Recent reviews by Red Scare

if i ever make anything even 1% as beautiful and meaningful as this, i will die satisfied.

I've been waiting for a game like this for years. This is for the FightCade freaks. The Capcom obsessed. If you're new to fighting games, you'll be in for a shock. This is a collection of misfit games for eccentric people and you should build fundamentals elsewhere. This is for the advanced player.

I'm mainly focusing on Darkstalkers in this review because it's what I am most familiar with.

The Darkstalkers games were foundational for the "anime" subgenre of fighters, and make up the majority of games in this collection. Each arcade release in the series is present in this collection. They're rough. They're unbalanced. They're experimental. I love them so, so much. The amount of soul they contain is unmatched by any fighter that Capcom has made before or since. But they are best experienced with the context of being familiar with 90s Street Fighter games and similar titles, because they turn the ideas from those games on their head, and were some of the first to do so. As Street Fighter II ventured into the unknown territory of making games with competitive balance in mind, Darkstalkers ventured into the unknown territory by making more abstract, non-human characters with unique powers and movement options fit into a similar competitive context.

Each game adds more and more, and makes the combat more complicated, adding more mechanics, making the game faster, adding more counterplay to each strategy you might come across, until it reaches a crescendo with Vampire Savior, a game that has still seen competitive play at fighting game majors and supermajors to this day. This game is so fast, with so much to understand, demanding so much of the player, it overwhelms with adrenaline. This is the game most people competitively play on ranked. Rushdown is everything in this game, but defensive options are powerful enough for a good player to combat it. Matches (not rounds) often end in less than a minute. Top 8s at major tournaments for Savior can be as short as a Grand Finals bracket for another game. The community is also very inviting and dedicated to helping new players build the skills to compete. This game sells the whole collection on it's back, in my opinion.

This collection also contains the unfortunate mistakes that led to the downfall of the franchise. Vampire Savior 2 and Vampire Hunter 2 are concurrently released versions of the same game with different rosters. They didn't have the secret sauce the original Savior had, were seen as inferior by most arcadegoers at the time, and competed with each other. The colossal failure of these two games killed the franchise (they're fun to mess around with, though! I main Pyron in these games). The spirit of the gameplay of Darkstalkers lives on in the Versus Series (Marvel vs Capcom, Capcom vs SNK, Tatsunoko vs Capcom), as well as some of their characters, but there hasn't been a new game outside of rereleases for Darkstalkers since, and the last rerelease for Darkstalkers was on PS3/360.

Speaking of rereleases, how is the performance of the collection itself? Not bad. The presentation is phenomenal, I love the new music and aesthetics of the menus. The online matchmaking is the best part: the netcode is competent, you can select multiple games to be in queue for at once, and the ranking system seems fine. The emulation can have some glitches, however. Thankfully nothing impacting gameplay so far, just occasional audio issues that end up fixing themselves by the end of a match. Nowhere near as bad as the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection, but I still hope they patch the few problems. The achievements and fighter awards seem like nice long-term goals for completionists, and the museum and soundtracks are very nice and contain tons of cool stuff for nerds like me. I'm enjoying it a lot so far.

Puzzle Fighter, Gem Fighter, Cyberbots, and Red Earth are all also working without problems, and are a lot of fun as well. Most of these games are acquired tastes that are either parodies of other franchises (in the best possible way) or highly unorthodox experiments in what /makes/ a fighting game... or both, depending on how you look at it! I haven't played much of these games, but I know that they all have their own dedicated fanbases that have been chomping at the bit for a collection like this to finally be able to play with friends and support their favorites.

The true odd one out in the collection of odd ones out is Hyper Street Fighter II. It's the final arcade release for Street Fighter II, and it lets you play as any character from any revision of the game from World Warrior to Super Turbo. It's wacky and broken, but doesn't feel as weird as the other stuff. Also, online is filled with ST players who just wanna use this game as a vehicle to play ST. It's funny to mess around with, but definitely not the main draw.

Overall this game is worth buying and is very enjoyable. If you're not really into fighting games, maybe wait for a sale. If you are the type who would fall in love with this game, chances are you've already bought it. But if you're on the fence, just do it!
Darkstalkers 4 would be cool to release someday, Capcom. Just an idea haha

no ♥♥♥♥ but we out here smokin ash blossoms

Played this a ton on 3DS growing up and practically memorized all of it. This is the idyllic example of a very short game with very high replay value. It's comforting for me to just sit down and play through it all over again in about half an hour or so, at this point I'm probably really disconnected from the experience of the original playthrough.

