It's no joke when I tell people my games are a big incestuous mashed together mess a lot of times. The thrifty old man in me HATES leaving good stuff unused lying on the shelf.

Anyways, even with all this mash, there were still content gaps to be filled.

LC's mechanics and ships were fully working, tho. The original stages were borked from switching it's original FPS from 45 to 60 to be used, so why not just start (mostly) from scratch? Years pass and I decide to just cram this stuff together as a pseudo sequel to SXYX with a different flavor.

backstory: in '21 we had SXYX updates in the pipe. I also converted a bunch of old Flying V sprites (originally drawn in vector) to hopefully be a part of that update. I also moved Last Chance stuff over to SXYX's editor. Most of that stagnated as progress on ZPF finally revved up around '22, though

I never got the point of the grabby beam mechanic, it feels like a weaker, prior iteration of Gaiares' TOZ.

Nice gfx, great music though. There's just not enough there to really make me want to soldier all the way through.

The thrifty old man inside me hates when anything isn't used XD

That's a reason AB is so fascinating. It's an odd orphan stuck between the era of Rolling Thunder/Shinobi and the later "standard" established console platform game genres.

It's kind of weird how big it was at the time for being such an oddball; but there was also nothing else much like it either.

Mostly it's just really uneven and kinda mediocre. There's so much worse on the PS2 tbh.

I don't know if this came before or after everyone suddenly decided the original was a "bad" game; but that and the critical thrashing of other brawlers then (remember God Hand?) probably didn't help.

The right is 100% my grandparent's house. I can still smell the little wood burning heater and my grampa's lingering cigar smoke and spit chew waft.

*Our* house looked even more 70's believe it or not.