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She also gives a massive support boost to Lea. Not quite as high as the one Barzelphen gets from Benette, but it's still insanely beefy.

While you could definitely argue Reese for A Tier, I don't think Furniture is a point in his favor at all. Most of the benefits he gets are either niche (bird figurine, +13 hit in Forests), not great (Hope, +3 Avoid), or complete memes (Deer Mount, +3 Crit Avoid) for prices that completely rip you off. Armsthrift ain't exactly great since it only has a flat 20% of working, so it really doesn't boost durability that much. Extra Gram uses are good, but I wouldn't say they're worth 22k worth of gold. About the only good pieces are the Tapestry and potentially the Vase depending on who you want to recurit. And I can't deny, those can be pretty great. Still, Reese just doesn't have good combat in general outside his Prfs. His bulk is actually rather low at a base 26 HP and 5 Def, with promotion only bumping it up to 29 and 7 Def. That's what less than what someone like Arthur starts with. Combined with his relatively low skill rates and high brackets, I'd actually say Reese is more on the bottom half of the list when it comes to combat. He at least makes up for it utility though.

Tom & Jerry Parody in Simpsons/10

Banned because I don't have an Odyssey Console.

Heyo I know this is SUPER late. I never got a notification about your reply and I'm not on the site a lot. But if you're still interested in all this time I'd love to discuss it more

They're all blue, Mr Thunder.

I mean, does it look like the guy has any pockets? He probably just keeps collecting the same few over and over again as he keeps dropping them.

society owes madeline a debt greater than can ever be repaid

79,578 this is gonna take forever. I looked at when the thread started and we still have a lot to go even at this rate

Just read the first issue - fantastically novel concept, will be interesting to see how the format adapts to the increasingly extraordinary events that occur over the course of the year!

