Samurai Deeper Kyo (Playstation)

 

 Like TV Animation X and Inu-Yasha, this is yet another fighting game released late in the Playstation's life, and based on a then-current anime. Unlike those other two, I've never seen the anime Samurai Deeper Kyo, and I know pretty much nothing about it, except that there's videogame tie-ins on Playstation and Game Boy Advance. If you wanted to be glib and more than a little unfair, you could call this one "a poor man's Last Blade 2". Unfair both because most games pale in comparison to Last Blade 2, and because Samurai Deeper Kyo's not a bad game at all.

 

Another thing it has in common with the Inu-Yasha game is that the controls and special move inputs are a lot simpler than those seen in "proper" fighting games. In fact, there are two control methods, one with single button specials and a truncated movelist in general, plus one that's a little more complex ( but not by much). There's also an assist system, which under default settings, triggers automatically every time your assist meter fills up, which makes things mildly chaotic in a fun way. Also, I don't know the plot explanation for this, but in story mode, a lot of the time, each opponent you beat will be your assist character for the next fight. Is this just the old shonen "defeat equals friendship" trope manifest in videogame form?

 

Other than the basics of the game itself, there's some other points of interest I'd like to address. First, one of the playable characters is a blonde girl with a handgun, who, through her end poses and other flavour animations, seems like she's meant to at least partially be a joke character. But, she's also the only one who brought a gun to a swordfight, and as you'd expect, she's a very effective fighter, with a moveset almost totally made up of projectile attacks. Another character has a spider theme, and can send spiders to attack her opponents, as well as summoning webs. She can even use webs to entangle her opponent's assist meter, though I only did this once and never figured out how to replicate it.

 

Something else that really stands out is the backgrounds. All of them really well-drawn pixel art backdrops, with cherry blossom trees, moonlit nights, soft rain, sunsets, and more. Unfortunately, this is an area that really does draw comparisons to the Last Blade games, since they're so thematically similar. Of course, in such a comparison, Samurai Deeper Kyo falls short: its backgrounds are very sparsely animated, when they're animated at all, and oddly, there's no people or animals in any of them. It gives that a strange, empty feeling. It's only a very minor complaint, but it is something that really stood out to me as I played.

 

Samurai Deeper Kyo isn't anything particularly life-changing or roundbreaking, but it's a decent enough game, and in my experience, you can never have too many decent enough fighting games. It's also one of those games that I feel like would've been a hit among my friends, if we'd have known about and had access to it at the time of its release, even if we didn't ever get to see the anime itself. It's definitely worth your time.

Stealth (SNES)

 This is a game I'd never heard of before last week, when the name stood out to me for some reason while I was looking for something else. I looked it up online, and the idea of a turn-based strategy game with a focus on stealth sounded appealing, despite the unpleasant thematic aspect of playing as American soliders in the Vietnam war. Unfortunately, this wasn't a lucky find, as the game turned out to be awful.

 

The first thing you need to know is that this isn't a game where you're being stealthy, it's a game where your enemies are being stealthy. Furthermore, they have some ludicrous advantages over you. First, you can only see them on the map when they're attacking you during their turns. On its own, this wouldn't be too bad, and it could add a little memory test aspect to proceedings, having you shoot where you saw the enemy's gunfire originate. However, it's couple with another advantage that pretty much makes the game unplayable: unlike your men, the enemy can move after they shoot.

 

So you're essentially blindly wandering around the jungle, maybe shooting at random squares in the hopes that there's an enemy there, while every time they take a turn, they'll be able to damage multiple of your men. One of your guys does have the limited option to call airstrikes, but even so, you're still firing blind, and in the several attempts I've made at playing the game, an airstrike has never killed more than one enemy, and sometimes doesn't get any at all.

 

So, it's not a fun game. It's not an attractive one, either! It's ugly enough that I would've suspected that it was originally intended for release on the original Famicom and got shifted over to Super Famicom as that market shrank, were it not also for it having been released in 1992, and also being (as far as I can tell) the first game from its developers. It's not the first time their work has been on this blog, though, as they were also responsible for Tarot Uranai on 3DO, which at least looked nice.

