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Approximately one year ago was the release of Book of the Dead, a Pathfinder 2e supplement that focuses specifically on undead. It’s the sort of tabletop RPG book that I really like: the type that hones in on a specific creature category and just hits you over the head with new monsters and a bucketload of lore. These sorts of books are less en vogue these days among major publishers than they were in the D&D 3.5e era, probably for economic reasons. (I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to buy 250 pages of in-depth factoids, including treatises on ghost biology and paragraphs revealing that undead learn Necril via steady exposure to constant streams of negative magic.)

Anyway, Book of the Dead is packed to the brim with all kinds of ghoulish stuff, and there’s also an adventure in the back dubbed March of the Dead, which involves the PCs investigating a town where all the residents have been turned into zombies by naughty cultists. Basically, it’s the village section of Resident Evil 4. I immediately wanted to run this, and began wondering who I could GM it for. Incidentally, around this time I was enlisted by Paizo to freelance on the upcoming Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia books, which are intended to remake the game’s Asian-inspired setting into something a little more fitting for 2023. A bunch of writers from the Asians Represent podcast were called to work on the books (“Up in the sky! It’s the Asian Signal!”) and after I realized that some of my colleagues hadn’t played the game they were writing for, I asked them if they’d be down to try taking cultists to suplex city. They said yes, and me, Daniel Kwan, Drew Quon, Emma Yasui and Jacky Leung ended up playing for a whole year.

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This was my first time GMing for a group who all had some kind of public presence on livestreams and podcasts, and it was instantly fun in the sense that here were folks who were naturally charismatic and used to speaking to an audience. At the same time, because our game was private, everyone was freed from the normal restraints that come with livestreaming and able to go as bonkers as they wanted. This commenced almost immediately in our Session Zero when everyone gravitated towards the more colorful character options, because who wants to play one of the Core Rolebook ancestries when you can be a living toy, a robot, a catperson and a skeleton?

And so, March of the Dead kicked off in solid style as the PCs dove into the town of Fiorna’s Faith and ripped apart multiple flavors of zombie with much gusto. I ran the adventure pretty close to how it’s written in Book of the Dead, and can confirm that the middle section where the party has to lock themselves within a house and defend against multiple waves of undead assailants is pretty awesome, and very close to the scene in RE4 where Leon and Luis get stuck in a house and shoot the crap out of 100 jobbers in a great example of male bonding.

But even more awesome was how each character’s personality quickly crystalized into something special, setting the stage for their future development. Daniel’s poppet gunslinger Tapio had a kitbashed gunblade and a deranged desire to BUST on his enemies, which led to lots of dialogue which would’ve gotten all of us cancelled if we’d been streaming on Twitch. Drew’s fighter, a automaton named Kaine, unlocked memories of his soul’s prior existence by beating the shit out of dudes and just as equally getting the shit beat out of himself. (Kinda like the Thousand Years of Dreams segments in the Xbox 360 RPG Lost Odyssey, minus the shit beatings.) Emma played the coziest member of the crew - a catfolk named Weetabix who was also a summoner who could manifest a giant flying squirrel named Rudiger, thus placing the party on the pathway of aquiring an ever-increasing entourage of furry friends. And Jacky combined the skeleton ancestry and duskwalker heritage (even though I think they’re technically incompatible) to make Ozark, a min/maxing Ghost Rider magus of Pharasma who broke the entire system by parkouring 80 feet each turn and constantly healing himself with illegal necromantic juicing practices.

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With such a colorful cast, it would’ve been a shame to stop with just one adventure. So after the party smashed Harlo Krant, the so-called “seed of evil” set up by the cultists to spread undeath through Fiorna’s Faith, I homebrewed March of the Dead 2 as a continuation. (No gimmicky subtitles here, just straight up numbers!)