Previous instalment: Sonic Chaos (SEGA Master System & Game Gear, 1993) And so we come to the third and final game of 1993’s Sonic Mania Day. To recap, the centrepiece of the show was Sonic CD, the gaiden-esque sequel to the original game that was headed by the half of the Sonic the Hedgehog duo that hasn’t been convicted of insider trading, while Sonic Chaos offered yet another middling attempt to bring the Sonic formula to SEGA’s 8-bit systems (and the second outing developed by Aspect). So, what of the third game? With the 16- and 8-bit systems each receiving a fully-featured platformer of their own, surely SEGA wouldn’t cannibalise their own market by doubling up with another Naka-headed entry to the franchise? Well, no. Yuji Naka and co. were, at this time, beavering away on their own project, so this third entry would logically have to be something new by someone new. Or not quite someone new, as the case may be. In a two-fer for firsts, November 1993 brings us SEGA Technical Institute’s Sonic Spinball, the first game in the series developed by a Western team, and its first spinoff. I mean, if you want to really get into the weeds, this game is predated by Sonic Eraser, SegaSonic Waku Waku Patrol Car and SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter Galaxy Patrol, but the former of these is Puyo Puyo clone released to a long defunct, Japan-exclusive download service, while the latter two are mall rides and hardly count as games in the first place. So yeah, Sonic’s first spin-off. “Hey, what gives?!” I hear you specifically, dear reader, exclaim, “I thought the first American to work on Sonic was that one guy from MTV Cribs, and that game only came out in 2010!” Despite what certain characters would have you believe, the American side of SEGA has had a hand in Sonic almost since the nascency of the Naka and Ohshima’s brainchild. In particular, three names stand out as instrumental in shaping not just Sonic’s international image, but Sonic’s image, period. The first of these, Madeline Schroeder, then product manager at SEGA of America, made crucial tweaks to Sonic’s very world and cast, reportedly pushing for the removal of Sonic’s human girlfriend Madonna, along with a band comprised of other animal friends that would have featured in the original game’s sound test feature – both changes made allegedly to make Sonic better appeal to American audiences as well as those in Japan. Second is Al Nilsen, whose approach of a guerilla marketing campaign for Sonic and the SEGA Genesis undoubtedly had an indelible effect in defining the particulars of Sonic’s 90s edge and “get-it-done attitude” (which, in the words of Ohshima, was in fact inspired by presidential sex pest Bill Clinton – as far as we know, Sonic most definitely did not have sexual relations with that woman). Finally, there’s Greg Martin, the member of this trio least in need of introduction. The odds are you’ve seen his art long before you started reading this thread, famous for its depiction of Sonic with a three-quill mohawk and a prominent crease in the middle of his brow (colloquially referred to as assface Sonic – whether that’s affectionate depends on who you ask). While I’ve little love for this particular design, Martin’s work is nevertheless iconic, and among the greater galleries of video game box art for its vibrant details and lovingly rendered shading, particularly on the metallic surfaces of Eggman’s badniks. When Sonic was introduced to the world and instantly became a cultural icon, the western influence reverberated and was amplified in the franchise’s early extended media in the west. The most prominent examples of such extended media from this team are the two 1993 animated series produced by DiC. The first of these, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, skewed towards a younger demographic and arguably represented a relatively more faithful depiction of the source material, presenting the, well, adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog in a stylised world alongside his buddy Tails as they thwart the bumbling Doctor Ivo Robotnik’s many schemes-of-the-week in a zany episodic format. I’d argue this series has had less of an impact on the canon of Sonic (other than originating his love of chilli dogs), but it is nevertheless fondly remembered, thanks in large part to Long John Baldry’s iconic performance as Robotnik, which inspired an entire genre of YTP in the infancy of YouTube that remains strong to this day. As an aside, this cartoon would inspire its own spin-off game, Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, but I won’t be covering that in this series, given that it’s just another Puyo Puyo reskin, a la Sonic Eraser. The second series, simply titled Sonic the Hedgehog (but better known as Sonic SatAM, in reference to its original Saturday morning air slot), ended up having much more of an impact on the Sonic mythos. Although it retained Adventures of’s casting of Jaleel White as Sonic (still considered the definitive voice of the character by a not-insignificant portion of the community), pretty much everything else about this series was about as far away from AoStH as you could get. Instead of focusing on the light-hearted mishaps of Sonic and Tails as they terrorised a largely incompetent and childish Robotnik, SatAM placed Sonic within a group of freedom fighters broadly based on the small animal friends from the first game, alongside a few original characters, fighting to restore the deposed monarchy of the Kingdom of Acorn in an industrial dystopia against the regime that overthrew it, led by a far more cunning and ruthless Doctor Julian Robotnik, portrayed here by the equally brilliant Jim Cummings. While the specific elements that this series codified haven’t exactly stuck around in the main Sonic canon (such as roboticization, a much darker take on the game’s process of sticking animals inside robots as batteries, here instead comprising the physical conversion of flesh and blood into steel and oil), it is very much an encapsulation of everything Sonic was in the west of the 90s and can be credited with expanding the world and characters of the franchise far beyond what was present in the games, as well as arguably being the first piece of media to offer a truly menacing depiction of the Eggman. And all of this very much comes through within Sonic Spinball. While not strictly set within the world of the cartoon, this game does borrow many elements from it, the plot tasking Sonic with travelling through Robotnik’s Veg-O-Fortress, built atop Mount Mobius, in order to trigger a volcanic eruption that will obliterate the massive roboticizer built into the heart of the fortress. However, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill Sonic platformer. As the title has already made apparent, Sonic Spinball is a pinball spin-off (try saying that five times fast). Gameplay occurs across four themed pinball tables – Toxic Caves, Lava Powerhouse, The Machine and Showdown. The objective in each of these is to activate various features of the table in order to make accessible and collect the Chaos Emeralds within the stage (between three and five in each – please do not ponder how this squares with the established lore of there being seven emeralds), thereby granting access to the level’s boss. In terms of game feel, Sonic Spinball is generally pretty solid. I should note that I’m not really a pinball