 

Stealth is a game that, as far as I can see, has no redeeming qualities, and you definitely shouldn't bother playing. It's boring, slow, and fundamentally broken. The most interesting thing I think can be said about it is that GameFAQs listed five other, completely unrelated games also just called Stealth. Maybe some of those might be better?

The Police 24 (PC)

 Despite the name, this game isn't to be confused with Konami's light gun arcade game Police 24/7, and despite the general look of the title screen, it's also not to be confused with an entry into the Simple 2000 Series. It is, however, from DesireFactory, the developer(s?) of the Fighting Oddball series of fighting games, and like those games, it makes heavy use of digitised photos for its sprites and backgrounds. (I actually have a physical copy of one of those games lying around somewhere, but iirc, I failed to get it running on a modern PC).

 

It's a single plane beat em up, made in an engine designed for fighting games. This awkward situation shows in some little things, like how regular enemies have little health bars above their heads while bosses have proper full size ones across the screen from your health bar, like your opponents would have in a fighting game. There's also something of an abundance of buttons, maybe the most I've ever seen used in the genre. You've got three different levels of regular attacks, a King of Fighters-esque dodge roll button, a taunt button, and a guard button. Plus, you have a burst-type ability that you execute by pressing roll and taunt together. PLUS there's a bunch of special moves with fighting game-style motions.

 

Each of the three stages has you fighting through a few screens of yakuza guys, in either dark or light-coloured suits, then there'll be a cutscene and a boss fight. It'll feel a little awkward at first, but once you get used to the controls, and to how enemies react to being attacked, it quickly becomes a lot of fun. You'll be figuring out easy and amusing little juggle combos and so on, and the comedic aspect is obviously enhanced by the digitised graphics. There's just something about these actual little photo people being kicked in the face and bouncing off the sides off of the screen. The bosses are Mario, Luigi, and a bigger yakuza guy. Judging by the cutscene in the first stage, it looks like the Mario Brothers are importing some kind of illegal mushrooms, which provides a sobering reminder that lazy, tedious gamer humour is not something that's restricted to the anglosphere. (Also, it obviously wasn't the dev's intention, since this game is well over a decade old, but: you're a cop beating up Luigi! Has a slightly different feel to it in the year 2025, doesn't it?)

 

The biggest problem this game has is that it's got a lot of promise in the way it plays, but it doesn't have enough actual game to really explore those mechanics. There's a massive movelist, and as mentioned, it's a lot of fun bouncing and chucking those yakuza guys around the screen. But the problem is that the game in its totality comprises nine screens of regular enemies (of which there are only two varieties), three boss fights, and that's it. There isn't even a score! A longer game, with more enemy types would provide more scope for playing with the mechanics and exploring the movelist. I know I'm asking a lot from what is probably a solo developer, but I'm reminded of Treasure's Tiny Toon Adventures game on GBA that felt a lot like it was a proof of concept demo for their later Astro Boy game on the same system. So, if this game ever got a sequel (and there's a chance it already did years ago, and I just haven't found it yet), I assume that game would probably live up to the potential.

 

I don't know if it's possible to actually buy this game anymore without scouring Japanese sites that sell pre-owned games, but it's definitely floating around online in various places, and if you like beat em ups and their potential as a genre, I definitely recommend giving it a look.

Martial Masters (Arcade)

 Even down to the most basic level of their PGM hardware being a lot like the Neo Geo, it was always clear that IGS were very heavily influenced by SNK, and in keeping with that, Martial Masters seems at first glance to be an ttempt at making a Taiwanese equivalent to Last Blade 2. I say at first glance, because when you start playing, the period setting (seventeenth century China in this case), slightly brown-heavy colour palette, and smooth animation really bring Last Blade 2 to mind. But when you look a little deeper, you'll discover that this is a game that has its own identity.

 

Before going further, I'm going to contradict that a little by saying that the setting and characters do borrow very heavily from martial arts movies, especially Once Upon a Time in China. However, this actually does serve to make it stand out among fighting games, since there are far fewer games than you'd expect that focus specifically on kung fu, and every character in Martial Masters represents a different style. 

 

This does seem to have posed a challenge for the game's animators, as some of the characters appear to have been animated using rotoscoping. Maybe it was too hard to capture certain styles in 2D without doing that? Whatever the reason, it does result in some very unique-looking fighters, and even though the characters play in similar ways to ones in other fighting games, with traditional special move motions and so on, the different look provided by the overall kung fu theme makes the game stand out in the genre for the way it feels to play.

