The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

A markedly different experience from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite sharing directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (co-directors Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack, as well as screenwriter Matthew Fogel, are back too), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dispenses with any of the tiresome, relatability scaffolding previously applied to this Nintendo juggernaut. Judging by the first instalment, the decision makers behind that film were convinced that audiences wouldn't be able to swallow the adventures of a stout, video game plumber unless the character overcame some trivial personal difficulties within your standard ('90s vintage) big screen adaptation. This galactic chapter though discards similarly shallow attempts at insight, the film instead constructed as a rolling incident machine that does a better - or perhaps just more honest - job of repeatedly showcasing forty-odd years of iterative, Kyoto design. In that sense, Illumination and Nintendo's film is completely given over to the presentation of obsessively layered and rendered landscapes that suggest some, faltering means of progression. So, the industrialised swamp of Peter Jackson's Isengard is transformed into a volcanic theme park that sears cheering lackeys to the bone; and a repulsive golden casino - perhaps a nod to Nintendo the company's beginnings as a playing card manufacturer - becomes an Escher etching that can be traversed in every, counter-intuitive direction. Plotted to be little more than diverting noise, this Mario Galaxy simulates something of the proudly illogical progression seen in the vintage video games that inspired it. A mode of communication in which relentless invention trumps a more careful means of ascension. 

Video Games 2025

Guard Crush Games build on lessons learnt co-developing Streets of Rage 4 - specifically the escalating sense of progression seen in the sensational Mr. X Nightmare survival mode - then apply them to a slightly different kind of Sega-style, scrolling beat 'em up. Absolum is, to be overly specific, like the Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder or Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons: Shadows Over Mystara arcade cabs but filtered through the colourful, high-contrast art style of bande dessinée comics then reimagined, mechanically, as a rolling roguelike. Delightful to play, particularly in couch co-op where you can bicker over power-ups with your nearest and dearest, Absolum is designed to be replayed in short, satisfying instalments. The paths that stung players beat back, on their way to repeating unsuccessful boss attempts, differ ever so slightly every time; remixing and rearranging set-piece encounters based around the goons who are embedded in each mini kingdom. Beautiful in a way that screenshots don't quite do the game justice, the sublime Absolum is the result of a multi-media collaboration - the aforementioned Guard Crush working alongside French television animation studio Supamonks, all under the aegis of publisher Dotemu. 

All my Dreamcast favourites in one place! There are a few games included in this Capcom Fighting Collection 2 that, on their original release, were only really available on (expensive) Japanese import. Yeah, you could get a barebones version of Capcom vs SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 in the EU region and it even, as far as I'm aware, supported a 60Hz display option. But what you really wanted to do was invest in a DC-X boot disc then take yourself down to a local importer to be charged far in excess of any reasonable retail price for non-sealed copies of minor upgrades like Capcom vs SNK Pro (£65, back at the turn of the century, courtesy of Liverpool's own Chip Shop 2000). In fairness, any lingering feeling that you'd been completely ripped off was instantly (and forever) dispelled by the heavy duty CD jewel cases and full colour manuals that were standard for Japanese consumers. In the case of Pro, this meant a pleasant smelling leaflet packed with beautifully illustrated examples of the Street Fighter and King of Fighters cast as envisaged by Kinu Nishimura and Shinkiro. Really all we're lacking here, in terms of perfectly replicating my personal DC library, are the For Matching Service releases of Vampire Chronicle and Super Street Fighter II X: Grand Master Challenge (£75 a piece, the extra tenner presumably due to the fact that these discs were only available through a Japanese mail-order website), both of which were, for some reason, incompatible with the Dreamcast's SCART output. 

Designed around the limitations of Sega's 16-bit Mega Drive (but nevertheless available on all modern video game systems), Earthion is a presentation-first side-scrolling shooter that betrays a particular kind of consideration when it comes to how players are enveloped by the sounds generated by Yamaha synthesiser chips. Developed by Ancient Corp, the studio founded 35 years ago by musician Yuzo Koshiro and his game designer sister Ayano Koshiro, Earthion may pack its screens with drifting hazards and advancing alien forces but the real meat of the piece is a brand new, coin-pumping score by Koshiro and a cacophony of crunching, cracking sound effects that would be very much at home in the high-end releases that Konami were regularly issuing on Sega's system in the early 1990s. Like WaterMelon's beleaguered Paprium, Earthion represents the Mega Drive both freed from number-crunched concerns, like the increasing expense of (at least relative to that time) higher capacity ROM cartridges, and the hardware completely at the mercy of a development team skilled enough to confidently skip between arcade-style genres. 

A baffling proposition when first announced. Why are FromSoft trying their hand at a roguelike with mechanics on loan from extraction shooters and battle royale games, rather than building yet another towering action-RPG? Have the Bandai Namco bean-counters stepped in and tugged, hard, on their reins? Even in the moments following release, when hopeful pre-orderers were taking their first steps through the tutorial segment, Elden Ring Nightreign felt strangely counter-intuitive. The game's request that players speed through these sumptuous environments, making split-second decisions about what to cram into their meagre inventory on the way to another colossal boss, seemingly at odds with every prior lesson in how to play the development studio's games. 