connoisseur, so maybe I can’t speak with much authority, but the core physics generally behave as I expected them to, in spite of a feeling of slowdown that was persistent enough to be noticeable but otherwise seems to have been accounted for within the game’s design such that it never became detrimental to my performance, nor grating in its frequency. Sonic (the ball, by the way, in case that wasn’t obvious) can be influenced with the d-pad while airborne, with a satisfying degree of control afforded to this mechanic, so players aren’t reliant solely on their skill with the flippers in order to get Sonic where they want him to go – a much appreciated feature for novices like myself. The only other point of note in game feel is that the game’s various on-foot sections feel fairly sluggish, but this isn’t a huge deal given their brevity and infrequency, as well as the fact that some measure of snappiness can be achieved with Sonic’s spindash, performed as it is in other games, though understandably with nowhere near as much potency. Unfortunately, such reserved compliments do not extend to Sonic Spinball’s design, credited to Peter Morawiec and Hoyt Ng. To the game’s credit, the levels are all quite creative in concept, featuring characterful table elements that aspire to do more than would be possible were the ball not a living character. Even in just the first stage, Sonic can be seen riding a minecart down a shaft in the middle of the table, or dropping under a set of flippers into what would normally be a dead zone in order to hitch a ride on an oil drum through toxic waste. However, the technical execution of these levels is a complete mess, so much so that it’s difficult to really figure out where to begin in picking them apart. The tables themselves are all huge, and the screen real estate only allows for around a tenth of the table’s height and a sixth of its width to be shown at any given time. Naturally, this radically diminishes the breadth of information that can be gleaned from what’s onscreen compared to traditional pinball games which show much more of the table at once, even when considering the game’s attempt to accommodate such limitations by delineating the playable area into several smaller tables. Despite this limited field of view, the layout of the tables themselves, in conjunction with the tasks to be carried out on each of them, often require a pretty high degree of precision in getting the ball to specific areas of the table, most frequently into narrow tubes or crevices. This is made even more of a hassle by frequent enemy spawns, which often hover just off the top of the screen when the ball is being held in the table’s flippers, so the number of times I fired off what would’ve been a well-placed shot, only to be sent careening back towards the bottom of the table by an enemy I couldn’t have accounted for happened more times than I care to count. If you’re able to overcome all this and get to the top of the table with all the level’s Chaos Emeralds in tow, you then get to fight its boss. I wouldn’t say the bosses are the best part of the game necessarily, but they’re pretty solid in both concept and execution. As with standard Sonic bosses up to this point, there’s no waiting time involved in these bosses, as there’s always something you can do in service of landing hits on the boss, even if you’re not whaling on the boss itself, which has a much beefier health bar than bosses in the platformers to counterbalance the game’s mechanics and movement allowing for multiple hits to be racked up much more easily. Additionally, every hit you score is remembered even upon falling out of the boss area so, while having to make your way back up the table to the boss (usually from the very bottom), that’s your only punishment for failure in this instance. Unfortunately, these bosses are also quite negatively impacted by the screen crunch that afflicts the rest of the game. Each boss has specific defences that must be navigated in order to score hits, but the trouble is that you most often won’t see these until you’ve already committed to launching the ball, and being ejected from the boss arena as a result of failing to bypass such defences isn’t an infrequent occurrence. This is particularly egregious on the game’s final table, where Sonic can only land hits on Eggman by first repeatedly hitting a button on the underside of his capsule in order to remove his defences, a grabbing claw and windsock on each side of the capsule, both very capable of sending Sonic back to the main table. Since the button and the defences generally aren’t onscreen simultaneously, feedback on when it’s safe to make an effort to hit Eggman is virtually non-existent, made even worse by the fact that hitting the button too much will subsequently reinstate his defences. As bad as all these design issues seem, they’re ultimately secondary to a much more fundamental problem, that being the format of the game itself. While the marriage of platformer and pinball games is a novel one, the resulting hybrid ends up being the worst of each genre. With four stages to trek through in a linear order, each offering only a smattering of objectives relative to actual pinball tables, the game doesn’t have a wealth of content to speak of, yet the linear nature of the game is one that keeps pushing the player forward. This, combined with the narrow field of view and relatively sparse (though unfortunately nonetheless convoluted) table layouts, really discourages score attacking. Even worse is how this format affects progression and difficulty. While the game is constructed as a linear experience, difficulty seems to be balanced around the moment-to-moment pinball gameplay. What I mean by this is that you start each play session with three lives and, with no saving functionality to speak of (at least within the game itself, I allowed myself savestates between each level in the Steam release, as well as in specific points in each level depending on how fed up I was with the game’s shenanigans), success entails a straight shot through the four levels right to the final boss with no game overs, your only reprieve being that a new live is granted every 20 million cumulative points (score is persistent through all levels rather than being reset between each). As a result, Sonic Spinball is a markedly punishing game to newcomers, with several of my runs dying at the first and second levels as I became acquainted with the game’s controls and design. The best place to try and recoup lost lives or gain extra is the game’s bonus levels. These take the form of small and more traditional pinball tables, with everything playing out on a single screen. The goal in each of this mini game’s three variants is to hit some form of table element a certain number of times. The first of these takes the form of several capsules which contain Tails and cameo appearances from Sonic SatAM’s freedom fighters, who must be freed while also contending with a miniature Robotnik drives back and forth in the foreground region of the table; the second is a moving dome modelled after Eggman’s head, the teeth of which must all be knocked out to win; while the last is an egg prison (the large animal container at the end of Sonic 1 and 2’s boss acts) surrounded by a ring of clucks (themselves modelled after Scratch from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog). These tables are largely inoffensive but for two