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contra 4, detective conan: the fourteenth target and splitgate 1&2 so a while back during a vacation to Paris i was watching the Geoff Keighly extravaganza, summer games fest, from a particularly nice hotel. place had a killer view but the show itself was not so nice. it was full of duds and despite a few highlights like resi 9, it was very stuck in my mind as a disappointing show overall because of the worst of it that stuck out so much more: shitty ai gen games, so much atomic heart garbo and the biggest bomb of the night, a guy walking on in a joke MAGA hat to advertise a shitty battle royale GAAS game. i wasn't the only one who thought this either since the game was immediately trashed by anyone with sense online for what was easily one of the dumbest stunts you could pull, paying tens of thousands of dollars to get on stage and kill your game before it even has a chance to launch. seeing this, you could tell how things were going to go. this game was not long for the world and neither was its predecessor. if you've played as many dying GAAs games as i have you can see the winds change on a dime. you get really good at predicting them, and predict them i did, as after i finished playing both, almost a week after granted, the studio announced that the first game was shutting down and the second game was being "Unlaunched", whatever that means. sometimes it kind of sucks being right, because while the advertised game, splitgate 2, is cynical trend chasing garbage, that first game is shockingly solid and a game i might even find myself missing when it's gone. 　the first game is pretty unassuming, it has a boring art style and very little to really set itself apart beyond its central gimmick and its the kind of game that's very easy to brush off—i certainly did, but it's actually shockingly really fun and well worth checking out before it goes and dies forever. the game’s whole thing is that it's halo/unreal but with a portal gimmick, like from the hit game i don't like, portal, though somehow even uglier and more boring looking than your usual valve game (but not by much). where this differs from valve’s catalogue though is that the game underneath it is actually good! the game has a really nice speed to it. it's fast and the guns are all really fun to use. i love the melee weapon and the shotgun especially, but i could pick up most guns and do well with them; though it is a pretty standard assortment of guns for the most part and a lot of them just feel like halo weapons and not even any of the fun whackier ones that halo and especially UT had. you won't find anything as cool as the flak canon here, but it all works. it's fun and pretty different from a lot of what is on the market right now. even the portal gimmick is surprisingly fun, though it didn't get as much use as i would have assumed. it's just another part of your character’s toolkit rather than being the core mechanic, which i like. the levels and art style aren't as good though. there were some fun levels like a big sky garden and a nice abandoned aquarium, but most of the maps here just did not stick in my memory, other than a very bland dam map that had some neat vertical level design that i had a lot of fun with and another forest map that felt really fun to explore, though i don't remember any specifics of it beyond that. it had a super dark green colour pallet. i don't have a lot to say about it beyond this, it was just a really solid and really fun shooter and it felt pretty active when i played it, though i do think i was playing with bots since i wasn't immediately demolished every match i joined. as a bot-match fan this suited me perfectly. give it a chance if you can before it leaves. you might find yourself enjoying it. (last second update! the developers actually changed the game last minuite to be Peer to peer rather than relying on a server, so it should continue to work in future!) so splitgate 2 takes this very solid foundation and kind of doesn't follow it. instead of being a cool unreal tournament arena shooter, something deliberately old school, it becomes a very played-out battle royale with a few gimmicks, its map style and the portals and that's really it. for a game that aspires to "make FPS great again," it seems very content to just be exactly the same as every other FPS currently out there, just with a blander style and the knowledge that things could and were better just one game ago. now to its credit, there is still an arena mode, albiet one with worse and less maps, some new weapons that i did admittedly like and far dumber bots. it feels much less fun overall and it's very half-baked since it's clearly not the focus. it also feels a lot less movement-heavy unlike the first, and it feels too modern for the kind of game it wants to pretend to be for this mode. it just feels like infinite warfare rather than feeling like splitgate 1. the battle royale mode is the main focus of the game, well, the main focus beyond the overpriced almost hundred dollar microtransactions, and it's very there. it's as bland as a battle royale gets. it's a standard BR mode with marginally more interesting weapons and a portal gimmick that you will almost never use because the levels just don't have many places to even place them. Sure, the map gimmick is a little cool, with