iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 10/10/2026

while I'm still working through my elevator action hardest 1-all, I decided to take a look back at this particular oddity. in 2007, a small taito affiliate released a low-budget Wii fps that ostensibly was meant to be an elevator action game... it wears out its welcome, but it's cute! link below:

first paragraph: The premise of this strange title from a group of Taito-affiliate developers is a spiritual successor to Elevator Action that didn’t quite make the cut; after developing a slew of DS Taito sequels in the years prior, Spy Games: Elevator Mission got published by shovelware purveyors UFO Interactive.1 However, the outcome is focused from back-to-front thanks to a limited, setpiece-less structure. It’s a rare post-fifth generation first-person shooter in the Metroid Prime / Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D mold: hybrid tank controls with a strafe button, back-turns, and infrared aiming. Turning while moving is smooth, and much like the original Elevator Action, bullets are dodgeable thanks to a relatively slow shot speed. Each hallway forms a small light-gun challenge thanks to random spawns from doors on either side, featuring enemies in the classic standing/crouching positions. Compared to progressing in a 2D plane, where slow bullets still command an uncomfortable amount of real estate on screen, the ease of juking bullets here makes this title less of a grand reinvention of the elder arcade ideals and more a cute, unseasoned experience for tank controls enjoyers. The two-hour time commitment for a run solidifies its spot in the latter camp.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 04/10/2026

october means it's time to tuck into some horror games, I'm kicking it off with the dreamcast's late-era theme park oddity Illbleed. the trap detection is much less robust than it initially appears, but the designers thankfully hedge on it, focusing on bizarre setpieces instead. link below!

first paragraph: It is common to refer to survival horror games as using theme park-style design, but few games literalize it like Illbleed. The titular theme park, referred to in the opening crawl as “Michael Reynolds’ Virtual Horror Land,” offers its patrons an unparalleled experience in interactive frights that fluidly breaches multiple level of performance: park operators involve themselves personally in the attraction narratives, veering further into true fourth-wall breakage as needed. Attraction topology happily overtakes rational space in an effort to drown players in infinite oceans or open walls to looming, gigantic children. Traps strewn throughout the hallways in haunted house fashion — linear, varied, and always stirring anticipation via the game’s visualization of the character’s senses — shock the player at regular intervals as if they were transported via Omnimovers. In the late game, during a killing-spree scenario that may or may not be truly happening behind the scenes of the amusement complex, the player travels through a catwalk maze above the half-charred bodies of prior guests, congealed together in glacially slow cremation, of whom over a hundred die each day of operation. This fact is solemnly stated but never questioned, and why would it? Illbleed offers the deranged, illogical horror experience of our nightmares.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 29/09/2026

a late one for you tonight... monkey ball is one of the most elegantly designed precision arcade games ever made, a game that takes a design staff primed on racers and lets them create economic geometry puzzles, only building towards alien grandeur in their structures at the end. link below!

first few paragraphs: Sega was the master of exaggerated, nuanced physics engines, and Monkey Ball fits that mold to a T. There’s three stylistic inaccuracies that sew Monkey Ball’s unique physics together:

Friction is present as a constant inhibiting force, but in a sense this helps hold the monkey on downward slopes. This gives Monkey Ball a “sticky” quality.

Collisions can and often do pop the monkey up in the air, where speed is uncapped. This, and the fact that the collisions seem relatively elastic,1 make collisions actually a boon for gaining speed rather than a total obstacle.

It’s a common misconception that Monkey Ball has the player control the tilt of the stage, letting the monkey freely roll throughout it. Instead, the player is actually controlling the direction of gravity, offering very similar effects to stage-tilting while also providing essential air control to the monkey.

The three of these combined make Monkey Ball an intuitive, forgiving engine that encourages aggressive play.2 Speed gains are always at the player’s fingertips and rely heavily on environmental awareness. With that intrinsic concentration in the engine, the stage design can then follow suit. Monkey Ball’s stages are focused and brief; many stages have a max time limit of only 30 seconds, intend for you to beat them in less than half of that, and have a theoretical lower bound of only a couple seconds. While the stages are static and encourage memorization, the short length and nuanced physics put the micro-movements front-and-center in comparison to broader routing, and this creates its own form of complexity-oriented dynamism for those who can’t memorize frame-perfect input strings.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/09/2026

to wrap up my trio of klonoa articles for this year, I've got a look at empire of dreams, another valiant effort by the now production jobbers to keep a namco series trucking. the results actually sets a new standard for klonoa puzzling, and you can read about how in the link below!

