Magical Taruruto-kun (Mega Drive)

It's yet another game based on an early 90s anime that never got translated into English. I guess this one must have been much more popular than Genji Tsuushin Agedama, as while that only had one videogame, Taruruto-kun had seven of them across four formats and in only two years! You'd think that kind of success would get the franchise earmarked for international release, but I guess not. Anyway, you play as the eponymous magical boy, who's a chubby little guy with a two-pointed hat and a magic wand, and obviously, it's a platform game.

It is a pretty high quality platform game, too! You can use your want to pick up items and throw them at enemies (for some reason, picked up items grow a smiling face), or just to hit enemies at very short range if there's no items around to pick up. You can also press jump again midair to sprout wings and perform a wide bowl-shaped swooping glide type action. Like any good platform game, it's designed around these abilities, with a few other gimmicks specific to each stage. One big fault I've found, though, is that while there are plenty of parts where you need to use the glide to reach power ups or squeeze through gaps, there's very few points at which you can really let loose and glide over a long distance without worrying. I know the devs were probably focussed on designing challenging stages, but the glide is really satisfying, and it's a shame you don't often get to enjoy it to its fullest.

It should also be mentioned that this game looks amazing. It's so colourful, and the sprites are all chunky and cute, and it's kind of got a SNES-ish look to it, if you think of the stereotype that SNES games were cuter and more pastel-hued than the Mega Drive's grittier, darker games, like if the SNES was TV anime, and the Mega Drive was violent OAVs, if you will. Despite the looks, though, it still plays in the harder arcade style you'd expect from the Mega Drive: it's a lot harder than it looks, it can definitely be played for score, and it's definitely designed around mastery of the mechanics and controls. (That's not to say that there aren't SNES games like this, but it's obvious to anyone that the Mega Drive's library, especially in the early years, was heavily skewed towards being a home arcade). Sorry about that overly-long foray into system comparisions, got a bit carried away there I think.

Magical Taruruto-kun is an amazing-looking game, that's also definitely worth playing. It strange how a game of such obvious high quality never really had much attention from western importers until the modern era. I guess being based on a kids show and not being an arcade port meant no-one in the west bothered to take notice of it on release. It's also left me interested in whether any of the other games based on the same show are any good.

Genji Tsuushin Agedama (PC Engine)

This is an anime licensed game, based on an anime that, as far as I can tell has never been translated into English. So I can't really tell you anything about it, other than it ran for 51 episodes, and didn't have any other videogames. I can guess that it wasn't massively popular, then, since a fair few kids anime from the early 90s had a game each for PC Engine, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, and sometimes even Game Gear, too!

Unusually for a licensed game, this one is a fairly original concept. Well, original might not be the right word, but it's not well-worn territory, at least. Genji Tsuushin Agedama is what might be the first and only Atomic Runner Chelnov-alike, being as it is, a platform/shooting game hybrid with a player character that can't stop running forwards. Obviously, that means that there's no exploration or anything, and the platform elements are mainly limited to trying not to fall into pits while simultaneously fighting off enemies.

So you run, jump, and shoot, and you've also got magic attacks performed by holding and releasing the fire button. As you hold it, a meter at the top of the screen fills up. The meter's split into differently coloured sections, each colour is a different attack, more powerful than the last. The longer you hold the button, the more powerful the magic you cast, though also, all the magics after the first are unavailable until you collect items to unlock them one by one, though this doesn't take long or force you to go out of your way. Another ability you've got is that you can do a quick roll along the ground by pressing down on the d-pad. You're invincible during this roll, and it can do a lot of damage, but it's very quick, so you're at risk of getting hurt as soon as it ends.

Though getting hurt isn't itself that big a risk, either, since you can take eight hits from the start, and there's plenty of healing items to pick up, too. In fact, though this is a fun, cute, and charming game, the one big criticism that can be levelled at it is that it's very easy. On my first play, I managed to get pretty far into stage four, and there are only six in total. Despite that, it is still a lot of fun, and definitely worth playing. I'd recommend buying a real copy, but I feel like I got lucky with mine: I got it for about a third of the usual price, since the ebay seller clearly didn't know the game's name, or how to look it up, and had it listed as just "Japanese PC Engine Game". But still, it's pretty fun, though maybe not be £30+ worth of fun.

Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru (DS)

This game's title translates to "I Will Protect You", and it was part of a short-lived initiative to try and lure female visual novel fans towards "proper" games. The only other game I know of that was a part of the initiative was a reskinned version of the RPG Dungeon Maker. The luring in this case was entirely thematic, having a white-haired bishonen as a protagonist, various other bishonen in the town, and a female NPC for them all to fawn over. The game itself, though, definitely doesn't feel like it was made with players new to action games in mind.

Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru is a platform RPG, or a metrovania, if you like, and it starts out being brutally difficult: even the weakest enemies will take a ton of punishment, while you'll go down in just a few hits. Despite the fact that it doesn't have experience points and levelling, there's still an inverse difficulty curve in effect, since as time goes on, you get access to better weapons and armour, and healing items become easier to get ahold of, and things quickly get a lot easier after the first hour. Still, that's pretty much a part of the genre, and all the RPG-style Castlevaniae have this problem, and I love them, so I can't really hold it against OgOwM. Though when I say it gets easier, I'm referring entirely to combat and survival.

The big problem I have with this game is the language barrier, so if you can fluently read Japanese, you can stop here: this game's pretty good, if you've played all 3 DS Castlevaniae to death and want something similar, this is the game to go for. For everyone else, though: after killing the irst boss, I got totally stuck. All I could find were locked doors and walls that looked destructible, but I had no Idea how to open them. I also found a few chests with key items in them, though those items didn't seem to open any of the doors I could find.

It really is a shame, too. I remember there being a bit of buzz around this game when it came out in Japan, a lot of people being intrigued by the idea of an action RPG designed by and for women, but it seems that interest fizzled out almost instantly. GameFAQs has the long-abandoned beginnings of a walkthrough and a map with very little annotation, and there's also a forum thread somewhere on the internet from 2010 announcing a translation patch that never materialised. Hopefully someday, interest in this game will be revitalised, and someone will write, if not a translation patch, at least a proper walkthrough, so everyone can play it. Until that happens though, you're going to have a tough time getting through if you're not Japanese-literate.

Here's an addendum to what's written above: a few days after writing this review, I had to play the game a bit more to take screenshots, and during this session, I somehow triggered a long series of cutscenes. After they'd finished, not only was my max HP increased, but I also now had the ability to break those aforementioned destructible-looking walls. So I am able to progess a bit further in the game, but since I have no idea what made this happen, I still stand by my earlier opinion that the language barrier is fairly strong for those who can't read Japanese.

Lupin III: Pyramid no Kenja (Saturn)

It's suprising how few Lupin III games there have been over the years, considering not only the character's international popularity, but also how his 1979 movie The Castle of Cagliostro was a clear influence on the designs of various games, most obviously the Castlevania series. And of the games that there are, a bunch of them are adventure games or console ports of pachi-slot machines, not the crazy madcap action games you'd expect from Lupin III.

This Saturn entry is one of the action games, though, and for some reason, it seems to be less well known than the Lupin III database disc thing that's also on Saturn. The plot, as far as I can discern (since it's told in a series of great-looking, but obviously untranslated FMVs), concerns Lupin, Goemon, and Jigen looking to relieve a pyramid of all its treasures. Of course, this being a videogame based on an anime character, the pyramid is not only full of normal traps, but also masked cultist guards, futuristic super-technology, and the pyramid itself is only the tip of a giant diamond-shaped structure that's mostly underground.

Most of the stages focus around getting a treasure, then getting to the exit. Along the way you'll also fight enemies, avoid traps and sometimes solve a simple puzzle or two. It's okay, but it's let down by a few things. The camera is the worst, it's terrible. It never changes angle on its own, instead relying on you to do it with the shoulder buttons, and even then, it seems almost impossible to get it into a good position for jumping over pits and things like that. I feel like a lot of the time when people complain about the camera in old 3D games, they're just nitpicking, but this is a case where it's legitimately terrible.

The other main problem is one I almost feel bad for picking at, because it really shows that the developers tried to capture the spirit of Lupin III. Lupin's got a big, gangly-limned run animation that looks great, but unfortunately, it also means that he's constantly moving really fast, making navigating certain hazards more difficult than it needs to be, especially when stuff like moving platforms and the like are brought into the equation.