 

Martial Masters isn't a game without a few features of its own, though, some of which, while maybe not innovated here, were at least uncommon at the time of its release. You can store up to nine pwoer meters, though it's rare to go higher than three, since they're not just used for supers! You can' perform a Guilty Gear-esque burst action by pressing HP+HK while blocking, which is useful, but not as useful as it might have been if you could do it while taking full hits, too. Especially since if you instinctively press HP+HK when you're not blocking, your character will do a taunt. There's a few other uses for meter, too, like launchers, a Vampire Savior-esque power up, and a kind of throw that doesn't deal damage, but does stun the opponent.

 

I briefly touched upon how the game looks earlier, but it does look very good. Mostly. Some of the portraits on the character select screen look bizarre, and as mentioned, the rotoscoped characters stand out a lot in a way that's not necessarily positive. But none of that's bad enough to really spoil the game, and the backgroudns and most of the characters look excellent. To bring up the general kung fu theme once again, it does make all of the attacks, specials, and supers really stand out in a way that is positive. 

 

Martial Masters might not be able to stand up to its contemporaries in that subgenre of "turn of the century fighting games with big sprites and unusually smooth animation" like Street Fighter III, Mark of the Wolves, or Last Blade 2, but that doesn't mean it's not worth your time. It's a fun game with a unique setting and feel, and it feels good to play. If you want to play it legally, a PGM cartridge would cost you a few hundred pounds, but apparently there was a somewhat recent collection of IGS games on Switch which is presumably a lot cheaper, and includes Martial Masters and a bunch more games (including previous review subject Demon Front).

Speed Power Gunbike (Playstation)

 Some of you might remember that I've already written about Speed Power Gunbike. If you don't remember that, don't worry: it was in a print magazine nearly a decade ago, and I'm probably a lot more clever and better at writing now. Probably. Maybe. This is also one of those cases where I'm taking into account the breadth of my readership and their knowledge of videogames. A lot of my regular readers will be at least somewhat familiar with the game, but plenty of them won't be. And it's not only worth telling those people about because it's a good game, but also because it's an interesting one.

 

It's an Inti Creates game, and if GameFAQs is to be believed (and as I'm increasingly discovering these days, it seldom is), it's their first. If true, they really got off to a strong start, foreshadowing the reputation for excellence they'd go on to  cultivate, though it's a 2D platformer, the genre for which they'd eventually become the most famous. Instead, it's a 3D update of an old concept that's mostly dead in 2025, and was pretty much dead in 1998, too: those road-based action games where your timer is also your health bar. You know: Dash Yarou, Masked Rider Club Battle Race, Mad Gear, and so on.

 

You play as one of three special operatives who get about on special Mospeada-like motorbikes that can transform into trikes and power armour. In bike mode, you go very fast, but it's not very manuverable, and you'll be sent flying if you take damage. In rally mode (the official name of the trike), you're a little slower than in bike mode, but steering is a lot easier, and you just get knocked back a little upon taking damage. In power armour mode, you slowly walk about as you please, or you can charge straight forward for a few seconds, plus you've got access to a whole bunch of weapons and can shrug off most enemy weapons without flinching (though you'll still lose time). 

 

On top of the properties of the different forms, you've also got the transitions between them to tak into account: You can switch between bike and rally mode near-instantly, and either of them can transform into srmour mode in about a second at the touch of a button. But when you transform into armour mode, you'll be charging forward for a couple of seconds, damaging any enemies or destructible scenery that's in your way. But the damage is greater depending on how fast you were going when you transformed. Conversely, when you transform back out of armour mode, you'll go back into the form you were previously. So if you were in bike mode going fast to get that big transform-ram damage, and you need to transform to make a quick getaway while there's still enemies about, you'll be transforming back into the more vulnerable bike mode when you do.