If the first March of the Dead was RE4’s village, then I designed the sequel to be the castle section, and I wanted to go big with a bunch of setpieces centered around a fortress siege. It’s hard to do mass scale battles in most D&D derivative systems, so instead of trying to have the party command an army I mostly just relied on the supplement Guns & Gears, which has a series of stat blocks on siege weapons which worked better than I expected. The idea was to have the PCs use the seige tools to turn the tides of war in an already ongoing battle between the cultists and a friendly group of Serenrae-worshipping orcs (the Burning Sun tribe, which received a mention in Lost Omens: Knights of Lastwall, another book I heavily relied on for setting lore). Alternatively, I also gave the PCs the means of sneaking into the fortress Sam Fisher-style. The party ended up taking the stealth option, but not before Kain rolled a natural 20 to catch a cannonball in his hands and throw it back at the baddies, which was awesome.

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Inside the fortress I had separate rooms and passageways devoted to each cultist, and all of these areas - or the cultists who inhabited them - were meant to hold some sort of significance towards one of the PCs. There was a gnome summoner intended as a foil for Weetabix, a tech-obsessed tinker dude who had essentially created undead automatons for Kaine to contend with, and a fleshwarping dwarf who’d imported cadavers from all across the world and used Tapio’s former body to form a flesh cape for his skinstitch golem. Ozark, meanwhile, got a friendly ex-Pharasma cleric NPC to help him in the last fight. Not all of these connections worked out exactly as planned - for instance, the gnome could’ve turned against her fellow cultists if successfully swayed by Weetabix, but she got her face melted off with an eroding bullet before she could utter five words.

Despite this, it was a fun exercise to tailor the story to everyone in small ways, which is always one of the biggest challenges when coming up with homebrew adventures. Probably one of the most memorable moments was when Daniel was able to obtain the Horn of Aoyin, an item he had previously designed while freelancing for the Pathfinder conspiracy-themed book Dark Archive. There’s nothing like a writer getting to add their own magical item to a character sheet, using it in-game to inadvertently cause their companions to go into a cannibalistic rage, and everyone going: “Wow, what asshole made this thing?”

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Alas, Drew had a scheduling conflict that kept him from joining us for March of the Dead 3. But the rest of the party was able to go on a final rodeo, and this one marked a dramatic turn as the crew departed Avistan to chase down more cultists in Tian Xia, a development I knew I wanted to do eventually, seeing as how we were all writers for the upcoming Tian Xia books. If we’re to equate March of the Dead with a 1970s film series, I like to think that this third movie is the schlockfest that went left field and randomly features the protagonists going to Hong Kong, as in other “third volume in a forgotten franchise” cinematic masterpieces like Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge or The Gods Must Be Crazy III. The PCs also had a good reason to go to the Dragon Empires, thanks to the fact that Tapio was quite literally a made-in-China puppet who now had to return the Horn of Aoyin to the Lantern Lodge in Goka, AKA the only region in Tian Xia that’s been updated for Pathfinder 2e thanks to the Fists of the Ruby Phoenix adventure path.

I relied heavily on Fists of the Ruby Phoenix’s second volume, which has a Goka gazetteer in its adventure toolkit section but also an article on kaiju. I knew I wanted to do a giant monster attack on Goka, but instead of focusing on Mogaru (AKA Golarion Godzilla who actually does attack the city in Fists of the Ruby Phoenix), I was drawn to Jakabu the Ethereal Leviathian. Jakabu’s a flying whale surrounded by undead sea creatures who I like to think may have been inspired in part by the bakekujira yokai. He exudes a Princess Mononoke “nature is mad at the world” presence that I liked, and since I was never able to run the Spelljammer Astral Whale-filled campaign of my dreams for D&D 5e, I figured that now was the right time for a kujira kaiju to take to the skies. Plus, Jacky had mentioned at one point during March of the Dead 1 or 2 that it would be cool to fight an undead whale.

Since the party was level 10 by now and had gone from a village to a castle, it was time to escalate the stakes by giving them an entire city to explore. Jakabu was literally raining thalassic horror on Goka thanks to a bunch of Circle of Despair terrorists from Minkai who were controlling him, and the baddies were led by a Sephiroth-esque bishounen who was in league with a greedy nalfeshnee. (Shout out to Undying Corruption and the good people at Nine Heavens Press for inspiring me with their geumdwaeji, a pig-like demon who takes a lot from both Korean myth and the traditional depiction of the nalfeshnee.) I like hexcrawls, and this “city under crisis” setup was perfect for a simple hex map featuring a slew of random encounters for the party to explore as they traversed Goka’s streets. Keeping the Resident Evil theme alive, I looked to Resident Evil 6’s China levels for a vibe to emulate. That game has a ton of problems, but the levels in the fake Chinese city Lanshiang remain an awesome standout worthy of becoming inspirational fuel.