On the whole, Pyramid no Kenja isn't a great game. It does, however, look really great, and it's yet another nail in the coffin of the "Saturn can't do 3D" myth. I don't really recommend playing it though, unless you've got saintlike reserves of patience at your disposal.

Shadow Blasters (Mega Drive)

Shadow Blasters, also known as Shiten Myooh, is an interesting case. When I first played it, I wrote it off as an unfair, too-hard kusoge. For some resaon, though, I kept being drawn back to it, and the more I played it, the more I saw the good in it. For a start, it's not unfair, or too hard, it's just a very old fashioned (even for 1990) game that expects you to learn it, and offers little mercy or concession while you do so.

You get four characters (two ninja, a swordsman and a monk), who also act as your lives, and you can switch between them at any time from the pause menu. One concession the game does make is that it allows you to play the stages in whatever order you wish. The four characters each have their own very slightly different attacks, not in my opinion, they're not really different enough to warrant switching often. One thing that really feels missing from this game is the ability to heal characters while they're "tagged out", either automatically over time, or through power ups with that purpose. As it is though, you might as well play with one character until they die, then go onto the next, until you run out or finish the game. Maybe it would make the game too easy though?

On the other hand, something I did really find interesting about Shadow Blasters is the attack/power up system. Next to your health meter, there's a power meter, indicating how powerful your attacks are. You can charge it by holding the attack button for a more powerful attack. That's all fairly traditional, right? The twist that I really like, though, is that one of the power ups you collect makes it so a segment of your current character's power meter is always filled in, making charge shots take less time to power up, and gradually increasing the power of all your shots, until eventually, if you ever manage to collect nine of the items with one character, every one of your attacks is at full power. It's only something small, but I don't recall ever seeing it done in any other game, and I thought it was really cool.

Everything else about the game is fairly standard for an early Mega Drive action title: the stages are in forests, mountains, spaceships, and gritty inner cities, the enemies are a mix of humanoid troops who blindly march forward and weird small monsters that fly around, and the bosses are a decent enough array of big, weird monsters. It's not ground-breaking, but it is at least well executed. Shadow Blasters was apparently released in Japan and the US in the same week, but despite that, there's still some localisation silliness in there. In the JP version, the characters have the thematically appropriate names Kotarou, Ayame, Senshirou and Kidenbou, while the US version has the incredibly ill-fitting Horatio, Tiffany, Leo and Marco. That's more amusing than anything, tough the same can't be said for the disparity in quality between the two versions' boxarts: the Japanese copy has an incredible high quality painting, reminiscent of the best of the Heisei era Godzilla movie posters, while the US box has a laughable piece that looks like the cover of a self-published tabletop RPG supplement.

Whichever version you play, though, the game itself is surprisingly good if you have the patience to stick with it. You'll probably want to emulate, though, since it's apparently now rare and expensive. Though it was one of the built in ROMs on my chinese handheld Mega Drive clone, so that's also a nice way to get it!

Ruruli Ra Rura (PC FX)

It's a PC FX game! So let's get all the usual cliches out of the way first: it's got beautiful animated FMVs, it's a console with lots of wasted potential, this game was inexplicably released in 1998, I have no idea how anyone turned a profit making games for a console with such a tiny userbase. Anyway, Ruruli Ra Rura, is a kind of metrovania-type affair, though it leans heavily towards puzzles than action. Also, besides the obligatory excellent FMVs, it looks like it could have come out on the PC Engine a decade earlier. The in-game graphics are really simple, with really small sprites and so on.

You start the game as a Samurai guy, and as the game goes on, you meet and recruit more allies, all with different abilities: shooting fire to destroy ice walls, running across narrow ridges, swimming, and so on. There's a common complaint levelled at metrovaniae, as well as similarly-structured games in other genres, like the Legend of Zelda games, for example, that most of the abilities you acquire have no practical purpose except for acting as keys to unlock the specific obstacles they're designed for. I think Ruruli Ra Rura is the most egregious example of this I've encountered. You can only switch characters at save points, and when you're not specifically sending an ally out to get past an obstacle, you're better off playing as the Samurai, as he's the only one that's remotely competent at fighting enemies. Plus he's got a fast normal walking speed (which is still very slow. Slow walking speeds are a plague in this game).