 

The lesson to take from the above paragraph is that Speed Power Gunbike is a game that requires its players to learn it. It insists that you learn its controls, the various systems at play and how they interact with each other, how to best navigate the stages, and the most effective strategies for fighting both the regular enemies and the bosses. The first time you play, you'll find a difficult, weird game with clunky controls, and in which you're constantly crashing into things andgetting hit. But the more you play it, the better you get at it, and the better you get, the more fun it is. Once you get the hang of playing it, you'll be speeding along, transforming right when you need to. It all results in a feeling of satisfaction, like that of gliding a pair of scissors down a big sheet of wrapping paper. But better, because you're not cutting wrapping paper, you're destroying stuff at high speed using transforming motorbike power armour in a setting that looks like all the best sci-fi OAVs you watched on VHS in the 90s.

 

That brings me onto the subject of how the game looks. Like you can see in the screenshots, it looks great. But unlike some Playstation games that look great by pushing the system to its limits, like Ridge Racer Type 4 or Vagrant Story, Speed Power Gunbike's secret is slightly different. This is instead a game that looks great by really leaning into what the playstation does well, in a way that few others do. Most of the things in-game are machines, buildings, and bits of big futuristic infrastructure, all depicted using big chunky polygon models, and textures that use lots of simple, solid colours to show the smooth metal and concrete surfaces that are so prevalent in this world. Even going down grey underground tunnels, it still looks great, and those grey moments mainly just make the big colourful moments of spectacle stand out even more.

 

Though this is an excellent game, it's excellent in a way that I can't recommend it unconditionally. If you're likely to just give it one go and give up on it upon the first failure, then don't bother. It's just not for you. Not every game is for everyone, don't worry about it. But if you're willing to meet it on its own terms, and put some effort into developing skill at playing an idiosyncratic action game, then you should definitely look into Speed Power Gunbike, as it's a game that'll give you back as much as you put into it.

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (SNES)

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (or Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou, if you prefer) is a game I wanted to play long ago, back in the time when there was an overlap in the latter stages of the RPG phase I had after having played Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III, and the early days of the Dreamcast giving me access to SNES emulation for the first time. I wasn't able to, though, as at that time, there was no translation. But the idea of an RPG with a middle eastern-influenced fantasy setting had me interested.

 

It eventually did get a fan translation in 2012, but my RPG phase was long since dead by then, and I was well into my "strong distaste for RPGs" phase. But in recent years, that feeling has waned heavily, and so I eventually got around to playing Arabian Nights. It's an incredibly okay game! It's got a few interesting elements, a lot of boring stuff, and they all kind of cancel each other out.

 

The plot is surprisingly dense: centuries ago, a wizard named Suleiman enslaved the eponymous spirit king, Ifrit. Then, a while after that, some unknown evil attacked, and though Suleiman was unable to save his own life, he did seal Ifrit away in a magic ring, telling him that after he's granted a thousand wishes for a thousand masters, Ifrit will be strong enough to face this threat and avenge him. The game starts with a young girl finding that ring, and being the thousandth to do so, wishes to bring peace to the land. Ifrit finds this highly inconvenient, since the previous 999 wishes were all easy stuff like riches and immortality.

 

To bring peace to the land, Ifrit, his new master Shukran, and a boy-thief they meet called Harty go off on a quest to find the eight crystals containing Ifrit's sealed powers. Along the way, they'll also find other spirits, some of them have been sealed like Ifrit was, some of them have been up to other activities in the intervening centuries. All of them happen to be various flavours of bishounen, though, and whether they're friends or enemies, they all talk to each other in a certain way. Like, if there had been an English version of this in the year 2000, the Geocities fujoshi would have been eating it up, posting their fanfictions and character shrines and such.

 

So, back to the game itself. The positives: it looks great all-round. The character portaits, backgrounds, battle sprites, it's all just really high quality pixel art. The battles themselves also bring up some aesthetic poits of interest of their own! Battles take place on a diagonally-aligned rectangular field with a really cool border around it. The field will be themed to the kind of area you're walking through, but unfortunately there's only one border, as nice as it is. Furthermore, the game's main mechanical gimmick is the cards system. You or your enemy can play a card before the turn starts, and they all have various effects on the battle, as well as changing how the field looks.

 

There are forty cards in total: eight elements that come in levels one to five. The effects they have include inflicting elemental damage on all the caster's opponenets at the end of each turn, nullifying the enemy's attacks, boosting or reducing the stats of one of the sides, and so on. Playing cards happens before the turn starts, and if it's not replaced, a card will last a few turns. If the enemy plays a card, you can replace it with one of your own, but it has to have the same element and/or level as the one currently in play. It's an interesting system, but it's one that doesn't really meet its potential, for reasons I'll now go into.