Brave a few silent expeditions with strangers though and the method begins to emerge. It's as if director Junya Ishizaki and the rest of his staff took a look at the absurdly truncated speedruns possible with FromSoft's longform output and then designed a game that simulated a similar experience for players less able to internalise the location of every fragment in these worlds. Nightreign is a minor miracle really, a game crammed with content on loan from its parent company's heaving portfolio that still manages to feel new and alive in hand. A lot of this ability to satisfy lies in how well tuned each of the available characters are. How each of the eight (now ten, thanks to DLC) Nightfarers fills a specific niche but can still, nevertheless, be piloted and redefined through equipment or upgrades to fulfill others. A clearer idea of tiers within this cast did emerge - especially when players sank deeper and deeper into overtuned post-release modes - but we're still looking at a roster of characters that are every bit as rewarding to learn and play as the original eight World Warriors of Street Fighter II. 

Nestled in amongst Gradius Origins' beautifully presented arcade ROMs, discarded prototypes and hidden console versions (accessible by entering the Konami code on the version selection screen for certain titles) is Salamander III, developer M2's take on what they believe a late 90s sequel to the original arcade spin-off could've played like. Almost comedically challenging - even on the lowest possible difficulty setting - at least in terms of the moment-to-moment expectations placed on this player's waning reflexes, Salamander III takes with one hand but gives back with the other, allowing recently scuttled ships to hoover up their fumbled upgrades, if they're quick enough. And if they're not, then the goon-level enemies that fill these crumbling civilizations-cum-oozing digestive tracts are very likely to drop enough power-ups to get you back to something resembling threatening. Short but triumphant, and very susceptible to coin feeding to power your way through, Salamander III is a feast of pinks and glowing, radioactive greens - a shooter that scrolls in whichever direction it pleases and is never very far away from an enormous alien life form covering their flashing weak point with hovering, embarrassed appendages.

Pillarboxed and packed with shrieking noise and jagged brown polygons - that seem to imply pungent, butyric whiffs - Labyrinth of the Demon King traps our fragile peasant soldier in a stagnant, feudal hellscape and asks that they mooch about crumbling environments, solving opaque puzzles and fending off emaciated corpses armed with broken furniture. Although the implied objective would see players fending off satanic royalty, the moment-to-moment gameplay experience is actually much more desperate. Even armed with weapons that have had a considerable amount of the game's scarce resources sunken into them, the player is still left with the unshakable impression that should they fail to learn how to adequately parry an incoming chair leg then their life in this realm will be short. To their credit, one-man dev team JR Hudepohl doesn't attempt to compound this potential for misery by replicating the inflexible checkpointing of the PlayStation 1 games that have clearly inspired Labyrinth. As soon as a player picks up an item, or completes a puzzle step, that progress is fixed. Tune into this deliberate expendability and Labyrinth is suddenly a much less daunting proposition. 

Although nowhere near as transformative as Capcom's recent pass at their own survival horror back catalogue, or Bloober Team's re-evaluation of Team Silent's sequel for that matter, Konami Digital Entertainment (and Virtuos, and PlatinumGames)'s Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater does sneak in a few changes. On the face of it these corrections shouldn't cause too much hassle, most of them are balance-related and therefore address the ways in which players stressed game logic or the classic input system to leverage advantageous outcomes. Like, say, snappily dismissing weapons then re-equipping them to work around lengthy reload animations. In practice though, this remapping and re-tuning upends how well-drilled players can approach a game that is a lot more focused around successive boss battles than perhaps they might remember. Old strategies are suddenly either absent or now much more cumbersome, demanding players tighten up their controller navigation or even think up alternative approaches for the foes they vanquished twenty years earlier. And isn't that what everyone wants out of this trend for modern updates? For these games to feel new again? 

The other half of the Streets of Rage 4 equation, developers Lizardcube and publisher Sega, were busy this year too. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance keeps the action-platformer blueprint of earlier games but updates combat and traversal to be more in line with modern, Metroidvania expectations. So, rather than be limited to a confident stride, shuriken tossing and close-up sword swipes, Art of Vengeance's Joe Mushashi now has an entire suite of upgradable and expandable, combo-focused movement at his disposal. In that sense, Lizardcube have managed to take the more free-flowing motion seen in the 3D PS2 entries, such as 2002's Shinobi or its sequel Nightshade, and transposed a version of that back into the swaying 2D environments that demand Mushashi climb, avoiding swarming enemies to seek out progression-blocking switches. Art of Vengeance then elbowing aside the less fondly remembered Saturn exclusive Shinobi X to stake its claim as the true descendent of Sega's brief, 16-bit obsession with ninjutsu. 

Even more successful than Bloober Teams' remake of the second Silent Hill game - at least in terms of offering players something that is not only brand new but actually somewhat mechanically transformative in comparison to the classic PlayStation releases - NeoBards Entertainment's Silent Hill f shifts the series' settled, mutative fog to a different time and country: another forgotten, failing mining town as well as a central person with a head full of thoughts and memories that they cannot bear to face. Perhaps this obvious uptick has more to do with the player character than anything else? Shimizu Hinako, a high-schooler utterly throttled by her place as a working-class teenager on the cusp of adulthood within 1960s Japan, makes for a more engaging onscreen marionette than a middle-aged sad sack. 

James' Silent Hill flowed out of his guilt and neuroses; Hinako's labyrinth is an entire society's worth of expectation caving in on her, crushing her before she's had a chance to become her own person. Hinako's town, already crumbling into destitution before thick Martian vines begin ensnaring the buildings, is therefore a trap of dead ends and winding, isolated paths. Pals race ahead and leave you behind, forcing you to creep along after them, metal pipe in hand (firearms are completely absent), vulnerable to the ambushes that they have disturbed. As you nose around draughty school buildings and abandoned households, hidden stashes of crumpled paper begin to become a regular pick-up - the notes themselves containing the kind of excoriatingly personal criticism that can only come from the closest of friends. Hinako frantically updating an in-game journal in an attempt to make sense of this poison. The player's perspective, slowly, begins to align with the more ruthless predilections that your avatar explores in her waking nightmares; a darkness that threaten to spill out into some version of the real world. 