Though I've got a lot of complaints about this game, I can't honestly say I haven't enjoyed playing it. There's just something slightly satisfying about the slow-but-sure progress you make through the world. There's a translation patch available that translates all the menus, making te game a lot more playable to the Japanese-illiterate, though unfortunately, unlike the patch for Tyoushin Heiki Zeroigar, it doesn't add subtitles to the FMVs, so you don't get the exact nuances of the plot. Although I don't think we're missing out on a great deal, since as far as I can tell, the tone is that of a very silly slapstick comedy, very much in the vein of all those Dungeons and Dragons-inspired OAVs of the 90s like Slayers, Dragon Half, Ozanari Dungeon, etc.

I think I've covered everything I need to here, right? It's a deeply flawed, but fun and charming game, with all the 90s anime polish you'd expect from a PC FX game.

Ninpen Manmaru (Saturn)

It's a long held piece of recieved wisdom, perpetuated by idiots, that the Saturn couldn't do 3D graphics, despite the existence of games like NiGHTs, Panzer Dragoon, Quake, Burning Rangers, and a whole bunch more. Ninpen Manmaru is one to count among that bunch more, being a proper, fully 3D platform game that looks great, easily the rival of any of its bigger budgeted Playstation contemporaries.

It's based on an anime that appears to be for small children, which does explain some of the game's design choices, like how there's no combat (even though your character is a ninja penguin with a sword strapped to their back). Enemies in the stages are really just mobile obstacles for you to avoid, and though there are bosses, they're confrontations, rather than fights. Instead, the game's purely about platforming, with the sole aim being to get to the end of each stage within the time limit, and without getting killed by traps or enemies.

The game's big problem, though, is the controls. They're just really sloppy! Your penguin will sometimes land on a tiny platform, then start running immediately after landing, sending him down into the lava below, and sentencing you to another long wait for the platform to come back within reach. In fact, that's the game's other big problem: how much time is spent waiting for moving platforms to get into the right position for you to jump on or off them. I know it's a longstanding platformer tradition, but for some reason, it really grates in this game, right from the start. Maybe I just don't play as many platformers as I once did, and I'm no longer used to the genre's quirks, I don't know, maybe it's just jarring considering how fast your movement is the rest of the time, and it breaks the game's flow. (As an aside, if this game were on any other console, you could mistake it for an attack on SEGA, since the excuse often given for the lack of a proper 3D Sonic game on the Saturn is that the Dreamcast was the first console capable of loading large enough 3D stages for Sonic to run around in, and Ninpen Manmaru is a 3D mascot platformer about a fast-moving blue animal navigating stages as quickly as possible.)

Going back to the subject of bosses, the confrontations being non-violent allows them a little bit of variety, as they take the form of various contests, such as collecting most of the coins in a small area while your opponent does the same, running away from a foe who seems to be trying to eat you until the time runs out, and so on. I haven't played particularly far into the game, as despite being aimed at apparently primary school children, the difficulty curve becomes incredibly steep after the first set of stages, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a regular old race as a boss stage at some point in the game, either.

In summary, Ninpen Manmaru is a decent enough game, that's techinically impressive for any home console of the time, let alone the Saturn. However, if you want to play it, be warned that legitimate copies fetch absurd prices, ranging from around seventy pounds, to ten times that amount. I'm not sure how those prices are justified, either, as the amount of copies on sale on ebay alone show that it can't be a particularly rare game. But I'm sure you can think of some other way of playing it if you really want to.

TH Strikes Back (Arcade)

You might remember a few years ago, I reviewed a Spanish arcade game entitled Thunder Hoop. Well, the TH in this game's title stands for the same thing I guess, since this is the sequel to it. Like its predecessor, it's about a guy who looks a lot like Son Goku (though this time round, it's more of a "Dragonball Z as drawn by Rob Liefeld" kind of Goku than the original game's shorter, more cutesy Dragonball style) running around platform stages shooting stuff.

Unlike the original though, TH Strikes back has less of an Amiga/Microcomputer feel to it, having a much faster pace, and more of an influence from console games as well as its arcade peers. There's generally a lot less careful platforming in this one, as you storm ahead as fast as you can, constantly shooting the many crowds of one-shot enemies, making you feel like the super-powered fighter your character resembles visually. The game has the "semi-auto" shooting, where you can shoot as fast as you can press the button, which is always satisfying, especially during boss fights. All in all, it's generally pretty fun to play. If you like Contra or Metal Slug and want a not-quite-as-good-but-still-pretty-good alternative, TH Strikes Back is a decent enough effort in that regard.