how its a big map split by portals into a few biomes like a desert and snow level and a few others, but it's really just a minor visual thing and the maps don't have much in the way of gameplay or design differentiators to feel all that different. it's just not enough to save it from being as bland as it is. contra 4 is a pretty interesting thing to look back on. it's a retro revival that's old enough to already effectively be retro, which is crazy to think about. it was wayforeward’s attempt to bring the series back in a big way and part of a small wave of contra revivals from this era along with hard corps a few years later before the series went dormant until the modern day with its collections and rogue corps (which i will play and may very well end up being my favourite in the series). it's a very solid game, though, with the best 3D segments in the 2D games, some fantastic levels, a killer aesthetic and a pretty good OST, but it's one that gets too difficult for me too fast and it pulls some stunts with its difficulty that may very well ruin the game for some. the game actually uses the DS in a really cool way that i think does make it stand out beyond its attempts to rekindle nostalgia. it actually plays over both screens and i think it looks really cool in doing so. usually you'll have your guy on the bottom screen and be doing your usual contra thing but then you'll hit a point where you need to go vertical and here you'll actually ascend to the top screen, whether via the game’s grapple hook mechanic or by platforming, and from there you'll play as usual on that screen. you can even shoot from the bottom and have the bullet fly up top. the game uses it to its fullest and there are some really cool boss fights that take advantage of it, like a very memorable helicopter fight, though it's not perfect since as you transition between screens it can be hard to judge bullets and positioning, which can make the game a lot more difficult than it has to be in some of those platforming segments—the waterfall one especially. the game just plays like a normal contra game otherwise, though. you have a few different playable characters but I'm not sure any really change the gameplay, and you have a bunch of cool weapons you can find, but i always defaulted to the spreader and the machinegun, both of which i tried to keep upgraded. you can upgrade them by finding duplicates of their icons, which is good, though it does end up with the non-upgraded versions feeling too underpowered. it feels like the upgraded versions were what the game assumed you would have by default, which given the game’s difficulty is something that you probably won't have by the time you reach a boss. there's also a grappling hook which the game makes good use of with he screen gimmick, though i found it a little finnicky to use, and with the chaos of the gameplay just ended up usually getting me killed rather than aiding me. it also had the 3D stages and these are by far the highlight of the game for me. they're really fun and a lot more fair in difficulty compared to the normal stages. they're not the most interesting to look at since they're all just grey bases, but they're so fun. i love how the depth makes shooting harder and how it really makes you be precise with aim and i just find the jumping and dodging more fun here. how it plays is very reminiscent of wild guns if you've ever played that. I'd love a full game in this style honestly. they're always the highlight in any game for me and the level set here for them is the best in the whole series. one cool thing though is the sheer amount of unlockables here, it's kind of crazy, you have tons of art, comic covers and even whole games with contra and super C both being unlockable for people with enough skill, skill far beyond what i could manage. the game itself isn't super long though, with skill its maybe an hour long, but for most people it'll likely take you a few runs, especially with that absurd difficulty. the game has an easy mode but it might as well not, since you can't actually beat the game using it and anything above that easy mode is so difficult as to just not be fun i think, even with save states. it really hurts the game since you don't have infinite continues or infinite lives, not even infinite checkpoints, i don't think I'd have beaten this game without cheating if I'm being honest, for some people this will be a total selling point but or me it's a real game ruiner and it stops me from really loving the game. the game does at least look super pretty, with the super high detailed spritework style that wayforward kills it with. the levels look amazing and some of the bosses here are really detailed, varied too, with tons of different kinds of levels that usually do sadly just call back to previous contra games, but seeing places like the waterfalls, the cliffs from contra, a huge base that feels like it was in a previous game but I'm not totally sure, the city from super c, though i don't remember the sky bridge or water jet levels from previous games and those were real highlights, the former even having the games best boss fight where you have to scale a rocket as it takes off and shoot out turrets! the OST by jake kaufman is *amazing* and probably the game’s overall highlight for me, the stage 1 theme, the remix of the contra 1 stage 1 you