Obviously, given the licensed pedigree, Bitmap Bureau's Terminator 2D: No Fate has a certain commonality with previous passes at this killer robot property, sharing something of the varied approach to gameplay seen in the T2 adaptations published, in tandem with the film's original release, by Ocean Software or LJN Toys as well as the infrared aiming reticles, quoted from the T-800's big screen HUD then applied to Midway's arcade cab. There are deeper, metatextual connections though, specifically in terms of how this piece connects to the Mega Drive adaptation of The Terminator, a short but memorable release programmed by Dave Perry for Probe Software. In the decades since that game's debut, Perry has talked about the creative limitations placed upon him by the license's former holders, Orion Pictures. The game was to focus around Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese to the exclusion of everybody else - so no stages playable from Sarah Connor or the Terminator's perspective. Bitmap Bureau's latest, belatedly, redresses those omissions, building a scrolling beat 'em up stage around a pixelated Arnold Schwarzenegger or allowing players to not only take control of Linda Hamilton's likeness but to make decisions on her behalf that change how the well-worn story unfolds. 

Alfredo Bontempi - City Ruins (Avaron)

A Minecraft Movie

Quite apparently tied in knots by teams upon teams of writers (the finished piece is, variously, attributed to Allison Schroeder, Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta), director Jared Hess' A Minecraft Movie betrays very obvious traces of this chronic overthinking and re-wiring. Denied entry to his beloved mines as a child, Jack Black's Steve, upon growing to manhood, returns with his pickaxe to tunnel his way into another, much blockier dimension. His ability to pass between this computer rendered world and ours thanks to a shining cube that, eventually, finds its way under Steve's childhood bed. A significant amount of time later, Emma Myers' twentysomething Natalie and her little brother, played by Sebastian Hansen, seem to move into Steve's long deserted home, whereupon they will find his precious gem and go on their own, Amblin-inflected adventure? Well, not quite. 

Turns out they didn't reckon upon actor-producer Jason Momoa, whose star presence demands that the tragic (and admittedly pat) backstory sketched up for this Movie's younger actors be obliterated to concentrate on detailing why Garrett, Momoa's tassel jacketed buffoon, thinks so highly of himself. It's not that Momoa particularly detracts from a film that might otherwise be completely given over to Black's increasingly monotonous honking. If anything it's sort of amusing that Momoa, a recently divorced father, can wield so much behind-the-scenes power when assembling a vehicle through which he might hope to win the eternal adulation of his own children. Although it would be impossible to adequately adapt the totality of Mojang Studios' enduring, Twitch-streamed juggernaut, it does seem notable that, when outfitting this Swedish video game property for the American big-screen experience, the filmmakers have overlooked plaintive pianos and unbridled creativity (but not the sudden transformation of sentient beings into tools that power the various mechanisms of Minecraft) to concentrate on invading subhumans and explosions. Speaking of which, can you guess how Hansen's Henry contributes to the teeming lexicon of this deliberately pre-industrial sandbox realm? That's right: he bashes together a firearm. 

Zero by Hungry Clicker

Video Games 2024

How can a game built out of gleaming, blacklight pixilation feel so verdant and alive? Look at it: neon vines drape across scurrying slimes; lambent waters trickle down sunken walls. Like a dying CRT cab pumped full of ooze. As an exploration focused platformer, Animal Well's approach to progress is both dense and layered. Screens that resemble a glimmering terrarium are knotted with hide-holes and secret shortcuts that run concurrent with more casual traversal. Controlling a ghostly little blob, players work their way around these dripping screens in loops, pressing up on walls and scurrying through any passages that reveal themselves in search of mysterious eggs and save checkpoints that take the form of a rotary telephone. Developed by Billy Basso and published by Bigmode, Animal Well is an instant, high quality calling card for Dunkey's newest video game venture. 

Hot on the heels of sinkhole disaster Concord, PlayStation quickly corrected the narrative pertaining to their 30th year in business with Team Asobi's Astro Bot, a love letter to those three decades worth of ups and downs. Whereas Firewalk Studios' game rabidly (or, maybe more accurately, foolheartedly) chased a place in a service gaming landscape already dominated by several long ensconced titans, Asobi's game was content to be a luxuriously worked summation of its home platform. Nintendo-like not only in its ability to constantly introduce new ways to navigate a lush 3D landscape but also in how the game's mood manages to be celebratory without slipping into arrogant self-satisfaction. Perhaps it's that Sony's iconography has been so thoroughly subsumed into Astro Bot's cute droid aesthetic? The cynicism associated with brand maintenance vanquished by the sight of Bloodborne's Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower reimagined as a capsule vending machine toy. 

After a couple of minutes with Balatro it becomes clear that the decision made by PEGI (the content rating board for video games released in Europe) to quickly revise their age label classification from a PEGI 3 to a PEGI 18 is, at least partially, a qualitative assessment of this game. LocalThunk's deck-building take on poker is compulsive and hypnotic rather than the cheery, mindless pair-matching seen in dozens of Nintendo party games. Players are presented with deals that can then be held or discarded, before a final submission subjects them to the powers of the juiced-up, leering joker cards that are purchased between rounds. As more and more of these cackling multipliers are gathered, the players chip haul starts to seriously outpace the (early game) completion demands placed upon them. The result is intoxicating, activating a part of the brain that thrives on pure greed and twinkling feedback. 