With the talk of the actual mechanics out of the way, I want to talk about the game's graphics. I've already mentioned the main character being a bit unoriginal, but the enemies are all pretty interesting. There's weird biological horrors, sleek, shiny sci-fi women who look like they've been ripped from the cover of an issue of Heavy Metal, floating cast-offs from The Real Ghostbusters, and even weirder biological horrors. The backgrounds are nice, too, being a mix of standard sci-fi spaceships and tech along with some shameless Giger-cribbing. All the enemies also have unique deatth animations, which for the most part have them exploding, spreading their innards all over the place, but special note should be made of the aforementioned sci-fi women, who upon death, inflate until they burst. I'll give the developers the benefit of the doubt since this game came out in 1994, but in our post-deviantart 2018 world, it does seem like that might have been some fiendish, perverse animator catering to his own special interests on the sly.

There's another cool little touch that kind of covers mechanics and aesthetics at the same time: enemies generally don't instantly kill you on touch. Bullets and other projectiles they shoot do, but the enemies themselves will instead initiate some attack when they touch you, and if you're quick enough, you can kill them before they actually pull the attack off and kill you. Like the death animations, those are all different for each enemy too. Lots of attention to detail in this game all round, which is a nice surprise when you consider that a lot of western-developed arcade games are just ugly, cheap cash-ins with the minimum effort put in.

TH Strikes back isn't going to change your life, and there's lots of better games in the genre, but it's still got enough going for it that you should at least play a few credits and have a look for yourself.

Super Bikkuriman - Densetsu no Sekiban (Game Boy)

You might already be aware of Bikkuriman as a franchise, but if you're not, it's a line of snacks that were popular in Japan from the late 1970s onwards, that also had stickers in the packets. The characters from the stickers were popular enough to have been featured in various anime and videogame tie-ins over the years, the most well-known in the west probably being the PC Engine game Bikkuriman World, which was an altered port of the arcade game Wonderboy in Monster Land. As far as I can tell, though, this game is completely new.

Like most licensed games from the early 1990s, though it is a platform game, and coming from 1992, it's actually an early example of a problem I associate with the later years of the Game Boy's life: developers being way too ambitious with the size of their sprites. Like you can see in the screenshots, the sprite in this game are huge, which doesn't give them a lot of space to move around the screen, and limits the distance you can see. And that does cause a lot of problems with leaps of faith and so on. Luckily, though, it is ambitious in other ways, and they at least make it an interesting game, if not a good one.

Firstly, your character's lifebar is split in half, with the second half being a power meter that goes up as you attack enemies, and down as you take damage. However, the less life you have left, the higher the maximum amount of power you can store gets, like in Psychic Force 2012. Once the meter reaches a certain level for the first time, you can press start to take on a more powerful form, who looks cooler and can fly and shoot projectiles. In this form, once the power meter reaches a certain level, you can press start to use a super attack, summoning a phoenix or a dragon (depending on which character you're playing as, and they seem to alternate stage-by-stage) to smite your enemies. So brave players might want to try sacrificing their health so they can easily perform this attack twice in a row as soon as they reach the boss (though this is both brave and foolish, as the game's massive sprites make it pretty hard to dodge attacks a lot of the time).

It's nothing ground breaking, but it's more complexity than you might expect from a licensed Game Boy platformer in 1992. And there's more too! As well as the main game, the developers have also included a little beyblade-esque spinning tops minigame accessible from the main menu, presumably as a way to shoehorn in a multiplayer mode. Before you start, you choose whether to emphasise power or speed, and whoever runs out of speed frst loses. So go with speed every time and you'll win. I can't imagine this sold many more copies of the game, and I honestly wonder if two Game Boys and two copies of this were ever connected together, even once. But it was probably a request from the licensor or the publisher that they had to include some kind of multiplayer thing.

Super Bikkuriman - Densetsu no Sekiban isn't anything revolutionary, and I definitely don't recommend going out of your way to track down a copy. But if you ever happen upon a loose cartridge on sale for practically no money at all (like I did), it wouldn't hurt to pick it up.

Super Bubble 2003 (Arcade)

There's an unusual story behind this post: a total stranger on Youtube sent me a message saying that the only information they could find on it anywhere were short video clips, and asked if I could write a post about it. I'd never heard of it before, and looked up those short video clips, and it looked okay, so here this post is.

