Recent reviews by Ace Of Arrows

I like the game.

Good tables, you can even test those you haven't bought as much as you want, limited only by score, before deciding if you want to commit to buying the table outright.

So here's a thumbs-up.

And now to address the two obvious common complaints others seem to have, so you know what I think about those matters.

"They didn't work on the game for eons."
Well they are now, at the time of this writing. (And I'm really hoping that when they get around to making a Star God Deluxe table, it has a quest line even longer and more epic than the Remake table's - I love a good, compelling story mode on a pinball table, and Star God Remake currently remains my favorite table in the game for that reason.)

"They used AI art! >:("
Read my lips: I don't care. It's not illegal at this time, and it doesn't affect the gameplay, so I fail to see why I should choose to be angry or offended about this, especially for the sake of determining a simple recommendation. This is one of those things that I find very difficult to grow in my own personal field of fricks.

Yet again we have the same old story of another of their games delivering The Quintessential IF/CH Experience™. Sadly, that's not a good thing; rather, it is a sad tale of disappointment. I have a reasonably lengthy history with trying to truly appreciate any games Idea Factory/Compile Heart make, and, regardless of in what specific ways each game fails me, IF/CH games have fallen short of greatness every single time, regardless of genre or sub-genre.

You see, they have a long and storied habit of making games that have really nice HUDs, a compelling narrative, reasonable character development, good voice work, and a roster comprised largely or entirely of various female characters (of whom the main protagonist is usually flat-chested or close enough for some reason), but - importantly - coming up distinctly short on actually balancing their progression or systems well. Like the Laptop Gun in Perfect Dark, IF/CH games only pass on cursory glance, and fall apart the moment they're exposed to even the most remote of scrutiny; you often find yourself going "I can SEE how this could have actually been good if they'd just put some more effort into it, but they just didn't."

In the case of Mary Skelter: Nightmares, it has a laundry list of issues:
* Overall, the job system works poorly. First of all, some jobs are just clearly the right choice because they're totally busted in their own ways, such as Alice/Paladin, Cinderella/Destroyer, or Snow White/Item Meister, and/or the only remotely reasonable choice in a sea of otherwise generally-garbage choices, like Red Riding Hood or Rapunzel as either a Pierrot or Leech. Secondly, job spec passives (which you only have as long as you stick with that job) generally are not compelling whatsoever and are usually inconsequential, with few exceptions (such as Item Meister); I rarely felt hugely compelled to learn them or level them up.
* Massacre Mode falls flat on its face for me. (And trust me, it's not lost on me that this is supposed to be the game's focal special battle mechanic, also being the reason the Splatter Gauge exists.) It doesn't seem to actually increase your stats all that notably, and even the girls' special Massacre Mode skills suck. As a result, I have never found myself actively shooting to get any girls into Massacre Mode, nor did I ever bother leveling up Massacre skills. (Just so others are satisfied that I've mentioned it, certainly the risk of a corrupted girl going Skelter instead of Massacre is every bit as bad as the game says, so you do actually want to watch your corruption levels. Congrats, that's one of the few gameplay elements they actually did reasonably well with.)
* Partners proc seldom (the chance doesn't seem nearly high enough), so the Partner system seems mostly useless as well.
* Some dungeons or situations have harsh or outright unfair difficulty spikes. This is very highly notable in the Temple Nightmare fight, but happens in the middle of some dungeons to a lesser degree as well - you'll go up a floor and instead of mopping the floor slightly less, you'll suddenly have a significantly rougher time for no real reason.
* Once your playthrough really gets off the ground, Jack gradually becomes overall more and more useless for anything other than keeping corruption/Skelter in check, and rarely tossing an SP restoration item during a boss battle; corruption management becomes his sole notable function. It becomes largely unnecessary for him to act as a meat-shield for the girls (who can defend for themselves anyway, and the Paladin job's Cover skill can be super-busted on top of that), he almost never needs to toss items around despite being the only character who is always able to use them in battle (I've already mentioned the Item Meister job, which can partially eclipse his functions), and attack items cause basically no damage, so most of his time not spent reducing the girls' corruption ends up spent hitting the Create Blood command over and over and listening to him do his best impression of Goku charging a Spirit Bomb.
* The Temple Nightmare boss scenario is easily the worst-designed boss encounter I've seen in remotely recent memory. It deserves special, specific mention because it's actually that bad. I've made a whole forum post about this scenario, all the ways it's abysmally bad, and the many things that'd need done to make it remotely reasonable.
* You get some characters way too late in the game for them to be a major consideration for placement on the primary battle party. My playthrough, for example, recruited Gretel last, and she was never considered for a main-party position; she was immediately relegated to being a Partner, and never even got her job changed. Even when I got Rapunzel before her, I was quick to notice Cinderella already had way better skills for obliterating monsters than Rappy ended up with, and Cindy was better-established, so Rappy spent less than an hour on my main party.
* Jack is constantly accused of attempting to seduce some girl or other when he obviously isn't. This happens at least once every chapter once chapter 3 or so hits, often enough that it actually gets tiring to see it harped on over and over.
* Like most other IF/CH games, this game very definitely suffers "if you want anything remotely resembling a reasonable ending, you will need to jump through a million hoops" syndrome. If you don't do this, the game ends VERY abruptly after defeating the final boss and you receive ZERO closure, which I take major umbrage with.
* Last but not least, despite my owning a very solid computer, this game actually crashed on me regularly. It appears to have a memory leak issue. I tried multiple things to rectify this, to no avail.