things: First, the table is shown in a perspective view, stretching away from the player, rather than orthographic one, making aiming a lot harder than it needs to be. Second, the gap between the table’s flippers is just big enough that the ball will sometimes come back down the table in such a way that there’s absolutely no way to stop it from just falling into the dead zone. So while these sections of the game are supposed to ease the pressure of the game’s stinginess with lives, they really just end up introducing their own frustrations. While I think there’s perhaps a valid debate to be had on the value that lives and game overs bring to games, I don’t think Sonic Spinball is a good advocate for their existence - frankly, this is the most I’ve wanted to give up on a game so far in this series (though I did use savestates much more liberally in the 8-bit platformers, which likely wouldn’t have been so easy to swallow otherwise). Thing is, even mastery has brought me little joy. A week or so after starting the game, I put it down again as I travelled abroad for two weeks, during which time I didn’t play it at all. Upon my return, I had apparently internalised the learning from all my early failures and blew through the first two levels with speed and ease. And yet the gratification rewarded for this proficiency was minimal. And perhaps this is unfair – maybe I just don’t gel with pinball games, but it was nevertheless my gameplay experience, and at the end of the day that’s all I can speak to in these writeups. Still, if there’s one thing I’ve hoped to impress upon the audience of this thread, it’s that there’s value in Sonic games well beyond the technical gameplay experience, and Sonic Spinball certainly presents an interesting case in this regard. The reason why I spent three paragraphs near the top of the post on the American perspective of Sonic’s development is because the presentation of Sonic Spinball very much epitomises that vision of the property. Environmental aesthetics have much more of an edge to them, with a focus on grungy industrial areas, evoking the same kind of vibes as the environmental paintings of Sonic SatAM. Meanwhile, Sonic and his enemies sport designs that are very much in line with Greg Martin’s cover artworks. This time around, art duties have been handled by Tom Payne, Craig Stitt, Brenda Ross, Katsuhiko Sato and Kurt Peterson – if those first three names are stirring memories, that’s because they constitute the STI artists that worked alongside Yuji Naka’s team on Sonic 2. Of note in this regard are various level terrain tiles in Toxic Caves and Lava Powerhouse which display Stitt’s triangular shading style, most prolific in Sonic 2’s scrapped Hidden Palace Zone, as well as tiles for The Machine, which were repurposed from Tom Payne’s unused art for Sonic 2’s scrapped Cyber City level – this video, released by The Video Game History Foundation while I was writing the Sonic CD post, goes into detail on this topic and more. Cards on the table, I’ve never had much love for this conception of Sonic and his world. Although I did grow up with the entirety of Sonic SatAM available to me on a 2-DVD collection, this was during the early-mid 00s, about a decade after that series was first running and a few years removed from the watershed year of 1998, which was responsible for a lot of consolidation of the two canons of Sonic into something that was more cohesive. As such, my perception of the Sonic setting has always largely been that presented by the Japanese side of the franchise, otherwise known as SegaSonic, so I’m already a little bit predisposed to some negativity towards the presentation of Sonic Spinball. With that said, I think the game’s art puts up a pretty good showing in a lot of ways. The environments of the Veg-O Fortress are intricately detailed, and every bit as stylised as the locales of the Mega Drive platformers developed by Sonic Team, though the increased use of tiling and asset flipping in comparison to those games does leave Spinball’s levels feeling more video game-y, as opposed to the living yet fantastical locations of South Island and Westside Island, which boast a large variety of terrain shapes to break up such repetition. I also feel that Lava Powerhouse and The Machine suffer from oversaturation in their foreground colours, which makes them a little much for the eyes, especially when also adorned by various eclectic pinball lights and signage, but the technicals of Sonic Spinball’s environment art are otherwise pretty solid, even if that art doesn’t quite fit alongside what we’ve seen up until now. Character art perhaps comes off a little worse for wear. Sonic himself, while very expressive and fairly fluidly animated, is drawn in such a way that his head is rendered as a ball with thin, noodly spines protruding from it, rather than the spines organically flowing out of the head to create a single, cohesive shape. It’s a small change on paper (and admittedly a decision that is present within some very specific sprites in Sonic 2), but nevertheless one that inhibits the appeal of Sonic’s design and looks rather amateurish when animations call for the back of his head to be visible. Likewise, the enemy designs here are all fairly bland and unappealing compared to the altogether cuter badniks of Sonic Team’s games, while also not benefitting Sonic’s abundance of animation frames. Of this cast of ne’er-do-wells, I’d say the lowlights are Ferron, a nondescript rotund hazmat suit carrying what seems to be some kind of hook, and Buster, a monkey in a spacesuit with a propellor attached to his helmet. These, along with most other enemies, I think display a lack of understanding of the design philosophy that produced great badniks to begin with, specifically in how to keep the shapes simple, and when it’s most appropriate to substitute an organic feature with a robotic approximation (such as the six legs of a ladybug being replaced by a singular tyre in the design of the Motobug). At any rate, all the art here is still technically competent, and even the weak points fail to offend my eyes in any meaningful way. As with the art, the music of Sonic Spinball, composed by series newcomer Howard Drossin evokes a rough and oppressive atmosphere. Within the wider Genesis pantheon, Drossin is a bit of a rockstar. While Spinball marks his SEGA debut, he’s perhaps best known for his work on Comix Zone, another STI production. That game is scored by compositions reminiscent of 90s rock artists such as Nirvana, and, while I wouldn’t say I hear the beginnings of such a style in Spinball, there’s undeniably an edge to things. Gone are Sonic 2’s approximations of acoustic instruments, swapped out for compositions which much more heavily feature synths and heavy, booming percussion. On the one hand, I think the music feels very much like an extension of the levels themselves in a way that even Masato Nakamura’s scores don’t for Sonic 1 and 2. If the music of those games sounds as if Sonic is being followed by a band, the music in Spinball sounds as if it’s being played by the levels themselves in a way that’s a little indescribable. On the other hand, the instrumentation is largely quite rough. It seems that Drossin composed this project with the aid of GEMS, a tool created by Jon Miller to make the Genesis music production pipeline as smooth as possible for composers who, for various reasons, weren’t making their