Reviews

Reviews of the games I play, aiming to quickly encapsulate the game’s essence and quirks. Most games have an audience; my goal is for the review to make it clear to you whether you are part of a game’s audience (whether or not I am).

Capsule Review: Super Stardust Ultra

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A twin-stick shooter played on the surface of a sphere. The core gameplay is Asteroids-like with large rocks that break down into smaller ones and occasional enemies, but with a few sources of added variety.

This is a cleaned-up port of the PS3 version plus its DLC packs, with some extra streaming-friendly features and new DLC on top. Everything in the other review applies here too. This is the new definitive version - if you haven’t tried Stardust, this is the best one to start with. If you’re sick of it, this won’t change your mind.

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Capsule Review: Super Stardust Delta

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A twin-stick shooter played on the surface of a sphere. The core gameplay is Asteroids-like with large rocks that break down into smaller ones and occasional enemies, but with a few sources of added variety.

This game takes the same great formula as its predecessor, but makes some tweaks. Most notably, there are now only two weapon and asteroid types, with the least interesting one of the original three being dropped. The core gameplay - with the frustration-free spherical arena and the large competence zone conferred by the panic buttons - is just as much of a blast as ever. While there are a ton of game modes, since the game is a Vita launch title a lot of new gameplay and features rely on the Vita’s gimmicks (touch screen, rear touch panel, gyroscope) in ways that don’t always work well. As a result, there’s less here for the returning player, but it’s still portable twin-stick Stardust and that’s a good thing.

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Capsule Review: Super Stardust HD

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A twin-stick shooter played on the surface of a sphere (and an enhanced remake of Super Stardust on the Amiga). The core gameplay is Asteroids-like with large rocks that break down into smaller ones and occasional enemies, but with a few sources of added variety.

There are three different weapons to switch between for different playstyles - a spread shot, a focused long-range shot, and a whip-like beam. The behavior of different enemy types (including the periodic boss fight) present varied challenges to respond to, and each asteroid and enemy type is vulnerable to a specific weapon. Enemies and asteroids will occasionally drop pickups that include weapon upgrades, bombs, single-use shields, extra lives, or simple point bonuses.

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Capsule Review: Asteroids

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A space shooter game that puts the player in control of a small ship in an asteroid field. The player can turn the ship clockwise or counterclockwise, fire engines to accelerate forward, or shoot a projectile weapon. The ship broadly follows Newtonian physics - it has inertia and will keep moving in a direction after the player cuts the engines unless they rotate and accelerate in the opposite direction. Additionally, the ship’s own velocity is added to that of the shots it fires.

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Capsule Review: Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed

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A mobile adaptation of the long-running Dynasty Warriors series based on the setting, events, and cast of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The sprawling and dynamic Musou gameplay for which the franchise is famous has been scaled down and streamlined to work on mobile - levels are much shorter and simpler and generally have you taking a linear path to fight through waves of mooks until a boss appears. Controls are similarly streamlined - rather than tasking you with alternating strong and weak attacks to execute various combos, you just hold down an attack button and your selected character will take care of that for you. There are also separate buttons for special attacks on cooldowns. You can switch between characters at any time, and this is encouraged by an elemental rock-paper-scissors system where playable characters and non-mook enemies all have an assigned element.

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Capsule Review: Into

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Updated December 17, 2025: The below review is based on a wildly incorrect reading of the source material, which is clearly about coming out as transgender. I guess I just didn’t have those concepts in mind in 2017. I am embarrassed by this review but have chosen to leave it up as an example of how this kind of misunderstanding can happen and a reminder to myself to do better.

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Capsule Review: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

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An open-world action adventure with an emphasis on stealth. It’s set in the world of The Lord of the Rings, taking place before The Fellowship of the Ring and after The Hobbit. The player takes the role of Talion, a ranger stationed at the Black Gate of Mordor. His family is killed by Sauron’s troops and he teams up with an elven wraith to seek revenge.

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Capsule Review: Mister Mosquito

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A stealth/flight game where you play as a mosquito. Your goal is to stockpile blood from a typical Japanese family without being noticed and swatted. Each stage features a member of the family as they go about their day - the daughter as she relaxes in her room, the mother as she makes dinner, the father as he tends to his flowers, and so on. Each stage also has a number of hidden collectibles and often interactable elements - for example, you can fly into the power button on the daughter’s radio to turn it on, which will cause her to get up and turn it off. This is sometimes necessary to expose your target’s suck points - for some reason, you can only extract blood from specific designated points on your target’s body. Each target also has designated “relax” points you can crash into to calm them down if they’ve seen you and started attacking.

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Capsule Review: Creatures Such as We

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A ChoiceScript game set in a near future in which you play as a tour guide on the moon. Your character’s job is lonely and dull and so they pass the time with video games, their favorite being a sci-fi action game with zombies and ghosts. Then your next tour group turns out to be the designers of that game on a work offsite. This setup is used to provide a varied cast of characters you can choose to romance, but more importantly serves as a backdrop for rich coversations about game design, philosophy of art in general, life and death, love and isolation, and more.

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Capsule Review: The Temple of No

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A short comedic Twine game that ostensibly has you play as an explorer seeking the eponymous temple but mostly just makes fun of Twine as a platform. Not in an affectionate or even fair way, but in a way that makes the creators seem willfully ignorant and uncreative. It’s a Twine game for people who don’t like Twine games and have no desire to broaden their horizons but would rather mock that which they do not understand.

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