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March of the Dead 3 ended with the party battling the bad guys atop Jakabu himself, Shadow of the Colossus-style. Along the way they friended the famous sorcereress Hao Jin, who restored Tapio back to his human body via cloning and also gave me an excuse to speak in goofy HK English/Singlish. Which leads me to another important point - I mentioned earlier that this was my first time GMing for a group with plenty of podcasting experience. But it was also my first time GMing for a group composed entirely of players of East Asian descent. This meant that in all three March of the Deads, I was able to make a lot of cultural in-jokes that would’ve either gone over the heads of another group or simply been inappropriate. These ranged from your typical weeaboo jokes (Ozark read dozens of issues of the world-renowned chapbook SHONEN LEAP while on the trip to Tian Xia) to pitting the party against NPCs who cussed at ‘em in crappy Cantonese. This is the sort of thing that often happens when a group composed solely of people of color (or other marginalized folks) get together at the gaming table, and it’s freeing, fun, and something that needs to happen more often for every POC who decides to run an RPG.

We started our little March of the Dead trilogy in June 2022, and now we’ve finished in June 2023. Because of unforseen factors, the Lost Omens: Tian Xia books that we worked on still aren’t out yet. But despite delays caused by OGL debacles, I’m supremely glad that my co-workers and I got a chance to catapault off the back of a freelance writing assignment to play for a year. I can guarantee that everything this crew produced for those two Lost Omens books is going to knock the socks off of whoever reads it.

As for me, I’m putting Book of the Dead down for now, since inspiring a three-part FRANCHISE is more than enough usage for an RPG supplement. But who knows where the muse will strike next. Howl of the Wild, the next themed Pathfinder book that I was also lucky enough to work on, comes out in 2024, and I betcha there’s enough material in that one too for a year’s worth of goofy, high quality fun.

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Capcom’s Strider series holds the distinction of starring one of the coolest ninjas in video games. Hiryu feels like he was designed to look as rad as possible, from the blue suit to the red scarf to the tonfa-esque cypher blade, and his appearance was partially influenced by Spawn (another hero engineered to radiate style) because Capcom character designer Harumaru saw some Todd McFarlane books one day. Even Hiryu’s name (飛竜, “flying dragon”) is cool, mostly because it taught me that 竜 is the Japanese simplified form of the Chinese 龍, a character in my own name.

But despite his coolness, Hiryu is better recognized for cameos in the Marvel vs. Capcom series instead of his own franchise. This is most unfortunate, especially considering that Strider’s one of the earliest video game examples of a cross-media property. Way back in 1988, Capcom greenlit a Strider comic with the help of the Moto Kikaku mangaka group while also assigning two internal divisions to helm an arcade game and an NES title. The intent was to make Hiryu into a hero who would span multiple mediums and be recognized everywhere, from the printed page to the pixelated screen. And that sorta worked, but not as well as Capcom hoped.

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The first and most famous Strider - the 1989 arcade release - begins with Hiryu gliding onto the towers of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in a truly iconic bit of spritework. Within three seconds, you’re hit with an array of action as Hiryu strides forward, explodes enemies in half with his cypher, and does a signature flip where all of his limbs flail outwards in a mid-air cartwheel. The action and setpieces never let up, and over the span of the game’s five levels, Hiryu fights a council of politicians who morph into a multi-limbed robotic centipede, runs from mountain avalanches, explores dinosaur-filled Amazon jungles, hitchhikes a ride on an airship, and battles robotic anti-gravity cores in the fringes of outer space.