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 13/09/2026

been a while since my clear so I went back and re-familiarized myself with the original puzzle bobble! it's arguably the most influential true arcade puzzler of all time (tetris and puyo were pc games!) and stunningly unique on every level. link to my review below!

It’s hard to imagine that Puzzle Bobble arose from nowhere in particular, but none of the post-Tetris random-piece puzzle games that came prior resemble it: it’s match-three, but the board is designed by-hand and drops from the ceiling, crumbling only as the player shoots bubbles into it. One might surmise that, in an alternate universe, a continuous lineage from Breakout and Arkanoid to Puzzle Bobble exists, with some intermediary game that blends the real-time paddle of the former with the match-three of the latter, yet none exists. The key genetic trait retained here are the ricochets, a dollop of the basic kinetics from the block-breakers injected into the more modern puzzle concepts. Puzzle Bobble combines this with a hexagonal grid to create craggy playfields where one can sneak bubbles into crevices.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 07/09/2026

work has kept me from writing much and I needed a break from the constant game reviews, so I'm offering today a critique of Shinichi Ishizuka's Blue Giant as I promised back in spring. rereading it has really let me fall in love with the art and the minutiae here... link below!

first paragraph of link below: Shenmue understands the inherent arrogance of its protagonist Ryo Suzuki’s quest — in brief moments, tucked away behind a web of other cascading events, it shows the perspective of those left behind by his decisions, who seek to pull him back from the brink of revenge. These perspectives only appear in glimpses due to the weight that Suzuki exerts as the playable character, however. Shenmue’s exploration of minutiae trawls these people’s schedules yet closes them off from Suzuki; the attention to detail only glances beyond human bodies moving with purpose on a map, to canned conversations and little of the world interaction that Suzuki feasts upon. Thus, the ultimate perspective is warped around Suzuki’s quest playing out in your hands, justifying his arrogance. Blue Giant sows the same field — a man on the cusp of adulthood throwing himself towards passion in a foreign city — but it has a far keener eye for the engine that powers such arrogance, that both fuels it and harvests it, those who gain confidence from it and those who spurn it. It grips the arrogance much tighter and assumes it is elemental, feeling it wriggle and documenting every facet of it.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 31/08/2026

next up for today... I'm digging back into the dreamcast well after a long absence to explore Toy Commander, a shockingly cool vehicle sandbox experiment from the minds behind Alone in the Dark and Little Big Adventure. link below!

first paragraph: It’s difficult to judge solely from the cover what kind of game this is, but the first real mission spells it out: drive an RC car up a series of oddly modeled ramps to get onto a countertop, and push an egg into a pot of boiling water using the collision physics. From there the game skews towards more traditional objectives — combat and racing — but the mission design still includes unique geometry as a key consideration. Many missions provide rickety, railless scaffolding for the player’s vehicles to climb even without extraneous obstacles to push them off or impede their progress. Given that every mission is played against a par time, simply lighting a fire under the player is enough to force tight execution on these perilous ascents.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 27/08/2026

I've got some longer arcade reviews in the works (puzzle bobble, the monkey balls, elevator action, and night striker), but I wanted to give some love to some older platformer. playing these for score in the early stages recently has helped me gain a new appreciation for their design. link below!

first paragraph: Recently I discussed some of the arcade clubs I have participated in over the last couple of years. Part of the reason I’ve really enjoyed these is that I’ve gotten insight into some games where I haven’t pushed into a 1CC or 1-ALL, but I’ve still put effort into scoring and early-game routing. Today I’ve got three different ’80s arcade staples that fall into this boat: hugely important in their own ways, but not ones I’ve decided to really hone in on for a clear and a full review.

