Articles

Shin Maou Golvellius – A Valley of Quality

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videolamer’s Chris sent me a link to a sale on EGG Console games the other day. For well-adjusted people who don’t know what I’m talking about, the EGG Console is a line of old Japanese computer games rereleased for modern consoles. So like Hamster’s Arcade Archives line but for Japan only games that generally require actual reading (in Japanese) as the collection is of computer stuff. I had looked at the EGG titles years ago when it first surfaced in North America and was composed mostly of Hydlide and Xanadu but then lost track of the releases. Luckily for me, Chris knows what sort of garbage I’m into and he noticed Golvellius on the list of games on sale. I immediately bought it and then spent an hour looking into the other EGG Console games, even the ones not on sale because I am fiscally irresponsible.

The Japanese version of Miracle Warriors, my beloved mediocre Master System RPG, was apparently released on the ol’ EGG in late 2025. →  Reading more, assemble!

Wednesdays with Andrew – Gunbird and Saturn Bomberman

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA | Sega CD Gaiden

Last time we covered a slew of Sega CD games that I originally presented to victim Andrew maybe a year ago. It was a pleasant detour we all thoroughly enjoyed. But now it is time to get back on track with the original intent of the project – familiarize Andrew with Saturn games before it is too late. For him, not me. I don’t plan on dying.

Gunbird may or may not be hellish

We briefly revisited Galactic Attack before playing Gunbird. Everyone had more fun with the latter as I sat there smiling politely but slowly shitting my pants in veiled anger. See, I’ve never really liked the bullet hell subgenre of shmups. My experience consists of possibly only Castle Shikigami 2, but that seemed sufficient to make a blanket judgement. (That game does have a solid plot, though.) →  All your posts are belong to us.

videolamer ignoble

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Writers and people who write despite never being able to generate income with their meager abilities all know that for every published great American novel or 200 word blog post, about ten times as much never sees the light of day.  The world may never see a finished version of Kafka’s The Castle or whatever Camus was writing when Gunpei Yokoi ran him down with his car, but now the unpublished works of the videolamer staff are archived in a place accessible to all.

We present to you a trove of our lesser writings, things we were not proud enough to post here on this main website. We present to you videolamer-ignoble. When you have read everything on videolamer.com and even endured the material from the 00s but still have hours of time to fill at work, try this exciting new repository of mediocre content. It may be less entertaining, not as well written, and overall fairly rote but it will still help pass the time. →  One must imagine video games happy.

Immobile games – Mobile games that play like console games

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I have less time sitting at a desk (or couch) at home than I used to. I have a device that is more powerful than ever in my pocket, and I’ve found myself turning to that device for entertainment from time to time.

When I’m not entertained by doomscrolling or getting fed a deluge of AI-authored content (or content I’d prefer to think was authored by AI), I’ve been trying to find games that don’t addict me with pretend gambling, or for that matter real gambling. I’ve also been put off by free games with built-in advertisements. While it took a while, I have succeeded in the last year or so in playing mobile games that do not have these common mobile-game features. Here is a brief list of them for your enjoyment, because lists are the foundational content of the internet.

Kyen & Bylina: Retro PC-styled RPGs with a touch interface
These are inspired by an older mobile game series called Gurk, which is no longer available without side-loading because of OS version limitations. →  Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatarticle

Thinking about the Genesis library: Part I

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The Genesis of the Idea

I’ve been sitting with an unfinished version of this post for half a year. Making up incorrect theories about the Master System is fun because few people actually care enough to be mad at me, but the Genesis is the big leagues. I’ve settled on splitting the ideas I have about the Genesis library into two main parts, one about their first party output and one about third party support. This gets a little muddled because I cover internally developed, developed by a company Sega owns, and at times third party games published by Sega in this first post that’s supposed to be on first party efforts, but I try to clarify what is being discussed.

