrack, usually by falling into a lower part of the level, or just straight up being moved to another part of the level via a feature (some blowing wind, or something.) With the “tilt the world” controls (you don’t control your LocoRoco directly) this is maddening—not to mention the enemies/spikes, who easily strip off your gained berry-weight in a way that, again, can never be fixed. You have to finish levels perfectly.

Getting to the end of a level with 20 berries is, if not impossible, so unfair that it’s just absolutely hateful. So, going back to this because I was like “man, I have a lot of PSP games” (and I just bought some more) I tried to play it properly for a while but just gave up and roasted through the levels as quickly as possible. And if you do that, they’re utterly dull!

Never play this.

Will I ever play it again? Fuck no, plus will never touch any sequel with a barge pole.

Ristar (PlayStation Portable)

Developed/Published by: Sonic Team / Sega Released: February 16th, 1995 (on Sega Mega Drive / Genesis) Completed: 22nd August, 2015 Completion: Finished all the levels! Trophies / Achievements: n/a

So… has anyone noticed that Ristar is basically Jesus? Faced with corrupt leaders and enslavement, the people in the universe of Ristar pray, and God sends his son to save them!

Like, he literally sends his son, it’s in the text of the intro and everything. Ristar doesn’t, uh, solve the problem with some cool preaches and then get crucified, he solves it by using his big stretchy arms to grab enemies and ladders and things and then kill the big baddie. I don’t know if Jesus had big stretchy arms, they’re never shown in any paintings of him and I don’t think that they ever mention him having big stretchy arms in the bible. Actually, wait:

Matthew 21:12 “And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of them that sold doves, using his big stretchy arms.”

The more you know!

Will I ever play it again? Nah. But I did beat it. Mega Drive titles like Kid Chameleon, Decap Attack or the like? I can’t imagine choking them down.

Final Thought: The thing with Ristar is that it was developed by Sonic Team, based on an idea they had before they went ahead with Sonic (though Ristar was originally a rabbit) and which was later returned to with a team you wouldn’t recognise (mostly new hires.) Either way, because of the whole Sonic relation, you kind of assume that it’s going to be a bit Sonic-ey, especially when the level title cards are really similar to the ones in the Sonic games. But it’s not at all!

Ristar is, despite being a star, really, really slow. He can’t run, and he can barely jump (I didn’t bother to measure it, but I feel like his jump isn’t even taller than his height.) In addition to the really different, detailed graphics, the whole thing has quite an unusual feel, that I honestly felt more akin to a Euro platformer, like something developed on the Amiga and then ported.

(Ristar does do some shooting star stuff; he’s got these special spinny things that he flies off at the end of the level or if he finds a secret level, but it’s rare.)

Ristar is definitely… fine. I mean, it’s… fine. The levels generally manage to be vaguely interesting with their individual gimmicks (though occasionally the gimmick can be hard to work out) bosses are sort of patchy (one, which involved throwing a hot meal into its mouth, was infuriating, and as always the final boss is a huge pain) and it passes the time.

Sega 3D Classics: Super Hang-On (Nintendo 3DS)

Developed/Published by: M2 / Sega Released: November 28th, 2013 Completed: 17th August, 2015 Completion: Finished all the courses, including the world tour. And without any saving or anything like that. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Super Hang-On, guys. I know what you’re thinking, because it’s what I was thinking too. “Ugh, isn’t this the earliest of the Super Scaler games? I mean it’s really boring, right? Just racing on a two lane highway for ages. Barely any more evolved than Pole Position.”

What an idiot I was and what an idiot you are. This is the wrongest wrong, and I guess it took those wizards at M2 to show me my wrong wrongieness for the wrongitudinal wrong it wring wrong wubba wran

(Sorry readers. Let’s take a little intermission here to listen to Super Hang-On’s super cool chilltimes music. Ahh, that’s better.)

Super Hang-On, or at least this M2 version of it, is fantastic. I don’t know why, collectively, we’ve all decided it wasn’t very interesting. Maybe it looks a bit boring in stills, and likely, Outrun, with its wide roads, loads of cars and set dressing, just seems like it’s better. But here’s the deal with Super Hang-On: it’s an incredibly clever and subtle example of pseudo-3D racing. The game is about two things: 1) avoiding the many, many other racers on the narrow-ass road by carefully weaving through them, even as they attempt to murder you because they hate you 2) using “turbo” (which boosts your max speed by like 50km/h) carefully when you know you won’t fly off the aforementioned narrow-ass road or right into another racer who, also aforementioned, wants to murder you.

This is but two very simple mechanics. Together, they are perfect. Playing Super Hang-On on 3DS is almost painful, because you more or less death grip your 3DS with a brutal intensity as you try and edge through the field at the maximum speed you can manage. And you have to, because the time limits are absurdly strict.

Which is one of the reasons this M2 version is so great. There are a variety of settings which—and this is maybe the one real negative I have to give—are a bit obscure (I’m still not 100% sure what they all do) but with some fiddling you can get the game to “challenging” rather than “you will never finish this, puny humans.”

And the other settings are all great. Playing it using the gyro is actually really fun, the screen tilting is great (if you want to use it) and the 3D is fantastic even if it still doesn’t agree with me at all (I wonder if the New 3DS would fix that) so I sadly had to not really use it. It’s the perfect release, although if I was super greedy I’d want them to include the track from Hang-On too?

Sega 3D Classics: Super Hang-On is not optional. It’s an amazing example of a clear, simple game design that’s absolutely thrilling to play. I played this for hours and hours and hours and I’ll go back to it, to finish the “sit down” version of the courses probably (even if they’re only mildly different? I haven’t tried them yet.) It’s great.

Will I ever play it again? Yes.

Final Thought: And I must say: Super Hang-On looks great, too. It’s maybe hard to see that when everything is flying past at 324km/h, but if you sit and watch the credits you can see how intricate the level furniture and backgrounds and colour choices are. Super Hang-On might actually be one of those perfect things, you know? A flawless pearl for people who like a specific kind of pearl (I’m not saying everyone is going to love this pearl. It’s just as good at being a pearl as a pearl can be.)