Strider is a blend of a hundred different things that the developers considered cool. But beyond all of the set pieces, the factor that sticks out to me the most is the Cold War futurism that drips from every level, feeling original but somehow dated at the same time. What other games start with your character infiltrating the “Kazakh Federation” and end with them fighting the sorcerous Grand Master Meio, a dude who seems like a thinly-veiled stereotype of a communist dictator gone wild? What other games commit to their “born in a geopolitical era of tension” vibe by featuring speech samples in multiple languages, including Russian, Japanese and Mandarin? Strider came out right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and you can feel it. On that note, I don’t think Kazakhstan has appeared in any other franchise as much as Strider. Honestly, the world would probably be a better place if more people associated Kazakhstan with Hiryu’s adventures instead of Borat.

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Strider didn’t receive a decent conversion for home consoles until the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1990, and the NES “port” that came out around the same time wasn’t a port at all. Instead, NES Strider is an early Metroidvania, and one that I actually enjoy a fair bit. This opinion goes against the norm, since while I can recall NES Strider getting lots of promo in Nintendo Power when I was growing up, popular internet consensus these days tells you that it’s a broken game with controls that feel like they’re stuck in a beta phase.

I can’t refute that - NES Strider’s controls stink, especially when you’re forced to pull off a wall jump that’s impossible to do unless you have perfect timing. (Thankfully it’s only a mandatory move at two points.) The game’s also got a weird glitchiness about it, with enemies respawning at an utterly aggressive pace and the edges of the screen flickering way too much every time Strider moves an inch. The bugginess of NES Strider supposedly kept its impending Famicom port from ever being released, making it a rare example of a Japanese game that sold in North America but not in its native country.

And yet, the ambition to NES Strider is admirable. The trend of backtracking through levels and using items to unlock previously inaccessible areas might be commonplace now, but it wasn’t in 1989. The plot, while burdened by a messy English translation, also features far more of a story than any other game in this franchise thanks to its heavy basis in the Strider manga. (Which is pretty cool, by the way, and partially readable in English thanks to a fan scanlation of its first three chapters.) Instead of simply facing Grand Master Meio, Hiryu’s got to dig out corruption from the ranks of his organization, and it’s nice to actually get some insight into his companions, from a fellow Strider named Kain to a guy named Ryuzaki who left his Attack-Boots in China.

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Strider never blossomed into one of Capcom’s sequel-studded franchises of the ‘90s. The NES game was a bold but flawed experiment that didn’t get much traction, and while the arcade game performed okay, many of its key developers left the company soon after its release. In the European market, though, arcade Strider received dozens of ports for home computer systems that really couldn’t handle it, like the ZX Spectrum. Tiertex, a local developer behind a handful of these ports, got the rights from Capcom and made Strider II, a sequel with shockingly bad level design which also goes under the name Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns. Capcom effectively retconned Tiertex’s work with an in-house Strider 2 in 1999, riding off of the wave that Hiryu received from his inclusion in Marvel vs. Capcom.

Released for the arcade and Playstation, Strider 2 seems to take place two thousand years after its predecessor, with the Hiryu the player controls a clone of the original. It’s never entirely clear, as the plot was clearly just an excuse to have Hiryu fight a reincarnated Meio. Forgettable story aside, the game spans as many environments as the first Strider, and the opening level sees Hiryu fighting terrorists in Neo Hong Kong to the beat of some darn good music which sounds suspiciously like the Ozzy Osbourne song Shot in the Dark. There’s also a rival Strider named Hein who wears an all-white uniform in a nod to Hinjo, the main character from Tiertex’s Strider II, which is a polite ode to a game that Capcom has all but disowned nowadays.

My biggest issue with Strider 2 is that each level is divided into small chunks, with the player forced to sit through loading screens while the next segment loads. Most PS1 games released during this era suffered from long loadtimes, but it’s annoying to deal with the same thing in an arcade game. Maybe the load screens are meant to give players a breather before the next spree of button mashing, but I feel like the game’s pace suffers tremendously. It’s hard to fall into the same “blaze through, slice 'em with the cypher, do a billion flips along the way” rhythm that the first Strider inculcated when you’ve got to wait five seconds after every major encounter.