 

The game's got some problems, and most of them are related to battles. THe encounter rate is incredibly high, so by the time you get to anywhere you're meant to be, you're going to be overlevelled. Even boss fights only take a couple of turns of spamming attack. So you can pretty much ignore the cards altogether, as well as the other magic and special attacks to which you get access. Also, there's some weirdness regarding walking: when you're in a town or dungeon, you walk pretty quickly, but only in the four cardinal directions. On the world map, you can walk in eight directions, but you move incredibly slowly. A few hours into the game, you do get given a magic carpet that speeds up your world map movement, and partially fixes the encounter rate problem too, but it's weird that the two kinds of movement are flawed in different ways.

 

For all its problems, though, I have been enjoying Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King. It's a nice little RPG, and the plot keeps introducing new twists that have had me playing more to see where it all goes next. When I first started playing it, I neglected to save, like an idiot, anddied in the first dungeon, losing nearly half an hour's progress. It's a good enough game that I just started again, instead of just giving up in frustration! If you've got any affection or nostalgia for old-fashioned RPGs in the year 2025, this is one you probably haven't already played, and is worth your time.

Lord Monarch - Tokoton Sentou Densetsu (Mega Drive)

 I first tried this game out a few years ago, when the translation patch first got released, and I immediately bounced off of it. It seemed to be a boring, passive game that mostly played itself, with little input or agency for the player. I recently gave it another chance, though, ans this time, I don't know what's different, but it really clicked with me, and got me hooked!

 

So, it's a real time strategy game for the Mega Drive (a cohort which is stronger than you might think, also including games like Herzog Zwei and Dune II, which is basically the start of what people think of as real time strategy games), and since it's from a time befroe the genre was really codified, it's pretty unique one. You mostly don't have to take charge of building or directly controlling units. They'll just kind of do that themselves. Your soldiers will build forts and roads, and the forts will generate more soldiers.

 

Your input, especially in the ealry stages is pretty much managing the tax rate in real time, and even there, there's a marker advising you on where the best place to put it is. Building forts (and bridges, and other projects) takes money, and your income is determined by some secret algorithm that takes into account the number of forts you have and how high the current tax rate is. However, you need soldiers to do your building and fighting, and their generation is controlled by a similar algorithm that takes into account the number of forts and how low the current tax rate is. 

 

For the first few stages, you'll probably be able to get by pretty easily by just adjusting the tax rate how the game tells you to. Before long, though, you'll have to start telling soldiers to do things like building bridges and fences, sealing up monster-spawning caves, and even directing the directions in which they expand your territory, rather than just letting them spreadout wherever's closest. Another thing you'll start finding use in is ignoring the tax guide and setting it to maximum or minimum for short bursts when you feel like you need a quick injection of either resource.

 

Something I haven't yet mentioned that deserves a mention is how the game looks. Lord Monarch was originally released on Japanese microcomputers, and has been ported to a bunch of different systems. I think the Mega Drive port might be the best looking of them! The graphics ingame are small but detailed, being both full of character as well as clear and readable. Out of actual gameplay, there's an overworld map and a bunch of cutscenes, both of which look amazing. The map is full of really nice isometric graphics, while the cutscenes are made up of big, beautiful pieces of still pixel art. And in all cases, the colours are incredibly bright and bold. It doesn't make use of any special trickery like some Mega Drive games have, but it's still one of the best-looking games on the system.

 

Lord Monarch is a really great game! It's a shame that it never got officially translated at the time of its release, but luckily, yet again, twenty-first century fans have stepped in to fic the mistakes of twentieth century corporations. It's a little odd, and very different to most other strategy games, but it's definitely worth giving it a try. Or even two tries, as my story attests.

Raging Fighter (Game Boy)

 I was going to review a different Game Boy fighting game this week, Fist of the North Star: Ten Big Brawls for the King of the Universe, but I thought covering three anime tie-ins in a row might have been a bit much. Luckily, Raging Fighter (Released in Japan as Outburst) actually provides an interesting contrast to that game in a few ways, and the two can serve as examples of how and how not to make a good fighting game on the Game Boy. Well, almost. Fist of the North Star isn't that great. But it is better than Raging Fighter, and it's specifically a better Game Boy game than Raging Fighter.