There isn't a single part of the game that drags or feels obnoxious to go through again to me aside from a couple of the optional trinkets. Every stage in this game is super creative and it has a banger soundtrack. Most of the time it's a lot less about having extreme precision and more about executing the trick/strategy to the puzzle the level is presenting to you correctly, and figuring out that strategy in the first place. Each stage has a new mechanic that it throws at you to keep your on your toes, but none of them wear out their welcome. You might get tilted your first couple of playthroughs or when trying to go for optional content, but it's well worth it. There's no excuse to not have this game in 2021.

This is THE old-school PopCap game, and in my opinion it's the best game the company ever put out. Despite the appearance of it just being a standard PopCap puzzle game, the frenetic and stressful gameplay gives Zuma Deluxe a hook that'll make you want to come back for more, even years later. Compared to their other work, it shocks me how little this game is discussed online. I used to play it all the time as a kid from a CD before I eventually purchased it on Steam, and coming back to it reveals that despite some compatibility and scaling issues (more on those later), the core gameplay hasn't aged a day.

It feels like a Japanese arcade-puzzle game at it's core, and that's because, well, it is one. Zuma Deluxe is infamously derivative of Puzz Loop, an arcade game from the 90s that has the same basic concept and gameplay. The developers even admitted in interviews that they got the idea for Zuma by playing Puzz Loop in MAME. The emphasis on chaining, scoring, and the lives system, things that weren't given immediate gameplay relevance in other games by PopCap (you NEED to hit a certain score threshold in a level to be able to end it, more on this later) can all be traced back to the game's arcade roots, as well as the very high difficulty of later stages. It's almost an unfair comparison to make, but it absolutely puts Puzz Loop to shame. Zuma Deluxe feels like it hit the sweet spot of gameplay improvements that turned Puzz Loop into the intense, fast-paced, challenging game that it needed to be, without going into gimmick territory and turning into Zuma's Revenge. Whether it's ethical to essentially remake someone else's game and comparatively make a killing from it, even if it is vastly improved, is up to you.

The real depth of Zuma Deluxe comes from the fact that just trying to power through and go for easy clears isn't enough to survive later on when the game starts throwing in new colors to deal with. You need to get familiar with and take advantage of the opportunities for bonus points and powerups the game gives you in order to make it out alive, which gives a much greater feeling of accomplishment when completing the stage than other PC puzzle games where developing that kind of intentionality isn't so important. Setting up chains, gap bonuses, and gaps in specific areas to be able to snag coins when they show up is absolutely critical to hitting that score threshold where the chorus yells "ZUMA!" and stops spawning new spheres to clear. Unlike other games by PopCap, you don't have the luxury of playing at your own pace, and it can be very nerve-wracking the last few seconds where you realize that you've found yourself in an impossible position, where nothing you do can save you from losing a life.

The fact that this is almost pulled right from a game center can be a turn-off for some people, though. There's basically no story or characters to speak of here, and the fact that you need to play through almost every level four times during the arcade mode means that you'll get real familiar with every level in this game whether you like every one of those levels or not. Each time it loops, you either get a new color (for visits 2 and 3) or the speed at which the balls move increases (visit 4). You also get a new bonus level for each stage, but having to play through 5 or 6 levels of repeating content to see the next one makes the arcade mode of this game feel way longer than it needs to be. Having to play Codex of Mixtec for the 4th time in a single sitting might have been last push someone needed before they finally snapped. It seems like it would have been wise to make these different runs individual difficulty modes instead, but hindsight is 20/20. What also might have benefited from hindsight is the game's general aesthetic. I'm very nostalgic for it, but going into the future I doubt people will find it very tasteful. When I think about it too hard, it almost reminds me of the racist video slots that old people waste thousands on in casinos.

Going back to the topic of compatibility, this game came out in 2003, and released on Steam in 2006. It's not really designed to adapt to more modern computers, and while you could get lucky and not have to look up any issue or guide to have a good time, you might need to dig around the support forum or the guides on Steam, or do some Googling to get everything working 100% properly. It shouldn't be a huge challenge, but you should be aware of this before purchasing the game. Fortunately, this also means that the system requirements are some of the lowest on the platform.

Despite its flaws, this game for $5 is a really good deal. If they patched it up a bit and made it a better experience to play on modern computers, it might even be worth $15. It's a diamond in the rough, and for the price, it'll be worth it even if it doesn't hook you, and you just play it for a few hours before putting it down.

turning on the "positive affirmations" in zen mode publicly sent me down a dark mental health spiral once that ended in tears

can't imagine life without it. at 4 bucks it's a steal.

this is the best ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ i've ever played

The closest you'll get to an arcade-style VSRG on Steam, well worth the money on sale.

I usually hate FPS games, and shooters in general. I thought I couldn't enjoy any game in this genre aside from messing with DOOM WADs. Then I took the Halopill.