music by coding it in hex, nor had members of the team dedicated to make those compositions shine on the YM2612 sound chip. You can get a fuller explanation of the tool from this video, but the relevance to my critique of Sonic Spinball’s music is that it seems that Drossin didn’t make a whole lot of changes to GEMS’ default soundbank patches, so the end product is very much undeveloped compared to his later works, not to mention very harsh on the ears. This is best heard in the game’s options and scoreboard music, its sawtooth lead emulating charge running through a tesla coil that drowns out the surrounding instruments to a comedic degree as it deafens the listener. Even looking past the instrumentation, I can only remember around half of the game’s compositions, only two of which I actually enjoy, being the aforementioned options music (yes, I’m deranged) and the theme for Lava Powerhouse. Still a better batting average than Sonic Chaos, at least. Otherwise, general sound design is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the game does have some really kickass pinball table noises, my favourite being low-pitched boops of the warp tunnels that transport you between areas of the table. On the other, many sounds, like the game’s music, are just way too harsh on the ears. By far the worst offender here is the sound effect for hitting a boss – a piercing, static-filled shriek that assaults the ears. It’s a thematically cool choice, but it’s just downright unpleasant. Even outside the most extreme examples, the problem with Sonic Spinball’s sound direction writ large is that it’s trying too hard to be distinct. While the traditional Sonic platformers indeed benefit from their iconic sound effects and catchy music, Spinball is a game that has you repeating a lot of actions in succession, which means repeating a lot of sound effects, and the harsh synths that score your gameplay generally don’t last more than two minutes before looping. Meanwhile, you’ll likely be spending somewhere in the region of 10-20 minutes on each table on a successful run – plenty of time for things to get stale. I wonder if the auditory experience of the game might be improved by replacing the soundtrack with that of Sonic CD’s US score, which can definitely provide the appropriate level of edge and gravitas, but is much more subtle and atmospheric, and thus less prone to noticeable repetition. Despite everything, I find it difficult to resent Sonic Spinball. Don’t get me wrong, I very much did not enjoy my time with the game, and placing it at any higher than a low-C tier would be overly charitable of me, but it was also made under conditions that were far from ideal, for reasons that will be explained in a future instalment of this thread. According to Peter Morawiec in an interview with Sega-16, the team only had a paltry nine months to bring the game to fruition, with drastic changes being visible between each of Spinball’s pre-release tradeshow demos. Even the addition of talented contractor programmers like Denis Kobel and Lee Actor, who coded the game in C at a time when assembly was the norm, did little in the face of the reality that Spinball needed more time to cook. With that in mind, a lot of Spinball’s flaws and lack of polish become a lot more understandable – the team had to commit to a vision and they needed to do so very early on. And with that in mind, it’s a miracle that this game exists at all - just temper your expectations if you plan to give it a spin…ball. But what about the 8-bit version? Yes, it’s a two-fer this instalment! Like Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 before it, Sonic Spinball also got an 8-bit companion piece for the Master System and Game Gear. Thankfully this wasn’t developed by STI on top of the 16-bit version’s tight production deadline, but by the catchily-named SEGA Interactive Development Division, releasing a few months after the main event in…well, nobody cared enough to make record of the release, apparently. Sonic Retro, the most accurate source for information surrounding these games, places the Game Gear version as a September 1994 release, with the Master System version following a little after that in January 1995, but even searching for magazine ads for this version to glean a proper release date from doesn’t turn up anything conclusive. Apparently 8-bit Sonic Spinball just showed up on store shelves one day and nobody thought to question it. Still, it’s more of a presence than this version got in Japan, which only ever received the 16-bit version of the game. So I’m fudging the numbers on this, up until now, chronological retrospective, but it’s with good reason that I’m doing so. Unlike with Sonic 1 and 2, the 8-bit rendition this time around is very much an imitation of its console big brother, recreating the level design and graphics of the original game to a lower spec. Granted, it’s not a perfect translation – the more intricate table elements of the original are nowhere to be seen, and the game’s music is almost entirely different, along with a suite of new bonus stages to replace the traditional pinball tables of the Mega Drive version, but the intent is clearly there. And ultimately there’s not enough that is new to justify me giving this version of the game its own distinct writeup. So far as I can recall, I’ve heard more in fan communities over the years about this version of the game than the “true” version (though not much of either, admittedly), and not for the right reasons. I can’t really remember specific complaints, I think outside from the physics being off, but there was certainly trepidation going into this one, not helped by my experiences with the 8-bit Sonics thus far. Imagine my surprise, then, when I breezed through this game within the space of an hour, and devoid of any of the feelings of frustration that 16-bit Sonic Spinball worked up in me. First thing’s first: Yes, the physics are absolutely off. The game is extremely floaty and there’s noticeably less nuance and variance in the directions Sonic will travel when hit by any given object one way or another. There’s not really much justifying this, given that Hal Laboratory released the much more sophisticated Revenge of the Gator for the less capable Game Boy a full five years before this game, not to mention there’s even a dedicated physics consultant listed in the game’s credits – one Dr Scott Gould! Besides the specific pinball physics, 8-bit Sonic Spinball is generally pretty sluggish, seeming to chug along in the same kind of way that the 16-bit version does, with Sonic’s on-foot movement being particularly lethargic, although he’s only in this state for about the same amount of time as in the Mega Drive version, give or take, so this isn’t a huge deal. Level designs are about as 1:1 with their original counterparts as can reasonably expected, even considering the adjustments. In particular, Toxic Pools removes the minecart section found in Toxic Caves and replaces it with a more traditional pinball table in the upper middle section of the level, Lava Powerhouse is almost a perfect recreation but for the fact that clucks don’t spawn in the steam vent area, The Machine is lacking the elevator gimmick that could be activated by performing a flipper hold on a couple of specific flippers, and The Final Showdown no longer features pulleys that need to be engaged to bring out additional flippers. Otherwise, the core shapes