Already sinking beneath sludgy AI imagery and aggressive micro-transactions, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 had a great couple of weeks in which online action coalesced around playlists dedicated to the smallest maps the game has to offer. Blessed (or cursed) with a new, multi-directional movement model that seems much more logical when considering the wide open spaces of the Warzone spin-off, rather than the spawn-flipping back-and-forth of the dedicated multiplayer maps, Black Ops 6 does actually shine on the tiniest possible arena. Stakeout takes place inside a series of claustrophobic apartments; staggered rooms with clear paths in and out that cater wonderfully to the instant correction of the shotgun weapon type. Players can hug walls, hovering out of view, waiting to blast unsuspecting visitors or dawdle around, firing from the hip. The close-quarters and point-blank damage scaling mean opponents cannot slide away from your boom stick and the funnelled movement channels ensure that you're unlikely to be sniped from some unconsidered angle of vulnerability yourself. 

Never thought I'd feel pangs of nostalgia for the rickety polygonal meshes of the PlayStation 1 era but here we are. Crow Country is a cutesy, Haunted PS1-style spin on survival horror that allows players to do something almost unthinkable: they can rotate the camera around these environments, to really examine the nooks and crannies of these lovingly crafted 3D spaces. Indeed, such was the novelty of this unlocked perspective feature, I didn't even realise you could do it until I'd put a good twenty minutes into the game. 

Additional content so completely fantastic that FromSoft could very easily have held it all back for a quick, cash-in sequel. Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree is, at least before you gather some very specific items, almost impenetrably difficult. Arriving in a pocket universe filled with horrors so terrible that the ruling powers of the main world have sealed them away, players are very likely to either be instantly pummelled by one of the wandering, skyscraping bonfires or ambushed by an assassin who stalks the player like a big cat on the way to visit some crypts. Make it inside one of these extra tiny dungeons and you'll be met with a mini-boss who owns a fully automatic crossbow. 

These first few hours are uniquely dispiriting then. Your endgame equipment only able to nick and chip these fresh enemies. Dedicate yourself to finding fragments of another of the game's mythical trees though and the difficulty curve begins to level out until rolling progress is, again, within the player's grasp. Although decried for introducing this strained kind of longevity, Erdtree's sap collecting forces players to re-examine both their build and equipment. Sticking to what has worked previously is, very clearly, a form of self-sabotage. FromSoft have filled their adjunct realm with new weapons and armours; fresh spirits and allies to call on; recipes for improvised chemical weapons that can, thankfully, make some dent in the enormous health pools that bar your ascent to a new throne. It'd be rude not to make use of them. 

A bloodthirsty take on Konami's run-and-gun shooters, Iron Meat caught my attention by presenting itself like some lost, plugged-in update of a Mega Drive fav. The equivalent of the Mega CD version of The Terminator when judged against some speculative release that combined the exploding perps of RoboCop Versus The Terminator with the more athletic movement of a Contra: Hard Corps. Although not as arresting as either of those classics, Iron Meat is still a lot of fun, particularly a level that sees the player trying to escape a crashing airship infested with writhing, bio-mechanical worms. 

If nothing else, Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics clearly illustrates the stark contrast between the kind of HD remasters that are expelled from a parent company to prop up a weak quarter and the reception that can be expected when the porting and packaging of such a property at least attempts to equal the genuine longing that has galvanised multiple online petitions. This Fighting Collection not only allows players easy access to games that were previously subjected to lousy console translations (see X-Men: Children of the Atom and The Punisher) but also offers up a beautifully curated copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes that allows players to tweak and toggle to the degree that even specific, character-related bugs can be switched on or off. Right now, New Age of Heroes is living a second life, energised by fighting game master Justin Wong and his screen-clearing alter ego The Wazzler, as well as an expanding YouTube scene that specifically disregards the ingrained, meta to re-investigate lower tier characters that were instantly deemed useless back in the early 2000s. Finally getting to see Sunburnt Sakura or Iron Body Zangief pulverising Sentinel match-ups has been delightful. 

Expectations were underground for Bloober Team's remake of Silent Hill 2. Publishers Konami had long since ran that particular cash cow into the ground, losing source code so re-releases of PS2-era classics are permanently hamstrung or handing off development duties to anybody but whatever remnants of Team Silent remained within their parent company. Even jumping immediately to the second game in the series for this modern re-jig sounded worrying, as if Konami were attempting to stir up the biggest possible pay day for themselves before their audience realised they'd been had. As it turns out though, Bloober have actually overdelivered, subtly rebuilding the second Silent Hill in such a way that this release can function as a companion piece to the original, rather than something designed to overwrite it. As James creeps deeper into this abandoned town, familiar progress, puzzles and encounters are missing. Marked only by an interactive prompt that then simulate some sense of fuzzy recall. Although never stated outright, it seems as if we are experiencing James' dilemma as something cyclical and purgatorial. Another round in an endless punishment that he has trapped himself in. And if that doesn't do it for you, there's some tighter combat controls that allow you to duck and weave around the emaciated horrors attempting to lay themselves on top of your widower. 

Developer Coal Supper's Thank Goodness You're Here! is sort of like if you got the Viz cartoonists to devise their own, interactive version of one of Richard Scarry's Busy Busy books. Players control a little gnome who zips about a lurid, postcard drawing of a post-industrial Yorkshire town that sprawls across several interconnected (and sometimes deliberately unconnected) screens. These strange little scenes teem with villagers going about their daily business, from running a dilapidated corner shop to attempting to fish a penny out of a sewer grate. Everything and everybody can be whacked, in fact that's all you can really do. Thankfully, striking your palm across their collective backsides will always result in some sort of reaction, from a shocked titter to a response that might actually cause the day's progress to inch that little bit forward. Comedy is a something of an untapped resource in video games, either reduced to incidental flavour or something excruciating that must then be endured. Thank Goodness is neither, managing to concoct a prevailing sense of daftness that is both genuinely amusing and actually sort of cosy.