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Strider 2 released during a period when action platformers were nearly nonexistent in the arcades, and a 30-minute experience - which is about how long it takes to beat the game once you know what you’re doing - wasn’t going to really cut it on the PS1. And so the series went back into dormancy until 2014, when Capcom once again enlisted the services of a third party. Double Helix Games’ Strider is yet another retread of Hiryu versus Meio, but there’s a surprising ton of DNA from NES Strider present. These go from the music, which features an awesome remix of the NES game’s level 1 Kazakh theme, to the decision to make Hiryu’s journey into a full-fledged Metroidvania.

Double Helix clearly poured a lot of love into their work, and I give 'em props for that NES inspiration. But there’s something missing from the experience, which is probably why you don’t often see 2014 Strider on lists of the best recent Metroidvanias. Unlike the world-spanning levels of the other Striders, this one takes place solely in Kazakh, which is large but very samey. As a result, the game feels padded despite not being terribly long, and the in-game map is far too confusing due to different planes that Hiryu can jump across. While Metroidvanias are one of the few genres that tend to activate my completionist tendencies, I never felt the need to explore every nook and cranny or snag every ability. It’s a shame, because Double Helix was almost there in melding Strider’s disparate gameplay styles and finally bringing Hiryu back to mainstream stardom. But they didn’t stick the landing, and Amazon Game Studios bought Double Helix right after Strider released, ensuring that the devs probably won’t ever get the chance to improve on their formula.

It’s been almost a decade since Hiryu got his own game. He most recently showed up in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, and Capcom threw Strider fans a bone with the character Zeku in Street Fighter V, who has a Hiryu-style skin and is said to be the dude who founded the entire Strider order. All of this is neat, but it’s baffling that Hiryu - despite being one of the coolest ninjas in gaming - has never had a solo title truly take off since his debut. Some of this might be due to the fact that Capcom has to credit (and presumably pay) Moto Kikaku whenever Hiryu appears, and one could argue that the original arcade game’s balls-to-the-wall action and high difficulty don’t have a place in Capcom’s catalog any longer, or at least aren’t as money-printing as new Monster Hunters and Resident Evils. But I think you could easily make something like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice starring Strider Hiryu, and I wish someone would. After all, we’re talking about one cool ass Cold War ninja here, and he deserves to shine once more.

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If you follow me on Twitter, you might’ve seen that my brother recently gifted me a Steam Deck for a wedding present. Being the educated soul that I am, my first priority with this impressive handheld was not to play the shiny new remake of Resident Evil 4, but to put emulators and ROMs on it so I could successfully play games released three decades ago.

One of these games was 1992’s Master of Darkness, which was released for both the Sega Master System and the Game Gear. Master of Darkness has at least three names depending on its platform and region, and the few people who’ve written about it on the internet have called it Vampire, Vampire: Master of Darkness or In The Wake of Vampire, creating the illusion that this lone game is an entire franchise.

But Master of Darkness is the exact opposite of a franchise - rather, it’s a single title that Sega released to mimic Castlevania when Konami’s series was still a Nintendo exclusive. It falls fully in clone territory, and I first became aware of this game when I was a kid reading through the section on The Castlevania Dungeon about “Castlevania-like games.” There, it’s described as “worth a shot, if only to see the shamelessness.”

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I’ll dare to make a hot take and call that a harsh analysis of Master of Darkness, though maybe I just have a high tolerance for obscure games that resemble more famous titles when you squint. Master of Darkness is far from the crappiest Castlevania clone I’ve played (that award goes to Castle of Shadows, a piece of mobile shovelware that’s no longer available on any app stores), and there’s a special kind of B-movie charm that the game radiates.

Instead of putting you in the role of a buff Belmont vampire hunter, for instance, you play a London occultism expert dubbed Ferdinand Social - a truly top-tier name for a protagonist. Social learns that Dracula is going to wreak havoc thanks to his trusty ouija board, which sends him an eerie message one night and serves as Master of Darkness’ creative password screen. Taking his knife in hand, Social pursues leads to the Thames and faces Jack the Ripper, who’s collecting bodies to fuel Dracula’s resurrection. Social’s journey then takes him to a creepy house of wax, a graveyard, a laboratory, and finally Transylvania itself.