of each table are captured, with all emeralds being found in the same locations as on Mega Drive and the processes needed to acquire each being more or less identical. However, there is one specific point of difference that makes the 8-bit versions of these tables a far more pleasant time, that being that the field of view is greatly expanded. Being able to see so much more of the playfield at once allows for shots to be much better planned here and it’s frankly an embarrassment to the Mega Drive iteration of Spinball that it fumbled this aspect of gameplay while the Master System and Game Gear didn’t. As a bonus, the weaker hardware considerably inhibits the rate and quantity at which enemies can spawn, so there’s much less to get in your way, keeping the random elements persistent rather than intermittent. This kind of consideration by concession extends to 8-bit Spinball’s bosses too, in that the intricacies that make the 16-bit bosses as tricky as they are just can’t be replicated here. While Lava Powerhouse and The Machine retain the Roboiler and Veg-O Machine respectively, the latter is ridiculously easy in the Mega Drive game to begin with (hell, it might be slightly harder here, since it’s difficult to rack up consecutive hits inside the machine before falling out of the bottom) and the former’s upper platforms don’t seem to collapse at any point, making it much easier to wait for the best time to hop into Roboiler’s urn to attack. Furthermore, Roboiler’s only got two faces rather than the four of 16-bit Spinball, and the remaining face doesn’t become intangible when the first one is destroyed, making this a trivial boss to single-cycle. In Toxic Pools and The Final Showdown, different bosses do appear, seemingly due to sprite limitations, but both are extremely ineffectual. The first, an unnamed, flying mechanical Robotnik head…does nothing that I can remember. I honestly think all it can do is fly around. The final boss against Robotnik doesn’t fare any better, with the boss’ most effective defences being the grating sound effect of the electric coils on either side of the arena that indicate that the Eggman is inaccessible until you jump on four valves, and the aggressive sprite flickering that Robotnik exhibits while flying around upon being robbed of his barriers. The biggest obstacle here is flubbing a jump and falling out of the boss area, but this is entirely avoidable, given that there is ample space in the valve areas at the side of the arena for Sonic to remain in, stationary and on-foot, waiting for Robotnik to come to him. There is one aspect in which 8-bit Sonic Spinball is more miserly than the original, namely that the bosses do not retain scored hits if Sonic falls out of the boss arena. This is likely due to hardware restrictions, much like the fact that each boss exists on a separate screen to the rest of their table, but it’s more than accommodated for by the fact that falling out of the arena places Sonic in a position that’s practically right at the boss room’s entrance, rather than dropping him to the bottom of the table. It characterises this set of bosses perfectly – completely toothless, with any potential for threat or upset being completely filed away due to a combination of a wider field of view, more predictable ball movement, and perhaps necessary concessions on the game’s part that render any attempt at punishment for poor play basically inconsequential. Given the character of 8-bit Sonic so far, not to mention the reputation of 8-bit games in general, it’s all a bit bizarre. Also a bit bizarre are the game’s bonus stages. Rather than taking the form of miniature, traditional tables, these are instead a set of three rooms each, filled with rings and breakable containers, themselves containing more rings in addition to points and additional time. The goal here seems to be to grab as much as possible and getting out before the 90-second timer hits zero. I say “seems to be”, because the only real feedback I got from these was the one time I failed to reach the exit (more through lack of effort than anything else), upon which the game told me I had earned no score. Otherwise, there seems to be no minimum passing grade here. As long as you can unlock each room’s door by breaking just one container and get out before time’s up, whatever you grabbed in the stage gets added to your overall score tally, just as it does in the Mega Drive version. Truth be told, I didn’t make any effort to master these bonus stages because there was absolutely no need to. On top of everything else that makes playing this game like sliding a hot knife through butter, Sonic Spinball on the Master System and Game Gear is shockingly generous with its lives, very much unlike its console brethren. By default, you start with five lives and five continues, for a total of thirty lives from the off. Those five continues were completely unnecessary as it turns out – not once did I see the game over screen. Having had something of an ordeal with 16-bit Spinball, I really shouldn’t be complaining about the companion piece taking only a fraction of that amount of time to beat, but it’s all just so devoid of friction, and thus feeling. Every step the demake takes to make Sonic Spinball a more pleasant experience also robs the game of anything to make it stand out. It’s a poor pinball sim wearing Sonic Spinball’s clothing, a pale imitation with next to nothing of its own to offer. This is further evidenced in the game’s presentation. The graphics, produced by Sandy Christensen, Larry Flores, Kevin Lee and Michael Tamura, under the direction of Michael Chung and Maureen Kringen, are extremely faithful translations of the original 16-bit art. The reduced palette here forces economisation of colour usage in a way that does make everything a little more pleasant on the eyes, particularly in Lava Powerhouse, but it’s still just a lower grade version of something already seen. Likewise, the music, while original and distinct, stirs nothing in the cockles of my heart. Brought to us by Paul Gadbois, Dave Delia and Brad Scott Gish in addition to Howard Drossin, it sounds much less grating than the Mega Drives’ hard, scratchy synths, and the loops aren’t nearly as noticeable, but it’s even less memorable than the original sound track and, unlike that score, there’s no variety in the mood of each piece. Everything is the same genre of upbeat, arpeggiating square waves, with nothing interesting done using the available hardware at all, despite plenty of 8-bit games before this one showing that such mystique is absolutely possible on these systems, even within Sonic’s own catalogue. And that’s the Sonic Spinballs two. One, a game that belies a profound microcosm of Sonic’s western brand image of the time, but marred by frustrating design choices that are likely the marks of a poor development environment; the other, an attempt to cram the original vision onto systems that were perhaps not apt to handle it, removing all the claws but also all the character in the process. Despite the 8-bit version being far less aggravating to play, I do recommend that you opt for the 16-bit version if you’re interested in either, as the Mega Drive iteration at least warrants that interest, besides being a much more refined approximation of pinball physics. All that said, next time I’ll be looking at the final Sonic game for 1993 – hopefully the blue blur can end the year on a high.