first flicky paragraph: I was shocked going in at just how dynamic and bouncy Flicky is, especially in improvisational scenarios. As a necessary disclaimer: if one had the wherewithal, they could easily chart out optimal routes for each level, as the enemy AI is relatively deterministic. However, doing that across 40 levels (for a single loop) takes quite the time investment, and I was pretty enthused at the more improvisational elements approaching the halfway mark. Flicky collects small, yellow chicks around the level, but instead of disappearing, they trail her in a line, which increases as more chicks are scooped up. The cats and bugs that chase Flicky around scrape off a life upon contact, of course, but by contacting the chicks in the trail, the affected chicks run off and scatter. This creates some nice interplay with the chick depositing mechanic, where Flicky returns the chicks to the starting door (the level ends once all have been returned) with a scaling bonus based on the number of chicks deposited at once. In a routing situation one would solve this, but in freeform play a constant pull between stacking up chicks and returning the current set affects the player. Taking them back “safely” one at a time isn’t necessarily best, as letting the level soak in the background gives time for the full roster of enemies to spawn and centralize on your position.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 27/08/2026

she's right... ping pong is pretty good...

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 24/08/2026

still positive on aspects of klonoa 2 (likari is a knockout puzzle concept and I can't wait to see how dream champ tournament expands on it) but the rest still falls flat for me. link to my review below!

first paragraph: Splitting the majority of the puzzle gameplay off to Moonlight Museum puts Lunatea’s Veil in a position to carry forward the original game’s action elements, but Lunatea’s Veil seems uninterested in reprising the quirks from the original. Where Door to Phantomile emphasized levels that curved in on themselves, obstacles that crossed between playable planes, and enemy variety, Lunatea’s Veil hews much closer to prototypical 2D platformer elements — featureless running and jumping within the plane. Basic checks on one’s ability to wield Klonoa’s enemy-based double-jump are absent when not contextualized by one of the few new gimmicks, such as with giant worms that appear out of walls to eat Klonoa unless fed prior with an enemy, which appear long past their expiration date late into the game. When these won’t suffice, a trite 3D snowboarding section fills the void. Oddly enough, this ends up highlighting the puzzles that dot each level; the proper platforming is only grist between them.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 23/08/2026

think I'm pretty settled on these as my 20 shoegaze favs (before you ask about loveless, I'm treating it like an invisible bingo free space)

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/08/2026

chiller high score from today as well lol (and I guess a 1all but hardly an accomplishment lol)

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/08/2026

starting to learn iidx dp... cleared my first 5! 🥳

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 18/08/2026

spent quite a lot of time this year on outrun 2 sp, both from a scoring and a time attack perspective. over that time, it's elevated from a vibes classic for me to a mechanical totem, up there with any of my other favorites. link to my analysis below!

first paragraph: Players familiar with the effortless gear drifting of OutRun 2 may balk at the idea that it inherits much from the team’s prior Daytona and Scud Race titles, but common DNA threads through each one. Despite first appearances, OutRun 2 relies on the same exaggerated vehicle model: a strict power band, stiff handling at high speeds that frequently understeers, and drifts that linearly drain speed until exited. In the latter case, Daytona used engine braking to initiate drifts via holding a lower gear for a period of time before stabilizing the speed (which correlated with turn angle) by shifting back up. In OutRun 2, virtually every turn is solved with a plink across the shifter buttons, with little time spent in the lower gear. Instead, fine angle control is mediated through countersteer mechanics, letting the vehicle nudge laterally and alter the vehicle rotation angle on the fly. The choice makes OutRun 2 vastly more approachable at a glance, but a major change to the SP version brings back another Daytona mechanic for incredible flavor: slipstreaming.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 14/08/2026

to tie in to my arcade-style article from a couple weeks back, I did a quick write-up of my experiences over the last couple years running private arcade clubs for us to compete and learn games together. if you haven't tried making one, you should give it a shot! link to the article below

first paragraph: I’ve attended MAGFest six times now, and one of my favorite events each year are the tournaments. Regular head-to-head genres tends to monopolize the proceedings – fighting games, action puzzle games, TCGs, etc. – but they also put an emphasis on featuring less common tournament fare, including score-based games! In some cases this may be implemented through simultaneous play (a Typing of the Dead tournament I was in once was structured this way), but for others, the format allows everyone to watch each competitor play through a game superplay-style and mark their scores on a local leaderboard. I loved this concept so much that I started participating in online variants of the same concept with friends over the last two years, and it’s been a rousing success.1 My friends and I have played many more games off the beaten path, gained competency in the “prestige” titles, and explored some score systems that people rarely talk about. Below I’m going to offer a few reasons why an arcade club can be a benefit to your friend group and give some tips on setting it up and maintaining it.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 14/08/2026

gf left so I started doing bachelor things (making an entire package of breast fillets into chicken saltimbocca and then eating it at 11p at night)