For a long long time, I've lamented that I would often see screenshots of freemium MMORPGs and mobile phone games from Korea with really, incredibly good pixelart and sprites, always sad that there was this pool of talent there was was a perfect fit for cool, fun, arcade-style games, seemingly doomed to an eternity of their art being wasted in a world of nickel-and-diming micro-transactions and grind-based games. Meanwhile, Korean arcade games had a reputation for not only being incredibly low in quality, but also for stealing art assets from western and Japanese games. Super Bubble 2003 bucks both trends by not only being okay to play, but by having all-original (as far as I can tell) artwork!

And that artwork is truly excellent. All the characters are super-cute and well-animated, the points items are all lovingly rendered sprites depicted various foods, everything's bright and colorful without being garish; it's all just really high quality. I think the only negative thing I can say about this game, visually speaking, is that there's no visible life counter! The music and sound effects are pretty unremarkable, if you're wondering.

As for how it plays: it's a Bubble Bobble clone. Like most BB clones, it doesn't, as far as I can tell, copy the original's Druaga-esque system of byzantine secrets-within-secrets, only the core mechanics of trpping enemies in bubbles and popping them for points items. It does a pretty good job of it, though, and it does add a couple of other things to the formula, too: there's a tug-o-war minigame that appears when you collect a magic wand, and a giant/invincible mode that happens when you collect a bootleg Superman icon. The minigame is pretty much impossible to win, as far as I can tell though, so I have no idea what the prize is. The giant/invinciblity power up is nice, having its own super-cute sprites rather than just blowing up the regular-sized ones.

It's got a very steep difficulty curve that almost instantly shoots right up after you finish the first set of fifteen stages. I shamefully have to admit that I credit-fed up to the mid-30s to take screenshots, but I find credit-feeding incredibly boring so stopped there. It's proper difficulty, though: it doesn't change the rules on you or any other underhand tactic like that. With a lot of practice and skill, you could totally 1cc this game eventually. Whether or not it's a recommended play hinges, I guess, on your tolerance for that sort of thing, possibly tempered by your desire to see super-cute sprites. Give it a try, I guess?

Silver Valley v1.00 (Master System)

I don't know what it is about the Master System, but for some reason, it seems to attract homebrew with really great production values. For example, a few years ago, there was an amazing port of the Bruce Lee game that was originally on various 8-bit microcomputers in the 1980s. Silver Valley continues that tradition, but this time, it's an all-new game! Just as a disclaimer, I'm assuming from the version number that this is probably the final version of the game, but I could be wrong.

It's a platformer that's clearly heavily inspired by the NES Castlevania games, with bits and pieces that suggest other influences too, such as Megaman, Ghouls and Ghosts, Wonderboy, and even the Switchblade games, which were kind of UK-developed attempts at creating Japanese-style console action games, but on the Amiga. It all feels as smooth as it looks, too: the controls are responsive and great, and you can jump, attack, and shuffle around on your knees. Technically and visually, this game can't be faulted: it's one of the best-looking games on the Master System, commercial or otherwise, and it all feels perfectly robust, too. AND there's even a little game-within-a-game in the form of a playable "Crapman" arcade cabinet,

There are a couple of little problems designwise, though. The enemies, for a start, almost all seem to be massive damage sponges, taking several hits to kill. There's also the lives system: you get one life (though you can take four hits before dying) and infinite continues. It might just be me, but it felt like this really cheapens things, with certain challenges like instant death spikes and almost unavoidable enemies appearing pretty close to the start of the game making it seem like the game wants you to use the continues, which I feel is a problem, because I just feel like using continues, especially when there's an infinite supply of them, drains all the joy out of any game. A change as simple as having three lives instead of just one would go a long way towards making this feel like a much more "complete" game.

I don't want to be too harsh on Silver Valley, because it's obviously a passion project for its creator, and it really is an admirable effort, too. But at the same time, I do have to be honest when I'm talking about a game, no matter what its source. I can only hope that if eruiz00 ever finds this review, they take it for the honest, constructive criticism it's intended to be, and that I hope they continue making games after they're done with Silver Valley, as it's clear they have a ton of talent. And everyone else reading this, I of course recommend you give the game a try, because despite its problems, it's still and impressive achievement.