Mary Skelter: Nightmares simply goes on my long list of IF/CH games I have tried - very, very hard - to truly enjoy and appreciate, because I can see what they're trying to achieve, but as per usual for them, they've yet again come up short in almost exclusively the ways most important to a video game experience.

Sorry, but I cannot in good faith recommend this game to anybody seeking a reasonable, fun, or occasionally even fair gameplay experience.

The game has only been out for a few days at the initial time of writing; it will reflect that.

Game is fun, and easily has a generous amount of replay value - and that will only go up if people start actually doing what the devs encourage: Making new triggers, boons, and other stuff in the workshop; as with any moddable game, this has absolutely ridiculous potential if the fanbase rises to meet it.

While the game is appealing and worth the price, there are currently two points of contention I'd like to address that exist at this time:
* As others have discussed, you do need to be careful about the "Unlock" buttons in the options menu, because they will unlock all the stuff they say, there's no "are you sure," and there's no takesie-backsie option (which, by the way, CAN absolutely be done; I've seen other games like Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers that have an "Unlock Everything" button but always track what you'd originally earned anyway, and therefore also offer a "RE-Lock Applicable Items" button). If this dev implements "are you sure" and "re-lock" options, this won't be a potential issue anymore.
* For some reason, this game does not have resolution options whatsoever, and even if you choose Windowed, it doesn't even remember the resolution you manually resized the window to on subsequent boots. There is no good reason for this, and both things definitely need to be implemented before anybody who likes reasonable resolution options will be happy.

Neither of these things, however, detract from the experience of actually playing the game, and I will still recommend it to anybody who likes these kinds of things.

The Legend of Zelda But It's a Shmup™ is a fantastic game and absolutely 100% achieves what it sets out to do, plain and simple.

If you're a fan of how traditional Zelda games work, and have even an iota of liking shmups in you, this game is more than worth its purchase price, and you will adore it.

For those who are actually familiar with and/or have nostalgia for 80s gaming, $25 US for 50 sub-games is going to be among the most obvious decisions you will ever make in your life. There's tons of variety here and you're sure to find anywhere between several and a bunch of sub-games you'll enjoy playing again and again.

Ignore every single person who gives UFO 50 a thumbs-down - the only kinds of people who do that, from what I can tell, are those who were clearly never UFO 50's target demographic in the first place, or don't understand/accept that this title is supposed to be all the stuff they're hating on it for. 80s-era games can be frustrating and/or difficult. 80s-era games can be simplistic and/or short. Get this, UFO 50 would've actually been bad if those things weren't true of a fair share of its sub-games. I'd bet half of these people didn't even actually live through the 80s as I did.

That said, I'd go on to say that all things considered, UFO 50 is a fantastic 80s simulator - for quirk, joy, simplicity, frustration, and difficulty alike. If that sounds like a great time to you, or you can at least go in open-minded, then clearly, there's plenty to play and potentially love here.

If, on the other hand, that sounds utterly impossible to you, then you can go get back on Apex, Overwatch, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy 14, Arknights, Genshin Impact, or wherever-it-is that your prettier graphics, easier gameplay, or waifus are available to console your inability to Deal With It™. The real, old-school gamers will be over here shaking their heads talking about you when they complain about the "kids these days."