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 11/08/2026

it's in "Content and media" in the settings menu, click on "Following Feed Preferences" and move the reposts one to the left

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 06/08/2026

when recording our recent podcast on klonoa (which will get posted in a couple weeks!), I took the chance to explore klonoa's underrated handheld outings. if you can slog through moonlight museum's uninspired opening, the game offers a taste of just how far the series' puzzles can go. link below!

first paragraph text: A side jaunt on the WonderSwan gave the Klonoa developers a chance to dig into the puzzle aspects of the original release, and no enemy suited their needs more than the Boomie. These bomb mice wrap up each of the primary Klonoa mechanics into a neat package: they can be carried, they squish under ceilings, they enable Klonoa’s throw-based double-jump, and they trigger interactables, all while exploding on a timer. By not disappearing upon being thrown, they additionally add a storage element that other enemies lack. Moonlight Museum squeezes puzzles out of each of these facets in a way the original Klonoa never bothered. Doors that open for limited periods once a switch is flipped perfectly intersect their timers with the Boomies, especially when one or multiple remote switch triggers is involved. A special category of block exists only to increase the possibility space of this intersection by spreading a Boomie’s blast in a specific direction, sending it through ceilings where switches sit out of reach. Whether they involve as many moving parts as these or rely solely on Klonoa hoofing it to a gap with a hot potato in his hands, the puzzles here lean on the Boomies as their workhorse.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 03/08/2026

thank you so much! very funny to see your name pop up bcs someone recommended your reviews to me last year and then dipped so I didn't know if you had socials or not

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 02/08/2026

any tgm you can play is the best game you'll ever play, and the second game, The Absolute, is perhaps their peak. check out my review in the link below

first paragraph: The first nuance of Tetris that a new player will comprehend is the role of each piece. The unique sides of each tetromino synergizes with particular holes in the stack and affects the future stack’s shape: some flatten, others create peaks, some bridge gaps, others divide. Few Tetris variants stretch what this entails quite as far as Tetris – The Absolute: The Grandmaster 2 (lovingly referred to just as The Absolute Plus, or TAP). A Swiss Army knife piece like the T, at the drop speeds TAP eventually induces, suddenly becomes a death trap if there’s a gap in the stack right below the drop point; likewise, I-pieces and their inflexible rotation quickly ends runs without stacking with it in mind. Tradeoffs form in this environment. Covering holes, while virtually never an issue in the later Tetris Guideline games thanks to held pieces and gentler speeds, has strategic merit here when compared to overextending vertical towers or removing flat landing spots from the stack. A willingness to stomach risk and non-optimal outcomes gives TAP a distinct character.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 02/08/2026

re: cheesing article, one of the scariest things you can do when writing about games is compare them to other mediums with this implicit credibility gap, because thinking laterally about the parallels can be difficult (and perhaps reveal a lack of experience)

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 22/07/2026

(screenshot for those who are wondering what the "reasons" cited above are, footnote 8 is me noting that this is an American-centric view lol)

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 22/07/2026

finally I return to my long-form articles after half a year... backloggd legend drax asks: what exactly does "arcade-y" refer to? in response, I explain my reasoning for three major fundamentals of the arcade style, each of which drives the arcade mechanics we know and love. link below!

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 19/07/2026

empire of dreams is honestly tight. starts real slow which is a shame bcs they have so many expansions on the basic klonoa puzzles. far, far beyond what either console game does. ex stages feature makeshift enemy storage and plenty of regrabbing

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 16/07/2026

capping off my trilogy of kururin reviews is squash, the rare gamecube exclusive that still has almost zero coverage. it's the best starter game in the series thanks to analog control and a gentler campaign, while also moving in some new directions for its set of objectives. link to my review below!

first paragraph from review: Where Kururin Paradise poured the scrappy look of the original Kuru Kuru Kururin into a sleeker, cheerier skin, Kururin Squash completely revamps the look and feel with lush 3D backgrounds and and a focus on gentler curves. The flat-shaded cartoon interludes of Paradise give way to a puppet show aesthetic, down to curtains that open on the title card and characters printed on cardboard with articulated, flapping arms. Their non-stop gesticulating combined with the movement of the backgrounds, replete with signs of organic life and community, infuses the atmosphere with an invitation for the player to live in its world. Kururin had never been a brooding or violent series, but the grinning brutality of the obstacle gauntlets finally melts away in Squash.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 10/07/2026

albums I've listened to while on my dissertation grind (all new to me other than quique and la nouvelle pauvrete). loosely ordered by enjoyment

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 08/07/2026

my neighbor came by recently and started jumping uncontrollably upon seeing my copy of The Munchables, their favorite childhood game. we booted it up and quickly fell in love with those opening levels again. it falls off rather quickly, but the start shows what could have been. review link below!