Hibiki Takane by Nobita

Reina by Quasimodox

Cammy by Daigo Ikeno

Video Games 2023

Solid-state drives, and the lightning fast load times they facilitate, have allowed a certain seamlessness to assert itself in video games. While a lot of really talented developers have leveraged this data dump to zap players back-and-forth in space and time with very little pause, Remedy Entertainment have instead focused on the clash and intersection of competing realities. So while Control on PS4 (a previous example of Remedy's signature trick) was hamstrung by tedious, creeping bars interrupting these visual seizures, this year's Alan Wake 2 is able to chop-and-change surroundings on the fly, transforming the basic act of piloting a pistol-toting burnout into a psychedelic spelunk. It's not enough that ghost narratives invade and envelop real-time gameplay at key, plot-relevant points. Remedy have built entire mechanics around physically aligning our viewpoint on these fractures; rewarding careful steppers with breaks that bubble into mixed-media collages. 

A wonderful example of a non-linear action game, Blasphemous 2 relentlessly rewards players daring enough to press deeper into the unreachable corners of its sprawling map. Surrounding your leaping, dashing fanatic are pixelated descriptions of baroque super-structures that frustrate and deny progress. This is a world filled with leaking cathedrals that pierce the sky, professing exultation for a malevolent God, while paving over the fallen horrors of the previous epoch. Similarly, the game's soundtrack, composed by Carlos Viola, combines pounding, flamenco guitar with winding, melodic dirges that firmly trap the player in a turbo-charged Spanish Catholicism that never experienced The Enlightenment. This is a society steeped in mouldering horror and many obsessive forms of self-flagellation. What better backdrop for a game that demands you hurl a shrinking figure at landscapes heaving with bloodied stakes?

Motive Studios' remake of Dead Space shines even brighter than the original 2008 release, thanks to a massive shift in where the industry now apportions its time, money and talent. Back then lengthy single-player games were closer to the norm, with Dead Space crash-landing in-between all-timer Resident Evil 4 and a Resident Evil 5 that, at least originally, promised a withering, horror-focused experience. A completely different lighting system helps to cast churning flesh and metal in deeper, darker shadow but this remake's greatest strength is a rejection of the simulation physics that have so fully invaded every other game in which you are asked to manipulate an onscreen character from a third-person perspective. Movement is, instead, much more twitchy and digital. A welcome throwback for players less interested in steering lurching meat puppets. 

Poosh XL is the latest game from Adamvision Studios, a one-man dev team responsible for those fun Recharged remakes of several ancient Atari games a few years back. Like those releases, Poosh XL is blaring but basic; a one-button score attack that takes place within a neon, light-piped world and asks players to inch a ball up a procedurally generated passage. Players will struggle with progress-barring hazards; a control scheme that punishes thoughtless, rapid movement; and a instant death laser that is always hot on your heels. 

Post Void is a few years old now, if you buy your games solely through Steam, but if you're willing to bide your time and wait around for native PlayStation 5 ports, well, 2023 was your time to shine! Armed with an impassive idol head and a pistol that looks very much like a tattoo gun, players must navigate their way through strange, liminal living spaces decorated with revolting patterned wallpaper suggestive of a baked bean lava flow. Obviously the order of the day is escape, but your path to the shimmering pond that transmits you deeper into this nightmare is jealously guarded by all manner of slithering horrors. Random layouts and instantaneous restarts further massage this pleasant sort of revulsion, keeping you plugged in and plugging away. 

How do you remake the greatest video game ever made? Well, exactly like this. 2023's Resident Evil 4 may not be a 1:1 update of every aspect and avenue present in the original game but Capcom Division 1's revision smooths modern sticking points - most notably the 2005 game's tank-style controls - while maintaining the risk-and-reward loops that underline basically every aspect of that masterpiece's core gameplay. Exploration, weapon updates and the various currencies available all induce certain conflicting (and even, at times, complimentary) tensions into the piece. When the path ahead is clear, is it worth doubling back and checking nooks-and-crannies for branching paths? Does the bounty for vanquishing an even spongier variant of a mid-boss enemy outweigh the potential spend associated with pursuing it? 

Like Capcom's recent Resident Evil 2 remake, this 4 likes to trap players in a constant state of struggle. Very rarely do you (at least on a first playthrough) ever feel like you have too many health items or more than enough bullets to carelessly proceed. Separate Ways, the dirt cheap DLC that followed, is equally superb. Not only does it bait nostalgists with extra areas from the predecessor game that didn't quite make the cut several months earlier, it also introduces brand new traversal and combat mechanics that practically demand to become the new norm. On that note, it'll be interesting to see how Capcom approaches Resident Evil 5 when they (inevitably) come to remake it. Not just because of the game's depiction of Africa - which is positively Victorian - but also because these recent revisions of their classic survival horror games have remained committed to impoverishing the (single) player as a way of casting doubt on their ability to progress. 5's preference for sidekicks will mean either abandoning these design preferences or a skilful re-contextualisation of cooperative gameplay. 