I gotta ask though, IntSys the heck did you do with Engage? While there are major improvements, Ryujinx still struggles to run it in certain situations. For instance, the blizzard pastlear map (where I left off) chugs immensely. Meanwhile Sparks of Hope throws me into this absolute clusterfuck of particle effects and it runs without a hitch. Or, at least, negligible enough hitch that it's not really noticeable. How? I had very little expectations for Sparks of Hope...

True... It's not like there's a cheat code I can use to give myself all the resources so I don't have to ever bother with Fates's stupidest mechanic. Of course, how could there possibly be such a thing in my completely legit Nintendo PC that I use to play this game. Haha. Haha...

But this whole affair is how you get resources. Not like there is a convenient "collect everything" button.

I don't like them, I don't use them and I don't give them the time of day. To be completely fair, to get this line of dialogue you need to go up to him (presumably bringing your crotch along) and talk to him. A situation easily avoided by not going up to him and talking to him, like I do with all the royals. Grandmother is so cool though. She smuggles a mop into prison so she can tidy up her own cell. Then she gives said mop to Emma and Emma cleans house with it. And then she recruits Lea! Is there anything this woman cannot do?

I'm sure they meant more specifically tactics games with similar gameplay to Fire Emblem, not just the genre. Advance Wars for instance has no RPG elements. Your units are not characters and are expected to be spent like the resources they are. None of your unspent resources carry over into the next map. There's not even a "Hero Character" that causes a game over when he dies. It's more like a stripped down RTS that's turn based, and it even has that competitive multiplayer focus that Fire Emblem lacks. I would say FF Tactics clones are more prevalent than Fire Emblem ones. A Fire Emblem game has most if not all of: Permadeath, and a Lord character that causes a Game Over state on death. Parsable numbers (being able to calculate, down to the last digit, how much damage you're dealing and receiving in an interaction). You can plan on math, not just vibes low focus on Buffs/Debuffs/Status Ailments that change the numbers. And few AoE moves. Units are fully realized characters, rather than being a faceless recruit you're allowed to rename and class change. Limited resources and limited potential for grinding and not expecting that the player Will Grind in between chapters. While a FF Tactics clone is a conventional party-based rpg on a grid. Anyway, I've heard that Tear Ring Saga for the PS1 is an unabashed FE Clone, but I can't personally confirm that. Kaga's later games are definitely not copy pasting FE gameplay but many FE fans take to them anyway for how they recontextualize his work. If you want more Fire Emblem my best advice is to look into all the ROM hacks of GBA FE. Really impressive stuff there. As for the most Fire Emblem indie game not made by Kaga that I've played, I may give it to last year's Esperia: Uprising of the Scarlet Witch. One neat way that it plays with Permadeath is having unique memoriam scenes for every character's death. I'll also agree with Dark Deity and Banner of the Maid. Though neither of these games feature Permadeath, Banner of the Maid's Weapon Triangle (actually it's a Weapon Square) and Dark Deity's GBA FE inspired aesthetic definitely wear the inspiration on their sleeve.