A Katamari-like from the actual Katamari developers, those Now Production contractors who toiled to get Keita Takahashi’s vision off the ground.1 Munchables twists the “roll up stuff, get bigger, roll up bigger stuff” loop from Katamari into a game all about eating, where the mute, spherical protagonists chomp through waves of pirate/alien/frankenfood creations, progressively inflating after each set of meals. The character’s size is unambiguously labeled with a level number, with enemies larger than yourself having a similar label to illustrate who exactly you can eat at any given point. These larger enemies can be bumped with a dash attack that splits them into smaller enemies, although if the difference between you and the enemy is vast enough, each of their component sub-enemies may still be larger than you. Recursively repeating the split mechanic unveils levels built around flooding the field with bite-sized enemies and eating as many as possible before they reassemble into their larger forms.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 05/07/2026

I've been doing some book cover designs on spec recently 🙏 lmk what y'all think

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 30/06/2026

it's a shame that kururin paradise has never made it to western virtual console or nso, because it outstrips its predecessor in almost every way: rotation speed control, tighter level design, and gorgeous graphics. if you love kururin 1, try out its sequel asap! link to my review below!

first paragraph of link below: The Helirin’s rotation in the Kururin games has a particular dynamic: certain rotation angles will always reoccur provided the player has space to sit and wait. Safe zones often bookend major obstacle sections, so a start-and-stop tendency arises, where arriving in a safe zone with the wrong angle to start the next section incurs a short break to let it spin into place. The first Kururin game suffered from this in its larger stages specifically thanks to cyclical obstacles, each requiring a synchronization between the Helirin and the obstacle. Depending on the difference in frequency between the two cycles, waiting for both to line up could potentially take multiple rotations without prior planning. While the series’s staple springs, which change the Helirin’s direction of rotation, could help by altering the phase over multiple bounces, most applications of these boiled down to bouncing between parallel springs, offering only minor improvements over unassisted waiting. Kururin Paradise smartly fixes this by giving the player control over their rotation speed. Even with only a single speed increase to work with, the player has significantly more leverage on how to synchronize with obstacles or avoid waiting. In turn, the designers decrease the amount of safe zones in each level, resulting in more compact and intense design overall.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 22/06/2026

took a little break to get my monkey ball stuff recorded, but I'm back with ace combat (also known as air combat in the states)! I wanted to replay this before I started reposting other ace combat reviews, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it on a hard mode replay. link below!

first paragraph of the link below: Retrospectively speaking, Ace Combat’s1 rough-hewn edges might appeal to those turned off by how quickly the series streamlined starting with its immediate sequel. Starting Ace Combat’s hard mode plops the player into an unmaneuverable tin can that explodes upon contact with a single missile, and the plane selection only incrementally improves its quality from there. Broadly speaking, the most useful planes are split between durable hunks of junk and fragile ships that pivot on a dime, leaving the player to decide between the least bad choice for a given objective. Both of these give the simplistic dogfights and bombing runs a distinct flavor. The former makes downhill approaches a necessity to build up enough speed when avoiding surface-to-air missiles surrounding a drop zone, while the latter turns stray gunfire into a legitimate danger. The decisions here (along with a bevy of stealth planes and other more unorthodox choices) make experimentation with each mission much more useful compared to later titles, which drown the player in extremely useful all-rounders.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/06/2026

I mean 😭 Dad has walked in with the milk! (sorted by Top)

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 14/06/2026

random google search to see if I could find details on monkey ball 1 vs 2's physics without joining a discord server and one of the first reddit posts that pops up is a completely wrong chatgpt-generated essay that ends with this

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 12/06/2026

while I'm easing off the gas for a bit to focus on my dissertation, I've got a run of three articles on the kururin series, starting with the only one that made it to the west: kuru kuru kururin! it's the skeleton entry of a series that would try many weirder things down the line. link below!