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It’s an interesting selection of levels, and while you’ll occasionally have to navigate Social through stained glass towers filled with swinging pendulums exported from just about any Castlevania, there are also some original moments. The house of wax, in particular, really makes the skin crawl with poltergeist-animated furniture and creepy women in white who only become alive after you move past them. The late 1800s setting also adds a Hammer Horror-esque flair to Master of Darkness that sets it apart from Castlevania, a series primarily known for its pre-Victorian vampire killing romps (with the exception of a handful of entries - most notably Bloodlines and Portrait of Ruin, neither of which had been released back in ‘92).

But while Master of Darkness’ levels might be charming for evoking the same aesthetic as '70s British horror, they drag with repetitive design. Each level relies way too much on stairs, and while Social isn’t as annoying to control on staicases as Simon Belmont was, Simon always traversed through tight levels that never got monotonous. In contrast, each level of Master of Darkness is huge, and after the twentieth staircase, it all starts to blend together. The game also has a habit of locking the player in a single room and forcing them to survive a gauntlet of foes, which becomes old fast. Then there’s the last level - a labyrinth of interconnected screens that’s just as much fun as most labyrinths are in video games.

Master of Darkness could’ve benefited from tighter level design for sure. And to stand out from Castlevania, it also could’ve done away with Dracula as a big boss, since his final appearance is pretty unmemorable anyway. Any other famous horror presence would’ve helped this game stand out from its competition, and besides, Ferdinand Social seems like an everyman sort of dude. I can easily see his ouija board warning him about Frankenstein’s monster, a demon lord or some other denizen of evildom.

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Social never got a chance to fight alternate baddies, since Castlevania stopped being a Nintendo exclusive when Bloodlines hit the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis in '94, and I doubt that a huge contingent of Sega owners wanted the clone once the real thing was accessible. Still, something about Master of Darkness sticks with me, and it’s certainly worthy of an afternoon if you enjoy emulating forgotten gems with say, a Steam Deck.

Honestly, I kinda wish some studio would get the rights from Sega for a remake. I doubt they’re interested, but Lizardcube - the company that made Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap and Streets of Rage 4 - would be a great choice. Drop the Dracula stuff for a focus on other gothic icons, fix the repetitive levels, invest in hand-drawn art, and boom, you’ve got something that could win a niche yet loyal audience, especially since Castlevania is now a series pretty much stuck in limbo. Personally, if I were in charge of the never-will-happen Master of Darkness reboot, I’d make Jack the Ripper the main bad guy. Maybe Jack’s killing victims to power some kind of immortality soul engine, and Ferdinand Social has to navigate through ten London landmarks to bring him to justice, culminating in an awesome fight on the clock hands of Big Ben. Now that’s a plot worthy of a Hammer flick.

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Whenever I look on Steam it seems like another digital card game’s popping up. Apparently, the most recent hotness is Marvel Snap? I’m not especially informed, since when I play video games, I generally prefer to get lost in single-player, story-rich stuff. Also, if I’m going to play with cards, I’d rather hold ‘em between my actual fingers - though to be frank, I don’t play physical card games too often, or at least one-on-one stuff like Magic: The Gathering. This is largely due to the fact that I don’t like losing. I wouldn’t say I have a competitive personality, but when I’m up against a single foe, I’m awfully self-conscious about getting my butt whooped. (Cooperative or story-based card games like Arkham Horror are another thing.)

Whining aside, there are exceptions to my “meh” feelings toward 1v1 digital card games, and the biggest one is Duelyst, which can best be described as Hearthstone with strategic positioning. In Duelyst, you choose one of several factions - Lyonar (paladin types), Songhai (vaguely Asian), Vetruvian (desert robots), Abyssian (basically the Zerg from Starcraft), Magmar (kaiju) and Vanar (snow people). After choosing a faction, you proceed to select your units, each of which is represented by a single card. There’s also a neutral faction to help fill out your deck. Finally, once you’ve got your troops assembled, you duke it out with other folks online.