 

I won't talk about the other game too much, since I probably will give it its own post some day, but the big, most noticable difference between the two is found in the character sprites: FotNS has small character sprites, but they're full of character and detail, all very distinct from each other, and their animations are simple but quick. By contrast, Raging Fighter might have been the first to fall into the trap that Game Boy ports of Street Fighter II and the Mortal Kombat games would also fall into: its character sprites are large and detailed, and they look great in still screenshots, but their animations are stiff and they slowly flicker their way around the screen in a way that varely feels better than a cheap, low quality LCD game.

 

There are some good things about Raging Fighter, of course. Like I said and like you can see, it does look pretty good in screenshots, with its big sprites and detailed backgrounds. Also, and this might seem like damning with faint praise, but it has special moves and health bars that work like you'd expect them to. You'd be surprised at how some developers in the early post-SFII years would get one or both of those wrong. Finally, it might have secretly invented a staple feature of fighting games, a year before it's popularly-acknowledged advent.

 

There's two single player modes on offer, the first being tournament, which sees you pick a character and gradually work your way up a very MK-esque tower containing every other character in the game, topped off with a fight against yourself. The other mode is story, which sees you playing as the three good guy characters (or the Five Major Star Generals, as the end credits collectively calls them), and you fight in an elmination team battle against the three bad guy characters (or the Four Shadow Star Generals), with character health carrying over between rounds. As far as I know, this kind of match is generally considered to have first appeared in King of Fighters 94, which came out a year and a half after Raging Fighter!

 

Going back to the topic of fighting games on Game Boy, and how to do them, it would coincidentally be the port of King of Fighters 95 that provided the blueprint for it a couple of years later, showing that if developers did their best to get the feel of the game down, even if it means heavily simplifying the graphics, that it was possible to get fun fighting games running on even this hardware that was so vastly overpowered by all of its contemporaries. I don't recommend playing Raging Fighter, even taking into account its historical significance. If you really want a good figting game on the original monochrome Game Boy, Takara published a ton of them later in the system's life, and a lot of them can be found on actual cartridges for a pittance. So get those instead.

Koryu no Mimi (SNES)

 

 This game's based on a manga, which I haven't read, but a quick bit of searching online reveals that it's apparently about a guy who's heir to both his family's fortune and the family magical earring, which gives "easy access to wealth and women". In game, though, it mainly seems to allow him to go super saiyan, as when your power meter fills up, you press the R button to make him touch his ear, regenerating some health, temporarily increasing his attack and defence, and summoning magic effects to help fight the enemy.

But I've jumped the gun a bit, there. I should describe what the game actually is. It's a single-plane beat em up, that will, at first, seem like it's impossibly difficult. But this is down to two factors. First, the game has a surprisingly extensive movelist, and you're expected to make use of it, paying special consideration to figuring out the best ways to juggle enemies in any given circumstance. THere's even more moves that can only be performed when you're holding certain melee weapons! Plus there's guns sometimes! The second thing to take into account is more concise: the first boss, for some reason, is a slightly anomalous difficulty spike, and you'll have a much easier time once you've gotten past her.

 

There's a few more points of interest, too. Though it's a single plane beat em up, there are times where multiple enemies will be standing slightly higher or lower on the screen as if it were a belt scroller. This is a purely visual flair: you still intereact with them as if they're on the same plane, but it does solve the problem in single plane games whereby it can be difficult to show multiple enemies without them looking like they're all standing in a queue waiting to get hit. Also, this is the second SNES game based on a manga license with a stage where you fight enemies in a passenger train, after GS Mikami: Joreishi wa Nice Body. (Outside of the SNES, it's also the third game that I've covered on this blog with such a stage, after Kishin Douji Zenki FX - Vajura Fight on PCFX and the much more recent Cosmowarrior Zero on Playstation).

 

Single plane beat em ups are, I feel, a generally underrated genre with a lot of potential, that a lot of people unfairly write off as being an inherently worse or "more primitive" version of belt scroller-style beast em ups. Koryu no Mimi is a game that proves that there were developers seeking out the limits of complexity in the genre as far back as the mid-nineties. I think the creativity on display makes it worth playing on its own. Luckily, it is also pretty fun on its own merits, too.