Thanks. Good job.

Yeah, the creator went on to do his own series and it's very similar to FE, the games are Tear Ring Saga, Berwick Saga and Vestaria Saga. Also, I've been hearing about Unicorn Overload a lot here on the forums, as far as I could tell it's one of these too. And, apart from the examples that Imuabicus der Fertige gave, well, I'm not sure if you're looking for lookalike games just because you're curious or cause you wanna play them, but if it is for playing then there's a LOAD of FE fan games that naturally are on the tone of the series, a bunch are pretty popular among the fandom, even.

Switch for 3 houses mostly. I also kinda like engage art, but it's 3 houses i love best. Tellius a close second.

The addition of Delta to 30xx is pretty great. Finally someone with a Megaman Zero-like playstyle. Never been a huge fan of the way X4 and beyond handled X and Zero. One guy shots, the other slashes. That feels more like splitting a single moveset across multiple characters. Idk, I would rather have a single character with a deeper movepool.

How? Not like they ever remove their mouth from your crotch. In any case, considering a playable character to be "minor" doesn't make sense to me. Unless maybe it's something like a guest unit. Like Lea's grandmother, for example. Doesn't even get a name.

If I may, I would like to argue a case for Reese being in a higher tier. My reasoning is that he is an example of a lord type unit that comes with his own horse right off the bat, no less than two absolutely bonkers prf swords for free over the course of the game, a very easy (or possibly inevitable) promotion, and a weird but effective example of giving great returns for whatever you invest. He is the only unit who has a whole subsection of the office/town portions devoted to powering him up, and many of the benefits of buying furniture for Reese's office are rare or unique. He is one of the very few units in the game that can get the armsthrift ability, which significantly increases the longevity of all of his equipment. Everything costs a pretty penny in a game that is notoriously stingy with its money, but you also do not have to buy any furniture if you don't want. His stat growths are actually quite impressive for Berwick Saga, and he learns some very nice skills. The inability to field him in most of the side quests does on its surface hurt his availability, but if you use him at all in the main chapters he will have no trouble keeping up based on the foundation of his durability and high movement alone. the side chapters are more for your other squishy units that need catching up to him, if you ask me. I'm not saying he is the second coming of Sigurd or anything, but he can charge into the front lines, hit really hard when he needs to, gives a passive hit bonus within a decent radius, and is among the most durable lords I've used in my history of playing SRPGs. Personally I'd put him at A rank. I had other thoughts about Larentia, but I have to get back to class. To be continued!

I often forget royals exist. Shura exists for like five minutes in Birthright. ...Fair. Fair.

I suppose it'd be being betwixt a more free-flowing action RPG and a turn-based one? The flowing action of the former, but the casting times on spells and the fixed arenas feel like traces of the latter. And of course, the anime attack-shouting, the flashy spells, the general descent of the battlefield into a grand parade of liveliness. On some level, Xenoblade is the same (once the battle system opens up, early on things can be slow). It's decidedly different from say, Shin Megami Tensei, where being turn-based with generic demons as allies in a generally-bleak world don't imbue such vibrancy to the fighting. It's also different from TMS, which does have magnificent flair, but being turn-based I feel inherently keeps it from feeling so free as Tales. The technical level? -Well there, I never do master things.😅 I don't need to if I'm not playing on the highest difficulty level, which I don't. I do appreciate Namco's attempts to change things up every game, the things that if learned, would allow one to create unending combos of big damage while taking as little possible. -And I know you've a keenness for this stuff.- But I've the brain of a goldfish and the reflexes of a dead cat in this regard.😆 I will also say I approve of Berseria's choice to follow Zestiria in ditching TP as Graces had. Symphonia might've been my first, but it's liberating not to have to worry about TP consumption and keeping well-stocked on Orange/Pineapple Gels, watching my casters go pathetically whack things up close when their TP hits 50%. The fun of Tales battle is in Artes, even for physical attackers, as the basic hits of old alone can hardly a lot of fun make. I could see Lavos beginning its life as a pest gnawing away at the Tree of Mana, perhaps. Otherwise... well I don't see anything from CT's future originally being SoM material, that slightly narrows it down. Everywhere else seems like fair game for reuse, however.

I like doing what I call a "Scavenger Run" where you aren't allowed to buy items/weapons, I also don't use the forge personally but that's just me. In this run you can only use weapons you get from drops, steals, villages, or recruits also having Volke open a chest is banned too since that costs you gold every time, although admittedly that doesn't really factor into RD like it does PoR