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Don’t get me wrong; while I might like Duelyst, I’m not great at it. I lose regularly and haven’t managed to break Silver on the seasonal ladder yet. I’m also sort of anti-social, perhaps due to the anxiety I feel around losing, and I have a grand total of 0 people on my friend list. But there’s just something to Duelyst that draws me, and if I had to pinpoint it, I’d probably highlight the delicious pixel art and the appeal of actually moving little characters around a board.

To put this another way, I’m of the opinion that Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the best games in its franchise, and Duelyst is reminiscent of FFT, minus the rotating polygonal map. Sure, you choose a “deck” of sorts, but instead of watching pieces of paper fly around as in Hearthstone, you get to see a nicely-animated sprite slice up another nicely-animated sprite. As I said before, if I’m gonna play with cards, I’d rather hold 'em in my hands - but Duelyst circumvents this desire by making its “cards” exquisitely “video gamey.” Reminding me of Final Fantasy Tactics at the same time is a nice cherry on top.

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Duelyst also holds a special place for me because it’s one of the first projects I ever Kickstarted. Originally crowdfunded in 2013, Duelyst was made by Counterplay Games, who described it as the final form of a homebrew tabletop game that ex-Diablo III and Rogue Legacy devs worked on in their spare time. It was supposed to be a one-time purchase designed for fast and furious tactical combat, and it looked pretty as heck. I backed Duelyst right after Mighty No. 9 (which turned out to be a turd) and Hyper Light Drifter (def not a turd; I wrote about it here). I was there for all the drama when the devs decided that the game was going to be a free-to-player affair instead of a stand-alone purchase, and I was also there when Bandai Namco got the publishing rights and shut Duelyst down in 2020 despite promises of steady support.

That was a supremely sad move, but three years later, Dream Sloth Games acquired the rights to release a spiritual successor in the form of Duelyst II. The game’s largely the same as the original with fewer, rebalanced cards, which might irk hardcore players but is something I can deal with. Thankfully, the first iteration of Duelyst is included in Duelyst II as a legacy freebie, and it’s also available on duelyst.gg as an impressive fanmade recreation. To make this revival even sweeter, at the end of 2022, Duelyst’s source code was released to the public under Creative Commons, ensuring that pixelated card tactics will live on in multiple formats forever.

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This is an amazing resurrection for a title that was considered dead in the water just a little while ago, and there’s some stuff I’d like to see in the future if the game continues to evolve. A story mode a la Gwent would be neat - Duelyst’s certainly got enough unlockable lore to support such a thing, and several animated trailers were released in 2016 that fired up my imagination regarding the game’s world. Then again, maybe those are just my single-player roots showing.

Even if a story mode never manifests, I’m grateful to see one of the only digital card experiences to truly absorb me alive and thriving. I’ll continue playing Duelyst on and off for a long while, and I hope that the game’s new iterations attract a legion of fresh fans. Just don’t necessarily ask me to play with you - I’m perfectly glad messing around with Vanar in my own private time, filling the board with ice and being as happily anti-social as always.

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I rewatched all of the Indiana Jones movies lately, coincidentally just in time for the trailer of the new one, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. After I replayed Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis last year and realized that Indy was way more of a tomb raider than I remembered him to be, I was a little nervous about revisiting these films. I needn’t have worried too much - wonky portrayal of India aside, the movies still hold up well. There are colonial overtones if you bother to analyze things with a 2022 mindset, sure, but the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark still has to be one of the best sequences I’ve ever seen on film. The same goes for the mine carts in Temple of Doom and the tank scene in Last Crusade. Even Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which I tolerate more than most, has a few moments of pulpy goodness, nuclear fridges aside.

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This brings me to Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures for the Super Nintendo, one of the few video games that decided to capture the magic of all of Dr. Jones’ then-current films. I first saw a screenshot of it as a kid in Issue #9 of The Adventurer, a magazine that LucasArts put out to advertise their products, and I thought it looked neat as hell. A game full of levels inspired by all three Indy movies?! Genius! I never actually played it as a child, since I didn’t have a SNES growing up, but the concept stuck with me. And so after I finished watching the films I decided to give Greatest Adventures a whirl, since it’s easily accessible by emulation these days.

