Steam Scream IV is now live, so you can pick up The Sirena Expedition for 99p, which is probably cheaper than a Mars Bar these days! Check it out on Steam and Itch:

store.steampowered.com/app/1957300/...
giraffecat.itch.io/the-sirena-e...

Steam Scream IV is now live, so you can pick up The Sirena Expedition for 99p, which is probably cheaper than a Mars Bar these days! Check it out on Steam and Itch:

store.steampowered.com/app/1957300/...
giraffecat.itch.io/the-sirena-e...

Ah, interesting! Yeah, I do remember the jump timing being really forgiving back when I played it; interesting that it wasn't originally that way! There wasn't a lot of time between the Japanese and US/EU releases either, so they worked quick.

Nice! I was looking for the PAL release for ages, but kept finding copies that were missing the manual or in poor shape, as the price went up and up. The Japanese version worked out a lot cheaper!

Love this little guy!

Some more pages from the manual, including some excellent renders of all of the enemies in the game.

Some pages from the manual. Love the little drawings of Robbit!

Doesn't get the same kind of attention as Prodigy, Chemical Brothers or Fatboy Slim, but it's definitely one of the defining Big Beat albums.

I don't know if you've read this article, but it's the most in-depth look at the game and its development that I've found: www.filfre.net/2015/12/dung...

A good YouTube documentary would be great, though, to bring the story of such an influential game to a wider audience.

...but at least critical thinking had been applied at some point. But now 'woke' and 'DEI' are such integral parts of the culture war that they don't have to do that; they're just signalling to people like them that this is a game they can steer clear of.

...and b) while they weren't copypasta, there were enough recurring themes that they were clearly getting them from an Angry Joe review or something. So, the point of those reviews was to convince the average person that the game wasn't well-made or well liked...

...and the combat mechanics were oversimplified to the point where something was lost, that kind of thing. It felt transparent to me, because I'd been paying attention and I knew that a) it was very unlikely they'd have had time to form those opinions so soon after release...

Bit of an aside, but I worked on DmC Devil May Cry, and was closely following the fan backlash throughout that game's development. On release day, the game received a whole raft of low-scoring user reviews talking about how the story didn't respect the themes and characters properly...

This feels like a crucial difference to me. There was a time when they would have at least tried to dress it up as critique; maybe talk about how the character in the hijab felt out of place within the setting or some shit.

Most of the Sega 3D Classics/Archives ports are great, but Power Drift and Galaxy Force II are SO good! The 3D really makes them come to life.

Here's my ST copy. Not shown here is a form you could fill in and send to Core Design with a photo of yourself, and they'd send back a disk with a personalised profile for use in the game with a low-poly recreation of your face. By the time I bought the game, in the mid-90s, this had expired.

And Axyz, which I've had in my library for a while now, and have been waiting for A Year of UFO 50 to end so I can play it. Well, it's over now, so what am I waiting for?! store.steampowered.com/app/2850490/...