Banana Bytes' Sophstar is a top-down shooter packed to bursting with selectable ships. This, at least initially, overwhelming amount of choice isn't just cosmetic preference either: each of the game's many craft play in markedly different ways, from the directions these fighters pump out bullets to the ways in which the game's defensive, teleport mechanic operates. Sophstar, the work of a one-man team from Brazil, has that same, intense flavour as a Mega Drive import cart; one that you'd likely be drawn to based solely on a painted, wraparound cover featuring an electrified, alien horror leering at prospective customers. 

Given the horrid, freebie launcher feeling of the previous entry, Capcom really only had to right the ship with Street Fighter 6. Instead, they took the idea that even-numbered entries in this series should be transformative to heart, delivering a stacked fight suite loaded with distractions and diversions that are always teaching the player some piece of situational information. The optional Easy Operation-style controls, as well as combat mechanics designed to allow a couple of opportunities to reverse a round's momentum, are especially welcoming for newer players who are happy to be instructed. For all the impatient tutorial-skippers out there though, there's always a crouching medium kick into a Hadoken. 

Lucky enough to score a Sega Master System and Shinobi one Christmas in the early 1990s, I went on the hunt for a similar game when my birthday followed shortly after. Despite being a chopped arcade port, Shinobi still offered a twitchy mix of blade-on-henchmen violence and black magic special attacks, so it was only natural I gravitated towards The Cyber Shinobi, a follow-up that, presumably, stirred mechanoids into the mix. Designed around large, detailed sprites to the exclusion of even a basic sense of accurate player control, that 8-bit sequel stunk out the system; single-handedly switching me on to the idea that branding cannot be trusted and everything should be judged on a case-by-case basis. Anyway, Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is exactly the game I wanted to play back then: speedy, shuriken-on-cyborg violence; action trapped in a succession of burning buildings and crumbling laboratories. 

Venba, despite its sweet, sketchy art style, is a completely ruthless visual novel that batters forth in time and space, accruing considerable human wreckage along the way. For the majority of the game's hour-and-change length, players control the title character, attempting to decode a worn cookbook passed down to her by her own mother. Venba, a Tamil immigrant living in Canada, cooks for her husband and son, the latter of whom isn't shy about about pulling faces or making disparaging remarks when greeted with non-pizza foods. Short gameplay scenes revolve around the assembly of these cookbook meals - all of which look delicious - but the real meat is revealed when we are left alone with access to Venba or her son's mobile phones. Nosey parkers may well find themselves heartbroken, scrolling back through one-sided message threads in which a lonely parent heedlessly reaches out to a disinterested child. 

Resident Evil: Extinction

While Milla Jovovich's commitment to catwalk cataclysm has never wavered, each of the Resident Evil films has tackled the concept of video game adaptation in remarkably different ways. The first instalment, directed by Paul WS Anderson, was premised on the ways in which the root survival horror games revealed themselves, both spatially and visually. So as well as investigating the big business malevolence (literally) lurking beneath old money estates, Anderson's film also lifted the locked perspectives of the game's fixed camera angles. Only now the omniscient point-of-view was not that of the players steering these characters through the rotting dangers but that of the impassive computer intelligence calculating how to exterminate this biological infestation. In its best moments - particularly an opening sequence where offices packed with corporate climbers are ruthlessly liquidated - Anderson's film plays like a covert adaptation of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream; the pillar on which all tales of seething, mechanical hatred are balanced. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse, obsessed as it was with lionising the minutiae of Capcom's work, seemed to be more of an attempt at big screen veneration for this already successful brand. Despite its ambition, Alexander Witt's workmanlike idolatry proved to be less exciting than that managed by George A Romero (originally in the frame to direct his own big screen Resident Evil) with his 30 second long television ad for the second game in the series, Biohazard 2. The approach taken by Russell Mulcahy's consistently good-looking Resident Evil: Extinction differs again, marked by a willingness to translate the grammatical experience of video games rather than just broad events or fan-pleasing iconography. Extinction cross-contaminates bleached glimpses of an infernal, post-apocalyptic desert with pastel make-up interiors and creative inflections lifted from Japanese, post-humanist animation. Dramatically, Extinction revolves around dangerous encounters with various undead hordes, all visited on the film's dwindling collection of human survivors. These enemies all originate from an unclear or flimsy source, as if spawning in thanks to some unseen trigger. In the case of a setpiece that takes place in a Las Vegas that has been reclaimed by the desert, sprinting horrors issue ceaselessly from a shipping container that couldn't possibly contain this many creatures. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Despite an increase in budget that allows the filmmakers to make good on the rotting city glimpsed during the conclusion of the previous instalment, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a one hundred minute long fumble. Instead of a blood-splattered laboratory, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her disposable friends now have an entire city staffed with grinning mercenaries and the stuttering undead to creep through. Unfortunately, excitement-levels are not similarly bolstered. If anything the inverse is true: the more guns and wobbling, Mardi Gras titans that Apocalypse reveals, the more excruciating the viewing experience becomes. The first Resident Evil film was knowing enough not to gum its gears with this kind of consumptive sightseeing. That piece was more of a conceptual adaptation; one that took fragments of the original PlayStation game then used them to engineer sequences and situations based around the unblinking attention Paul WS Anderson paid to his leading ladies. Anderson's arrangement of bisected bodies (more than a little bit inspired by Vincenzo Natali's Cube) was even arresting enough to reinspire the developers back at Capcom. 