The game, published by LucasArts but developed by Factor 5 and JVC Musical Industries, runs on the same engine as JVC’s three Super Star Wars titles. I haven’t played those, but a quick look online shows that they’re renowned for being hard as hell and featuring levels that take quite a few liberties from what was in the movies. (Remember how Luke had to go toe-to-toe against a Sarlacc pit monster in the beginning of A New Hope?)

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Greatest Adventures doesn’t stray quite as far from the source material, though the last boss of the game is a goofy skeleton version of Donovan after he drinks from the wrong Holy Grail. For the most part, though, you’ve got traditional platforming stages inspired by most of the major moments in each film, like Indy exploring the Well of Souls, beating up Thuggees in the tunnels beneath Pankot Palace, and facing the traps leading up to the resting place of the Holy Grail. Every now and then you’ll get a level that expands upon something not really seen in the films - for instance, a snow section that shows Indy in Nepal trying to reach Marion’s bar. Then there are what I like to call “gimmick” levels that present you with a key moment from the movies, like Indy running from a giant boulder at the beginning of Raiders or avoiding gunshots in a nightclub in Temple of Doom, and these break up the standard platforming by forcing you to run forward to survive or duck behind cover. Finally, there are three levels that take advantage of the SNES’ fancy Mode 7 chip, placing you in a 3D perspective. Temple of Doom gets two of these, mimicking the life raft plane jump in the Himalayas and the mine cart chase. Last Crusade gets the final one, presenting the moment when Indy and his dad escaped a zeppelin via biplane and had to shoot down some Nazis.

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It’s all standard SNES platforming goodness, though the game is pretty darn hard. Indy controls well (though for some reason his whip is a far better weapon than his gun) but as the game ramps up you can expect to find a lot of inconveniently placed enemies (like birds, a la Ninja Gaiden) designed to trip up your jumps and bleed your health meter. The latter Last Crusade levels in particular start putting you up against Nazi mechanics and guys from the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword who can throw wrenches and knives in a perfect arc that always seems to hit you, and it’s a fine recipe for frustration. There’s also one level where you’ve got to swing from your whip between the windows of Castle Brunwald, and man is it kind of impossible.

I also wish there was more of an equal distribution of levels between the three movies, since Raiders gets 12 stages while Temple of Doom and Last Crusade only get 8. Also, I would’ve liked to see Indy’s sidekicks present. Greatest Adventures depicts the story of each film as kind of a streamlined alternate take where Indy’s alone all the time, and while Marion and Professor Jones Sr. show up in cutscenes (and notably the Game Over screen), others like Short Round and Willie Scott are nowhere to be seen. Willie, I guess I can do without, but not including Short Round is a crime, especially when they could’ve easily designed a Mode 7 chase scene with him driving a car as Indy escapes Shanghai.

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These quibbles aside, playing Greatest Adventures with save states neutralizes a lot of the frustration, and for an Indy fan, there’s much to like here - from the lovingly-recreated John Williams score to the occasional stage that really rewards fans of the movies. For instance, Raiders’ infamous swordsman in black shows up at the end of the game’s Cairo levels, and instead of proving to be a major boss encounter, all you’ve got to do is shoot him once to move on, just like in the film. There’s also a Last Crusade boss battle aboard a tank where you can’t use any other weapons but your fists to punch Colonel Ernst Vogel into submission, and you’ve got to do it before the tank rolls off a cliff, too. Good attention to film detail there!

The era of licensed video game tie-ins for films is more or less over, so I doubt we’ll see anything in the form of electronic entertainment when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes out. (Bethesda does have the Indy license and is supposed to deliver an original game that might coincide with the movie’s release, but they’ve been silent on that front for a year, so we’ll see what happens.) With this in mind, I do recommend giving Greatest Adventures a run-through if you’ve got a high tolerance for old-school platforming or at least want to relive Indy’s glory days before the new movie releases. Along with Fate of Atlantis, it’s probably the only 2D Indy game worth replaying by today’s standards.

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