The Daydreamcast spin jumps back into the action, and it’s all about the devil in the details this week. We touch on throwback games, particularly action side-scrollers, old and new, and decide they are only critisable in the nitty-gritty, in the quality of the tried-and-tested individual components. While Pavlos is too busy recounting his time working for The Man, Brogan serves up fresh-from-the-oven impressions of Cyber Shadow, a new Ninja Gaiden-like published by Yacht Club Games, and pontificates on how it fares against previous efforts in the space, namely The Messenger from two years ago. For our game of the week, we discuss an inconspicuous Strider knock-off, Run Saber, only to put it back into the very bottom shelf it came out of. Indeed, this curious release barely passes the bar of ‘fine’, choosing to settle instead on ‘severely lacking in all areas’, and we break down the many ways it falls short. As such, Run Saber can be regarded as a useful critical exercise and one that exemplifies our core thesis of the week: value can be judged from practice, appearances can be deceptive, all are not hunters that blow the horn, fair face may hide a foul heart, and an online thesaurus is a heck of a thing.
Timestamps:
Whatcha Playing
00:00 Splatoon 2 (2017)
12:43 Modern throwback games: Cyber Shadow (2021), The Messenger (2018) et al.
30:29 Deep Rock Galactic (2020)
Featured Game
44:22 Run Saber