Similarly to the thesis of my Master System writeup, Sega did the majority of work supporting the Genesis with games – Sega developed 80 titles internally for the Genesis, while Nintendo internally developed 24 SNES games. This was done both by direct development but also a large number of publishing deals. →  The King of Articles 2002: Unlimited Match

Wednesdays with Andrew Gaiden – Sega CD

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA

Long before Andrew came to me, tears in his eyes, confessing his immense regret for not buying and exclusively playing the Saturn – which resulted in the world famous Wednesday’s with Andrew series (everyone on Neptune has read it) – we spent significant time (upwards of 3 hours) playing Sega CD games. Or more like he would come over and have an adult conversation with my wife while I would force the controller into his hands and demand he play whatever new disc I had just popped in. Whatever the case, we played a fair number of Sega CD games and even enjoyed some of them even if I deliberately focused on inflicting pain with most of my choices – as any good friend would. What follows is the chronicling of our time spent playing together, or at least some random observations and jokes. →  Romance of the Three Articles IV: Post of Fire

My growing collection of game collections

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My friend Shota and I were arguing the other day about what is to be done. He took what I would describe as a mild and possibly self-defeating attitude regarding ideology and he accused me of an all or nothing approach that was ultimately more likely to paralyze than inspire. I see value in clearly defining the mountain we are moving towards regardless of if we ever reach it. It provides direction and can keep us from chasing waterfalls, or even making phony calls. Our conversation was vague enough to be applicable to the desire of achieving world socialism or the viewing of every episode of Double Dare. Of course both of us are much more mired in the academic than actual praxis because we generally desire to be seated on couches rather than interacting with strangers.

Shota’s incremental position may seem politically defensible to cowards unwilling to have grandiose, unprovable ideologies that implode the moment they meet reality but it has been my experience that the absence of a grand vision hampers coherent video game collecting. →  Read Band 2

How many games does it have?

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In the olden days, the number of games on a system was an important consideration for prospective customers. Magazines would track this information and ads would sometimes mention numbers. Children on the street wouldn’t stop telling you how many games their console had. There was a time when the early 16 bit (and 8 bit masquerading as 16) consoles came out and only tens of games were available. This was partly the result of the 8 to 16 bit console changeover being the first generational shift in the modern game system era as we know it. The Atari 2600 to NES transition was atypical in that, at least in the US, the console game market was in ruins. Plus, as opposed to Atari during the market’s adoption of Nintendo, the NES was still making companies a bunch of money – Sega and NEC were less proven, especially in Japan and the states respectively.

Today, it’s understood that a new system may launch with only 10 or 20 or however many games but more will be coming soon, so competitors rarely boast of the number of titles available on their platform. →  Go ahead, read my day.

A crisis of middling proportions

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There are many kinds of crises. A crisis can be a conflict between a god and a religion like some Jehovah’s Witness guy wrote about that one time, it can be a moral crisis like the characters in the Dostoyevsky books, or it can be a misspelled FPS people use as a benchmark for graphical power. Crises can be humanitarian, financial, or oil-based. Some say fascism is capitalism in crisis. I say fascism is not a useful term and we should develop new language for new things, which is why I will call the next world war a warld wor.

In my case, the crisis may be one of a center of longevity, or for you people who insist on reusing words, a midlife crisis. These things can be hard to detect, however. Resurrecting this website may be the most obvious sign of a midlife crisis to those who know I first started it when I was 23, which was now 20 years ago. →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.

Almost Famous – Dice, Scavengers, and Bastards

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The idea that publishers and platform-holders determine the games the vast majority of people are aware of through marketing, promotion, and their ensuing hype is appealing to a critic of consumerism such as myself. What appears to be freedom of choice is actually a heavily curated set of options presented by million and billion dollar corporations; our choice is largely an illusion. But at the back of my mind, I worry that this may be overly simplistic and the argument that quality games will be found by an audience seems compelling. And then I find a game like Circadian Dice, which reinforces the initial premise – an awesome, smartly designed game that never found the large audience it deserves.

This is the first post in a series on unpopular indies and will be driven by the pursuit of discovering more Circadian Dices – more games that should be much bigger than they are. Perhaps it will be a fruitless endeavor, maybe we will discover almost all worthwhile games are surfaced and I managed to find a needle in a hay stack, or we will learn production values are tied to game quality so intrinsically that it’s almost impossible for a small, niche game to be amazing when it looks bad and controls terribly. →  You’re tearing me apart lamers!