Lauded video game director Shinji Mikami, in a canny bit of call-and-response, translated Anderson's celebrated laser corridor set-piece back into an interactive obstacle for his own Resident Evil 4 (an encounter memorable enough to make its way into an expanded version of this year's remake). Less original by design, thanks to a fanbase that demanded fidelity when considering their polygonal adventures, Alexander Witt's Apocalypse is content to dutifully slog through the kind of material previously deemed extraneous. Witt's day job as a second-unit director for multiple Ridley Scott projects is only really detectable here in terms of a chopped-up intermittence that worms its way into the film's threadbare action sequences. Even when Apocalypse settles into a situation that should lend itself to an entertaining fracas, we are chased away from that moment by either harried cuts that explicitly take us elsewhere or a style of combat coverage best described as a spatial collapse. The only person able to portray fun under these galling circumstances is Sienna Guillory as deputy heroine Jill Valentine. Somehow the actress has managed to tune her performance into the strange frequencies and confident nonsense inherent to compact disc gaming. Her Valentine has bled off the CRT screen; every utterance clanging with the inelegance of tough talk translated from English into Japanese, then back again. 

Resident Evil

Time has been kind to the films of Paul WS Anderson, particularly those he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The writer-director's preference for expansive, often maze-like sets and dwindling human resources no longer registers as a shorthand cribbed from James Cameron and John Carpenter simply because no-one, not even those namechecked directors, are making films like that anymore. Compared to the digital costumes and endless computer-generated vistas on display today, Resident Evil is surprisingly tactile. David Johnson's camera is a member of the crowd, jostled by the leads and experiencing the strange, claustrophobic intimacy of a packed lift. These sweaty anxieties, of course, couldn't be further away from the polygonal purgatories found in the Capcom video game series that Anderson is adapting. There the player is very much alone; silence and isolation indicative of a win state that they have fought hard to achieve. 

That which was deemed undercooked or second-hand when this big screen blow-up was released is now easier to celebrate, in large part, because of how Anderson has woven a constant sense of physical (even chemical) vulnerability into the piece. Dramatically and stylistically, Resident Evil is built around hangovers; specifically the inconvenient memories that bubble up out of particularly oppressive narcotic funks. Visually though, Resident Evil is a film preoccupied with faces: Anderson and cinematographer Johnson shoot Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez in ways that are intimate and adoring, focusing on the soft hairs on their necks as much as their tousled fringes or pouting lips. In Resident Evil the halting rhythm of this male gaze is also a tool that tracks fatigue and the transformations creeping inside the film's more photogenic subjects, with Rodriguez the victim of the most drastic metamorphosis. Repeatedly chewed-on by grasping, yuppie zombies, her character eventually succumbs to the same snarling hungers. The pink mouth that the film previously lingered on is now presented as cracked and pale; peeled back to expose yellowed, snapping teeth. 

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Even setting aside the Famicom-era nostalgia and a licensed song selection that leans heavily on the dwindling decades of the twentieth century, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a still a feature dripping with throwback thinking. Specifically, the film makes it its business to explain (or attempt to bring some kind of logical order to) the deliberately surreal flourishes that 8-bit video games are built out of. Matthew Fogel's screenplay is pointedly pre-Marvel then, in the sense that it doesn't trust the audience to not get caught up on the minor details that power this technicolour fantasy. So not only is Mario's beloved Brooklyn a building site riddling with rising platforms and gloomy pipes - the film even adopts the flat two-dimensional perspective of a buzzing CRT television when Mario begins hurdling through one set of hazards - but the mushroom power-ups, that we know Mario will soon have to gobble up, are given an apprehensive dimension. In this way Chris Pratt's pixelated plumber is given an opportunity to overcome the minor fears associated with dinnertime fussiness - a note that may well have some resonance with the film's intended audience of children - as well as the more obvious peril associated with an enormous, fire-breathing dinosaur. 

Resident Evil 4 - STEYR POWER

A couple of weeks out from a full release, Capcom have pushed a demo of their long-awaited Resident Evil 4 remake to online stores. Presumably the first ten or so minutes of the final game, this preview code allows players to steer a lumpy, drunken-feeling Leon S Kennedy towards an even creepier break-and-enter incident, before urging him on to a one-sided shoot out with an army of creeping Nannas. Fans of ancient GameCube trial discs might recognise this segment as being broadly similar to the teaser packed with a special Capcom edition of Japan's Famitsu magazine. Published back in 2004, that miniDVD allowed extra curious players an opportunity to break the innate loop of the sample level, spawning two distinct chainsaw maniac encounters. These double-leggers, and the currency their defeat conferred, were crucial if the player wanted to unlock the TMP machine pistol. Here, Steyr fans simply have to discard the contents of their menu-bound attaché case before entering the fateful village, then drop down into a refuse-packed cave. 

Yuzo Koshiro & Motohiro Kawashima - The Poets II

Gouki by noobboy

Video Games 2022

Andro Dunos II is a scrolling shooter steeped in the pastel aesthetic of SNES-era cartridges, less the crippling slowdown. Players are tasked with nudging a chubby yellow space craft around a series of futuristic backdrops on the way to meet the customary great big boss with a flashing weak point. Picorinne Soft's game doesn't set out to redefine its host genre but it is an immediately and consistently fun game. Controls are crisp and responsive, while the weapon system and in-game currency are centred around a suite of beam types instantly selectable during gameplay. One might fire at enemies creeping in on horizontals, while another blasts out of the ship's exhaust system, shredding the ships that are attempting to ambush from behind. 

A throbbing twin-stick shooter, packed full of shrieking pinks and calming blues. Devastator is a locked-60, neon everything, update of ancient Atari cabs. Amber coloured virus vectors spill into the cramped, one-screen stages; their successive, escalating detonations tapping out a chorus of percussive pops. In their self-replicating midst are bolder coloured infections that chase down the player ship, crowding them until their think-fast reactions fail them. Radiangames' release is anything but tranquil, demanding players arc their craft in harried circles and issue split-second responses to their constantly evolving cage. 

