Recent reviews by Missingno.

Mega Knockdown perfectly encapsulates the greatest thing you can do in a fighting game: throwing rock four times in a row because you know your opponent is totally going to throw scissors four times in a row.

I'm just happy to support any new fighting games with native Linux ports.

A lovely spiritual successor to FF5, though the endgame does get a bit frustrating as I felt boxed into just one type of build that no longer gets to play with the game's unique Threat mechanic. Still enjoyed everything up to that point quite a lot and would recommend it anyway based on that.

Absolutely fantastic JRPG, raises the bar considerably from the devs' previous title. Does a great job encouraging you to explore all your options in combat and rotate party members.

Don't cry because Zachtronics is over. Smile because it happened.

If you're already familiar with Zachtronics' games, you probably don't need to read this review, go get this wonderful love letter to the fans. But if you aren't, I don't know if I would recommend Last Call BBS as a starting point. Go play Opus Magnum first and then come back.

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure who I'm writing this review for then. Oh well.

Last Call BBS is a collection of smaller titles, tied together with a retro computing framing device. You're probably here for the three engineering puzzles in the style Zachtronics is known for, but the other minigames shouldn't be slept on either. It's a great package with a lot to offer.

20th Century Food Court is the biggest title, and probably the main attraction for most players. The mechanics are easily understandable, no engineering degree required for this one, but there are a lot of ever changing gimmicks for each puzzle that can require very complicated solutions. It can be a big of a pain to debug at times since you will inevitably end up with very messy wire spaghetti. At first I felt this was the weakest of the package despite being the headliner, but optimization has actually grown on me quite a bit.

ChipWizard is actual electrical engineering, on a very constrained 6x5 grid. The puzzles may seem simple once you get past the initial learning curve to understand the mechanics, but you'll frequently find yourself with an idea for a solution on paper but no way to actually fit it in the grid. Optimization is incredibly challenging.

X'BPGH has the unusual gimmick of being a game with no instructions at all. Just start poking at the UI and try to work out what's happening. In-universe, it's explained as a game that should've come with a packaged manual, but your pirated copy has none. This may sound awful, but I actually really enjoyed working it out. And of course that's not all there is to it, once you figure out the rules you still have to solve the puzzles next.

Dungeons & Diagrams is a picross-style logic puzzle, use the clues to deduce which squares are filled or empty. I found this to be a lot more challenging than picross, many puzzles made it difficult to even find a starting point. But as long as every puzzle has one unique solution, it can be logically deduced. You may have to take a very roundabout route to make those deductions and do a lot of testing and backtracking.

HACK*MATCH is a remaster of the minigame from EXAPUNKS. I loved the original and this version is even better. It now has an arcade campaign with four bosses and an ending, which I enjoy a lot more than just endless survival. There's also local versus, but sadly no AI or netplay so I haven't had a chance to try this out. I'm a huge fan of versus puzzles, so I wish I could...

Steed Force Hobby Studio simulates assembling and painting plastic robot models. Seemed silly at first, but I found myself actually getting really into it, there's a certain zen to it. I was sad when it ended after only three models.

And of course, a Zachtronics game has to have solitaire. Sawayama Solitaire is a variation on Klondike, no redeal but you get a cell after the draw pile is empty and can place anything in open tableau columns. Not too difficult but requires careful planning. Kabufuda Solitaire is a rerelease from Eliza, with four difficulty levels. This one is brutal, it seemed to me like a lot of deals may not be solvable on hard, but I could just be playing them wrong.

Best car-based fighting game since Fighters Megamix

This game doesn't even try to hide how badly it wants to be Ace Attorney, but I'm not complaining. The writing is fantastic and lives up to its inspiration quite well. Having a unique minigame for each chapter's investigation segments gives the game its own charm to set it apart, and I'm excited to see where future chapters will go from here.

I've been waiting a long time for any new fighting games to come to Linux, we literally haven't had any other worthwhile port since Skullgirls in 2015. Thankfully, Them's Fightin' Herds was well worth the wait, this game is an absolute blast and deserves so much love.

Mechanically, it's more or less BlazBlue without airdashes. It doesn't really have any super unique systems that I can gush about in particular, but it's super well polished and the characters bring their own cool Drive Magic gimmicks to the table. It feels great to play and that's really about as much as I can put into words. Good fighting game, you press the buttons to make the other person fall down and it's fun.

What I can put into words is all the cool extras and flavor the game has. The lobby system is really cute, like ArcSys lobbies but actually good. Instead of having to wait at a kiosk you can just walk right up to someone and challenge them, or enter matchmaking from anywhere. You can even open up training mode while in the lobby, and you can again matchmake while in there. There's lots of cute avatar cosmetics to collect. My favorite part of all though is the treasure chests that will randomly spawn in the lobby every so often. Go up to one and a countdown will begin before it opens. If anyone else approaches, you'll have to fight for its contents! It's a clever way to add some small stakes to a match, I love it.