If you are experiencing burns or other symptoms of a lack of ability to Deal With It™, you can consult your doctor.
Prescription ointment exists, but may or may not be available in your region.
Supplies are limited. Void where prohibited.

It should be nearly impossible to well and truly complain about a free game, though I can see a few people have managed that difficult feat.

As for me, while the game is short (even compared to other stage-based beat-em-ups), it makes up for it everywhere else. The stages are long enough, you level up, you acquire equipment, and the boss fights are solid enough.

Kay has been known to add content to games; HoloCure has seen huge additions. With any luck, HXB will see the likes of more stages, more characters, or possibly other things; we'll see.

But yeah, game is free, and quite good for being free. Easy recommend.

You still have to agree to four (4) unskippable agreements (i.e. you can't just mash through them) in-game before you even hit the title screen, and then the game itself has notable problems; I encountered multiple softlocks where I couldn't move out of a situation I'd found myself in or, in one case, fell infinitely without dying, and was forced in all cases to manually restart from my last checkpoint. As others have, I, too, have had issues with consistently getting decent momentum with riding the yo-yo, which proved frustrating and/or caused deaths in multiple places.

I really wanted to be able to say I could manage to recommend this game. But if you're going to make a platformer, your platforming is the one thing that really needs to work out well, and the platforming here is simply not satisfying enough. The game would probably be worth its US$30 price tag if the experience was anything above "meh" (there's enough there overall, I think), but it just isn't. Maybe if you're not old and jaded like me and are still a bright-eyed kid you'll manage to think this game is fantastic, but if you're even half-serious about your platformers, I think I'm going to have to recommend giving Penny and her yo-yo a pass.

I love SO3, and thought I remembered the PS1 version of this being good when I was younger. And perhaps that version is what I should have replayed instead of picking up SO2R.

While the remake does introduce a lot of new features that are legitimately awesome, such as fast travel and time-sensitive PA alerts (which I do very much appreciate), there are a huge number of enemy attacks which desperately need nerfed, leader/minion fights are outright unfair (especially particular kinds), and many of the boss fights are not fun at all and are just as brutal in both of those ways as well (depending which boss you ask).

All this game has managed to do is repeatedly anger and frustrate me in ways an RPG player should not be angered or frustrated.

I just can't recommend SO2R. I'm sorry. I just can't do it.

While I love the concept of this game, it currently cannot go on the same high level as Dinosaur Polo Club's games (Mini Motorways and Mini Metro). At the time of writing (June 2023), Can't Live Without Electricity suffers multiple frustrating problems which sadly cause me to be unable to recommend it. I believe in making suggestions on how to fix issues when there are problems, so I'll do my best to do that as I note the game's issues:

* The game's algorithm is terrible at finding empty spaces to build on and not building on Wire lines when there's obviously tons of empty space to use. It is apt to choose locations the player has placed Wire, even if a huge swath of the map is still empty and untouched. While this is understandable (and expected) late in a stage, it does a poor job choosing house locations, and its claim that it could not find any empty space to build the new houses in is bafflingly completely untrue the vast majority of the time, making the wording of the heads-up message incorrect. Two things need to happen: 1) The mid-game (and by this, I mean the middle turns of a stage) needs the algorithm to be better at picking empty spaces. 2) The heads-up message needs to be made more situational, and not apply to all houses built on existing Wire lines - because nobody is going to have any concerns about, for example, a red house being built on an existing red Wire line. I suggest a message such as "Houses were built on Wire lines of a non-matching color."

* This game's got an unacceptably huge singleton problem. The RNG in Mini Motorways and Mini Metro are much better at building little communities, lessening the chances that there will be impossible-to-cater-to singletons - a problem this game has in spades. I have seen a number of scenarios in this game where a new house is built in a completely unserviceable location such that it HAS to be given a Generator or Jumper, making it legitimately impossible to get a perfect score for the stage just because the RNG happened to hate you on this attempt. Sometimes this happens so much in the same stage that you can't even WIN at all. This must be fixed before I can recommend the game. Offering more Generators or Jumpers will not cut it here; this game's singleton problem needs to be rectified; as it stands, I'm pretty sure the game does not check in any way, shape, or form whether a singleton will be serviceable for people shooting for a perfect score, and it simply has to, period.