Open world games follow a very specific formula, one that sees massive sections of the map consigned to the semi-useless state of travel scenery. There might be the odd roaming beast or item-packed cave hidden away somewhere in the scrub but, for the most part, these spaces present like physically playable loading screens; inflicted on the user as a way to stall forward-momentum between a world's more detailed gameplay destinations. FromSoftware's Elden Ring succeeds a series of games designed around a (reasonably) linear in-world progression. Players may be able to travel against the currents, so to speak, when exploring but any serious intrusion into late-game realms is prevented by the sheer weakness of the player's under-levelled character. 

So how do Hidetaka Miyazaki and his development teams approach their own open world game? While there are summits, scattered about the stained world map, that do offer the familiar experience of creeping through a dungeon-cum-barracks, for the most part Elden Ring provides players with a genuinely curious sense of exploration, one so multi-layered and rewarding that, in truth, the act of snooping around in this world is a closer experience to that of an archaeologist excavating a series of beautiful-but-fallen kingdoms. Elden Ring is actually kind of staggering in its ability to constantly, and meaningfully, reward the desire to ignore the obvious path forward. For the truly inquisitive, Elden Ring is a curated paradise of ever-expanding grottos and underworlds: bone dusted oubliettes conceal black chapels attended by praying secret bosses, while the death mask of a rotting, deposed, God lies calcified beneath a rioting castle. Elden Ring is an astonishing achievement, the kind of game that offers loops so purely captivating that it's struggle to work up much enthusiasm for anything else. 

Deconstructive in terms of its character-driven intent, God of War: Ragnarök actually does an excellent job of describing to the player why Kratos was always bubbling with rage back in those PS2-era games. Tag along sidekicks and secondary characters will not leave you alone. They're constantly in your ear, immediately describing how to accomplish any task placed in-front of you. You know, the checkpoint push you're currently and conspicuously ignoring because the game is laid out with dark corners that conceal the game's stingy power-ups. Still, when combat is joined, at least you can order your chatty little pals to riddle your enemies with arrows. 

The King of Fighters XV is the latest sequel to SNK's (used to be) annually released Street Fighter alternative, a series that I've slept on since the first few 2000s releases trickled out to the Dreamcast grey import scene. Although it very much does look like the game is happy to walk new and returning players through the more recent mechanical updates (in a dedicated training mode), I'm satisfied just navigating straight to Arcade mode, selecting the Garou team and letting Terry Bogard's burn knuckles do the talking. 

A decade and a half since the first game, No More Heroes III entertains thanks to a structural model that is, similarly, completely out of time. Grasshopper Manufacture's sequel is a PS2-era open world adventure by way of a neutron bombing - there are things to do in Santa Destroy but they are blips and outposts in a vast expanse of rubble. When set against modern waypoint chasers, No More Heroes III is simplistic and gimmicky; constructed around a combat system that feels puny until several special actions have been unlocked. By the end of the game though, every input and action is being juggled and exploited. Battles are transformed from inching attrition into an interactive checklist of ways to sap or undermine the massive health bars in play. If that doesn't do it for you, end-of-stage cutscenes dispense with cataloguing your effect on this invaded world, preferring that the player sit opposite two de-tuned movie maniacs as they discuss the filmography of Takashi Miike instead. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, aside from being a fun and surprisingly detailed scrolling beat 'em up, prickles strange nostalgic affections for characters that have long since dropped off anyone's internal radar. I'm not talking about the Ninja Turtles themselves or their feature pals like Splinter, April or Casey Jones. Rather it's your Irmas or your Punk Frogs or even your Vernon fucking Fenwicks. Characters created specifically for the 1987 children's TV series that have enjoyed no purchase or presence on pretty much anything Turtle-flavoured that has followed. These spectres appear throughout Tribute Games' pixelated fairyland, instantly transporting unsuspecting credit depositors back several decades to their local video shops, browsing the shelves to see if they have any tapes to rent that don't revolve around those dreadful Pizza Monsters.  

Remarkable in the sense that developers Witch Beam have taken an incredibly mundane (even frustrating) daily task, in this case de-cluttering, and managed to wring out an experience that is acutely heart-breaking. Yeah, Unpacking is little more than a series of screens and objects to organise, but the passage of time these scene shifts imply is alarming in terms of how quickly they are speeding through a young person's life. Box rooms in family homes give way to student accommodation then tentative steps towards co-habitation. Totems and trinkets stick around for a few successive levels then drift away, lost to the void invoked by regular transit. You feel like you're wishing someone's life away. 

Even when played on a clapped-out old iOS phone, Vampire Survivors' merits are completely obvious. Players take control of a tiny collection of pixels, striding about a flat field while inundated with increasingly macabre enemies. Upgrades come thick and fast: sometimes crucial, equally as often they are useless. Before long the whole of playing area is alive and seething with bubbling necromantic threat; an entire fantasy bestiary tracking in on your kiting, vulnerable little figure. Luca Galante's self-published marvel is as compulsive as games get. 

A vertical scrolling shooter built around the idea of a replenishing smart bomb. Typically, in games of this type, screen clearing power-ups are strictly rationed out, usually only available to players when they've just pumped another coin into the greedy housing cab. Z-Warp traps players inside the intestinal tract of some enormous cosmic beast, battling bosses named for gastro-oesophageal disorders and collecting spinning, toxic waste coloured skulls. The aforementioned explosive is on a timer, counting up as the player dodges distress; nervy deployments will inch out an immediate path through the onslaught but a fully charged detonation will clear a significant portion of the screen.