RotW: Sep. 6-12, 2021 -- Where I make tough decisions about placement, because someone has to.

Here we are, already to another week where it's time for a topic from yours truly. There were a total of 5 reviews submitted this week, but I wrote two of them. That leaves three eligible reviews from three distinct writers, meaning Vacant's plans for a podium finish this year face another setback. They must be so disappointed!

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Third Place: Planet Alpha (PC) by EmP

I can't remember the last time I saw the adjective "coeval," so it definitely felt like an odd opening to your review. I had to look the word up online, to be honest. It apparently means roughly the same thing as "contemporary," but it seems odd to compare Planet Alpha to Another World (Out of This World in the US, I happen to know), a game that came out many years prior. Otherwise, I had no trouble following and appreciating everything you wrote. You made this game sound like a reasonably pleasant diversion, without actually putting it in any sort of "must play" pile. Very good work, as expected!

Runner Up: Arrow Flash (Genesis) by overdrive

How do you keep finding Genesis shooters that somehow still haven't been reviewed on the site? The number of eligible titles must be quite low by now (in fact, I just checked and the only two Genesis games I see with no reviews that are explicitly listed in our database as horizontal shooters are the Japan-only Battle Mania: Daiginjou, and Heavy Unit: Mega Drive Special). Anyway, it's a very strong review. I found only one definite error (in the final paragraph, where you start a sentence with "In other word" when you meant "In other words"), and your points flowed beautifully from one to the next. You made the game sound like it's mostly up my alley, but probably not worth the trouble. Nice work!

Review of the Week: Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King (Switch) by mariner

I had seen generally positive remarks for this game, and the screenshots made it look great, so I expected to love it when I get around to playing it someday (it is in my library). Now, I know that I will probably like it considerably less than anticipated. All of that linearity is exactly what makes me less fond (to varying degrees) of a lot of the more recent Zelda games, the stuff that came between A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds. It looks like 3D Dot Heroes may remain my favorite Zelda clone. All in all, a very convincing review for an audience of me.

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This was a fantastic week, truly. The three reviews were VERY close to one another in my mind this time around. Excellent work all around. Thank you to all who participated with such excellent reviews!

Thanks for the placement and complements! I struggled a fair bit writing that one due to how forgettable and blah the game was --- one of those reviews where I wrote 4-5 paragraphs, looked at how it was going and erased them and started over. So for it to wind up turning out good is a nice surprise because I wasn't sure how it would be taken.

As to how I found it, quite simple! That was one of the games I reviewed back in the GameFaqs days and it was a bit too primitive for me to port over when we all moved our stuff from there to here. So, it spent a lot of time in that purgatory where I kind of wanted to re-do it, but I didn't really want to play the game again. Then, last week came around, I wanted to write a review, but I hadn't finished Judgment (or any of my other projects) yet. And then figured I could probably blow through this one pretty quickly and throw up some sort of word salad. And here we are!

It is kind of cool that Genny shooters are now nearly completely covered. I mean, from what I've heard people say about it, can't imagine that I'd ever want to play Heavy Unit. The TG-16 same name/different game Heavy Unit sucked enough that I don't want to play a different bad game with the same name. But at least I contributed to finishing off something!

To think... as always I appreciated the whole of EmP's review. But the "coeval" and the comparison with Another World were among what I appreciated most.

It's good, healthy even, to make people go back to vocabularies.

The comparison to Another World didn't bother me, and it seems especially apt. But if the use of "coeval" is intended to suggest the two games are contemporary to one another, I find that less useful. 30 years is a LONG time in this industry, given how young it is and how quickly things evolve. It's several console generations. I remember reading about Another World in Nintendo Power when I was in my youth (it was released for the Super Nintendo and other consoles here in North America, as Out of This World).

Anyway, it's not like I'm losing sleep over the use of "coeval." Its use merely felt odd enough to me to warrant mention. As an avid reader, I don't often stumble across a word that's unfamiliar to me. The last time I remember definitely doing so was a year or so ago when mystery author John D. MacDonald introduced me to the word "spavined."

Either Jason's misunderstood the meaning of the opening sentence, or I've not been clear enough. Maybe both. Coeval has a similiar meaning to contemporary but isn't quite the same. My usage of that word was not to try and compare Another World with Planet Alpha but instead to suggest that Another World was deeply synonymous with the cinematic platformer sub genre. It might not have been the first, but I'd consider it the most deeply connected with the sub genre. I guess the point I wanted to make is that while technology advances and new ideas are explored, there's still a lot of things that stay the same. Even some 30 years later. Planet Alpha is still very much it's own game, but it also takes a lot of cues from the game the started the entire trend. I considered it was an interesting enough thought to record.

Coeval is a word I found myself using quite often back when I used to write more about music, because you would often have to talk about obvious inspirations and foundations. Sometimes, it was expected to the the bulk of the piece, rather then talking about the track/s themselves. I don't miss that much. At all.

Anyway, before I derailed, props to Mariner who wrote a great review, and to Rob who's killing it old school. Thank you also to BWV for the kind words.

IN OTHER NEWS:

It is kind of cool that Genny shooters are now nearly completely covered. -- Rob

In another lifetime, I decided it would probably only take a year to go through some dumb little project I dreamed up and cover all the 32X games (project still going five years later) and played around with what I might do next. I decided that the next thing I would so would be to compile a list of Mega Drive scrolling shooters and make a push at getting all of those covered. I spent some considerable time of making a list and cross checking what reviews we had, and figured I'd throw that all up once the 32X nonsense was done. I've not thought about it since. I figured if I could get four people onboard, we would all aim to do one per month, release it on a weekend and call it something imaginative like Shooter Sundays.