get for playing the first stage on hard, the waterfall theme, the stage 3 base theme, the ocean stage, the factory stage (which sounds straight out of house of the dead 3) and the end credits theme are the standouts, it's not one of wayforewards best OST's but it's really solid. that's about all i have to say about it. Overall it's pretty solid but too difficult to be something i can really say i loved. i'd say i liked it more than contra 1 but not as much as super C or the gameboy game, so make of that what you will. i do reccomend it for people into super hard games or just this kind of metal slug'y action game. it's one of the better ones of its era for sure.the factory stage (which sounds straight out of house of the dead 3) and the end credits theme are the standouts, it's not one of wayforewards best OST's but it's really solid. that's about all i have to say about it. Overall it's pretty solid but too difficult to be something i can really say i loved. i'd say i liked it more than contra 1 but not as much as super C or the gameboy game, so make of that what you will. i do reccomend it for people into super hard games or just this kind of metal slug'y action game. it's one of the better ones of its era for sure. i also watched the second detective conan movie recently and it's somehow even better than the first. it might be even better than the more recent one i saw (million dollar pentagram), i mean wow! the first was already a ton of fun. it had some great developments with Shinichi and Ran that i loved. it had a fun story that was pretty unique for the show and took advantage of the movie format well, and also thank god it wasn't a murder case for once. Plus, it had some fantastic backgrounds and animation on top of being one of the few really great detective boys stories. This, though... this manages to take everything that first movie did well (bar the detective boys stuff who are absent here and i will not complain about that) and does it even better. this might be one of my new favourite movies and it's a shoe-in for the best of the three conan movies I've seen so far, a real feat considering how good movie 27 is. one of the reasons it's so good is because it's an expansion of one of the best kind of conan episodes, a mouri centric one. these always end up being some of the show's best episodes since mouri is probably the best member of the main cast and any time he gets a chance to really shine and show that he's more than a joke always ends up being a highlight of the whole show. he really gets to do that here since the killer this time around is aware of his past and taunting him, going after those he cares about and sending cryptic messages to lead him along and leading people into traps. the characters are fun, i loved the ojousama character and the critic character especially. mouri is as good as ever and this movie has some of the best developments for both him and ran in the entire show's runtime (though i don't really like how much the movie damsels ran when we know by this point she's easily the strongest member of the main cast, but i like the development so much that it's easily forgivable). conan isn't the focus here and that's really refreshing, though he gets his time to shine including what might actually be the best moment in the whole series right near the end of the movie where conan is about ready to kill a guy. that whole sequence had me in tears. the setting is cool too. a lot of the movie takes place in a newly built aquatic theme park place, very reminiscent of something like ever17 and it's a real sight. it has a great theme to it too. the OST in general here is amazing and beyond even the already high standards conan usually has for its music, like seriously, some of the ambient stuff here is amazing and managed to make its way to my playlists in an instant. i love the use of the vocal conan theme too! comes in at just the best time. did i mention how good the animation and visuals are? they might even be at their best here for the movie because of how good the locations can be—so many good seaside and city shots and the underwater parts of the movie look amazing, including a really cool sequence involving escaping a rising flood under the sea. it's really rad. the city shots, too! there's a really good one of beika station (also in that scene is a cool looking arcade fortune telling machine, i loved how that looked), plus there's an amazing set piece near the end involving a lot of destruction that's really fun to watch; the animators killed it. the only real iffy part to me was the actual revelation. it's signposted well enough and it makes sense but it just feels super anti-climactic. i wasn't as big a fan of it, though the real last chunk of the movie is still good regardless. it won't ruin it for you. the last thing i'd like to give credit to is, funnily enough, the credits. it continues the tradition of having the movie’s end being live action footage of the places that inspired the movie and i just love that—lots of footage of seaside area's while the movies vocal theme plays. i think it's a nice touch that shows the care put into production—it's really charming! much like the rest of the movie, sure you might not get much out of it if you aren't a conan fan but, like, well, why wouldn't you be? go and watch the show like yesterday, get on that.