* The first few stages of the game are simply unsuitable to be its first few stages - especially the very first stage, Fried Egg. Or, as I like to call it, Relay Central. While I'm sure the whole point of this being the first stage is supposed to be "oh, there are relays everywhere, it should be very easy to connect everything however I want," in practice, I found it to be extremely overwhelming, especially given the tiny size of the map, which causes it to become even more over-crowded than several other early-game maps that would still be more suitable for use as the game's first stage. Despite its 3 faction colors, it's more suited to be a late 3-color stage than an early 3-color stage. I strongly suggest that more newbie-friendly stages be implemented in the early game, and I will even suggest how to do this: Larger 3-color maps that have, rather than more relays overall, relays that are more convenient for the player to use - 3-color versions of stages like Pumpkin or Panda, for example, would make for excellent early-game stages. Lots of space isn't what overwhelms or causes problems - the exact opposite is true: Early-game stages should not be tiny! They should be spacious and give the player lots of available real estate to work with so they don't feel so boxed-in. If you want to make all 3 stars difficult to attain for such stages, just require more turns for them.

* More Wire needs to be on offer in heavily Pipe-centric stages. I really don't think it's just me who finds Pipe infrastructure hard to figure out on heavily Pipe-centric maps; players like me will benefit from being offered extra Wire in Pipe-centric stages where there is still some fair amount of real estate to lay it on (such as Turtle or, to a somewhat lesser extent, Cherries). Yes this means less forcing the player to use tons of Pipes. To be clear, I do not have problems with stages where Pipes are broadly on offer but whose usage isn't being shoved down my throat; I find stages where Pipe usage is relatively optional (such as Cow or Pumpkin), or at least not a huge primary focus, to be fun, as it is then more up to me whether or not I wish to employ lots of Pipes.

I'm going to go back to playing Mini Motorways and hope that Melovity improves Can't Live Without Electricity, because I know, without a shadow of a doubt - because DPC's games exist - that this game CAN be made less frustrating and more playable, and CAN be made more fun, if the devs put the effort in to do so. If they do, I will definitely come back to CLWE.

While roguelikes are, generally speaking, very much not my style, hack-and-slash style games are, and Hades takes the well-decorated cake. I don't know how it's taken me so long to say so.

I'm going to lead with this so it isn't under "Read More" - Hades is a perfect video game. I am wholly serious, and I do not say this lightly. Anyone who has read a few of my reviews for other games knows I am more than capable and willing of ripping bad games apart, but there is no hole anywhere to be found in Hades' sheer perfection - there is not a bad thing to be said about this utterly un-reproachable game.

Everything is beyond merely on-point: The story is extremely well-told, the battling is very solid, the unlock systems are extremely well-thought-out, the boon choice system works really well, and the voice acting is brilliant. The elements which make it a roguelike are kind enough that people who don't generally play roguelikes (such as myself) find it easy enough to accept deaths, because you know there's always that next purchasable upgrade you want that you know will help you out in your next escape attempt.

Replayability-wise, even once you've escaped once, let alone the 10 escapes needed to formally beat the main story and see the credits - there is still way more than enough incentive to keep going with your file for fun, challenge, intrigue, pride/bragging rights, or any combination thereof that you feel floats your boat:
* Escaping even once allows you to tweak your escape experience with the Pact of Punishment; you can pick and choose alterations you think will make runs more interesting, or go whole-ham on sheer difficulty to brag to your friends about how much Heat you can escape under.
* Seeing the credits unlocks the ranking system, so players who love prestige can rank up and show off to their friends.
* Even players who are just in it for the enriching lore can find reasons to keep playing beyond the credits - they can elect to take on the colossal task of making everything right again by tying up all the loose side-plot threads, and finishing up with gifting nectar and ambrosia to the gods to get the golden ending.

The notion that they only charge $25 for this game is almost nuts when charging full price would have been more than fair, but it does mean that the game is more accessible to anybody who may want to play it - and they should. This is one of those games that is so well-made and so approachable that I would put it on a general greatest of all time list, and as such would recommend it to literally anybody. If you're somehow on the fence about this game, I am telling you right now that time thinking is time wasted on not playing this masterpiece - the only regret you can have is waiting however long you did before buying and playing it.

14/10 perfect game. I could not even artificially grow enough thumbs to adequately express how highly I recommend this game.