The fundamental genius of the Kururin trilogy derives from its unique, bare-bones approach to modulating outcomes over time. Consider racing games: part of their appeal is how the timing of an action alters the outcome of each action that comes after it. Taking a turn changes not only the car’s current speed and direction but the speed at which it arrives at the next turn as well. This propagates to the requisite braking power needed for the turn, the best line to take through the curve, and the torque and power the engine is putting out; each variation adds nuance to later actions. Even when the system is abstractly solvable, the variables are so granular and dynamics so nonlinear that reproducing the solution is never trivial. The Kururin series does this without the same density or non-linearity by instead constantly turning Kururin’s long, stick-like ship while punishing contact with any obstacles. The player tracks little other the rotation of the ship and the location of moving obstacles, yet small variations in timing change the phase of the ship’s rotation for future movement, restricting viable movement through future corridors. While this lacks the analog granularity of car control, Kururin’s ticky-tacky movement and three discrete speed settings make up for it by clamping the player’s precision, asking them to alternate between the separate speed modes rather than key in a specific analog value. This reconstitutes the subtle variations of each run that racing games exhibit, elevating Kururin to their level in the confines of a handheld d-pad.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 11/06/2026

saying this in the same way that I'd say I'm a friend of dorothy

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 05/06/2026

this is absolutely fucked and leaves me worried that it won't be a transient issue

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 03/06/2026

really enjoyed this piece, and one of the best bits is up front. if you're also in the amateur crit sphere, the "voice-y" style is so insanely stale. even if the intent is to present the author as they are, in actuality it gives your voice the cadence/pitch of many, many others that came before you

Right off the bat we’re in trouble:

"I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other critics adored this game. IGN’s Simon Cardy gave it a 10/10. Game Informer’s Charles Harte gave it a 9.

…

I have made it clear on-record in the past that I do not fuck with Beethoven and Dinosaur’s output. I thought The Artful Escape sucked on toast.

…

It turns out that Beethoven and Dinosaur are even more predictable than I held out hope for and they deserved to be put in a box the entire fucking time."

This is full-on Gawker-style “voicey” writing that’s been stale for years.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 03/06/2026

it's not a particular robust game, but for fans of unusual playstation games, skydiving extreme/aerodive has all the markings of a bargain bin classic, as long as you don't spend more than an hour with it. fans of metro's bust-a-groove or plane racers may enjoy too! link below

header and first paragraph: "Although the package is unassuming and generic, Skydiving Extreme is actually a hidden fourth Bust-a-Groove entry, using a similar QTE combat concept without the rhythm component.1 The latter absence fundamentally alters the flow of each match: without synchronized measures tying the players together, the race is on to mash the button commands as quickly as possible. Dance battles from Bust-a-Groove transform here into skydiving choreography, with each team of four leaping from a plane and forming what are effectively body sculptures of progressive complexity. Presumably these formations also increase drag, as incorrectly executing them will put the divers in free fall, with the team that reaches the break altitude first losing. Over the course of a clear, the player earns the right to take on more and more complex maneuvers, performing in thunderstorms and other dangerous locations."

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 30/05/2026

lol (this was the first time I put my name in)

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 27/05/2026

while I enjoyed tall infinity enough, its sequel tall twins tower is an unsung action puzzle classic that nails so many genre fundamentals: rapid decision-making, fascinating board control on a huge playfield, and adorable playable characters. hop on now while everyone else is! link below:

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 23/05/2026

there are few games that are as dazzlingly varied and robust from a scenario design perspective as deus ex, a tour de force of FPS concepts from the turn of the millennium. this helps keep the pace rolling even when the second-to-second gameplay can't on its own. link to my review below!

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/05/2026

I'm so shocked, thought it was supposed to come next month

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 15/05/2026

for some reason the wii section of my site is barren despite cursed mountain being the very first post on there, so I'm rectifying that now with an overview of boom blox! the game is daunting in its breadth, and it's built on a very solid physics system and set of interactables. link below!

front matter and first paragraph of link below

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 12/05/2026

while picross 3d has its issues with a difficulty curve that quickly plateaus, it's also a more physically satisfying nonagram experience than virtually any of its peers. I had a very pleasant time finishing off the optional puzzles recently! link to my review below!

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