The lobbies also host a gate to the Salt Mines, a semi-cooperative dungeon crawler. Here you have 15 minutes to fight CPU Predators, mine salt rocks, and find treasure. The difficulty rises for every several Predators defeated (more players can help level up faster), and with it the rewards increase too. Health carries over between fights, and you'll have to think carefully about when to keep pushing, when to spend your hard-earned salt for a refill, and when to shy away from encounters and just search for more salt. If at least two players survive all 15 minutes, the player with the most salt gets to be a playable Bear boss and chase down other remaining players for a final challenge worth extra rewards for the winner. It's more fun than PvE fighting game content has any right to be!

Story Mode is pretty cool, and the writing is fantastic. It's structured like an adventure game using the same interface as the pixel lobbies, you'll explore dungeons, fight Predator encounters, talk to townspeople, and find hidden treasure chests with cosmetics you can take back to the lobby. Some of these battles are really just fighting game tutorials in disguise, highlighting a specific mechanic or element to test you on - platforming challenges teach you super jumps and shorthops, early Predators will use a specific move over and over until you figure out how to anti-air or bait and punish, Velvet's fight asks you to get past a complex zoning pattern, etc. As always with fighting game bosses there's a few moments of frustration (snake, crows, Oleander...), don't make the mistake I made of jumping in on Experienced difficulty just because you play other fighting games, but overall I appreciate what they've done to try and make something more elaborate than just arcade mode with cutscenes. At the time of writing only chapter 1 is finished (out of six main chapters plus a bonus Shanty DLC planned), but that chapter 1 is actually pretty long. I'm looking forward to the rest when it's done.

There's a ton of nice quality of life features. Since this game runs on Skullgirls' engine that means it comes with the same phenomenal training mode and buttery smooth GGPO netcode. On top of that they've added the ability to make your own combo trials and share them with other players, a robust replay system with rewind and seek functionality, training mode matchmaking, a net statistics graph you can check if a match is lagging, and plenty more nice little things.

Oh, and the soundtrack is absolute fire. The dynamic music system that makes it somehow react to the fight, which I'm pretty sure is some kind of arcane witchcraft, makes it even better.

Promised Linux support by late 2018, never delivered, two years of radio silence before finally saying it's not planned at all.

Petal Crash is one of the freshest new competitive puzzle games I've played in a long time, I simply cannot sing this game's praises loudly enough! Mechanically it's hard to compare it to any puzzle game I've played, and that's a good thing as I love seeing unique new ideas. While the usual win condition of filling up your opponent's board with garbage exists, it's actually somewhat rare to win this way in my experience (but certainly not impossible, you will see it sometimes). Instead the alternative win condition you should be focusing on is the Battle Bar, a tug-of-war meter that pushes towards the opponent's side every time you clear pieces, with the boundaries shrinking over time, until someone reaches the edge to lose a stock and the bar resets. Take three stocks from your opponent and you win the match.

The important thing to note here is that the Battle Bar doesn't really care about chains at all under default settings, only the number of pieces cleared. But garbage is still an essential tool for disrupting your opponent, as it's very hard to work around if you get a lot of it. Hit them hard enough and they will struggle to defend against your followup barrage. A strong opening chain is absolutely essential to establish momentum, and once you have the momentum you need to be ready to capitalize on it to close out the stock.

Took me a while to really wrap my head around all of this, first I was just stuck in that Puyo mindset of trying to make the biggest chain I can, but frequently got stuck or fell behind and died. Then I tried to just spam quick attacks but also couldn't keep up that way. After a while I finally got into the rhythm of firing off a strong opening chain to put pressure on my opponent, then following up with DPS, periodically going for another big chain now and then, and once that clicked it felt so good. Simply clearing large clusters of 3+ blocks is really really strong, feels a lot like having to mix chains and combos together in Panel de Pon.

For other game modes there's your usual Time Trial Mode to shoot for high scores, but what's really nifty is the Turn Trial mode which does the opposite: you have a limited number of moves, but can take as much time as you want to plan them out perfectly. Cool concept more puzzle games should copy. Puzzle Mode has its own twist too, rather than only limiting how many moves you can make, many puzzles can also limit which moves you can make. For example you might be restricted to 3 moves up, 2 moves left, and 1 move down, and you then have to figure out which pieces to apply them to in which order. There's an editor too in case the included puzzles weren't maddening enough for you, and you can also encode custom puzzles as text and paste them in for easy sharing.

It really delivers on flavor and atmosphere too. Love the sprite work, the soundtrack slaps, and story mode writing is pretty hilarious. There's some really clever little bits of attention to detail like CPU Daize using the colorblind block skin because he's a dog. But what really stands out most is that every CPU opponent has their own AI with a different playstyle. Yosoti slowly and methodically goes for big chains, Strelitz just tries to spam quick 1-chains, Ore Kid hammers the grow button to keep her board mostly full, Penny&Deony periodically alternate between setup and aggression, etc. On higher difficulties I've actually found it necessary to adjust my tactics a bit to counter some of them, especially Ore Kid.

My only disappointment is that there is no online, because I really would like to see a competitive scene take off. I have heard the developer is looking into it but making no promises, which is honestly understandable for a mostly one-person project. In the meantime I've tried Steam Remote Play as a makeshift alternative, it's alrightish if you have a good enough connection but probably won't work across long distances.

PETAL CRASH ONLINE IS CONFIRMED GET HYPE