#the worse he feels the more unresponsive he will become. in the vast majority of cases he has to manually choose to express himself

[darkestrellar]

Svern can't cry to express himself. It's an extremely natural reaction that is entirely foreign to him, and at present it's not one he's able to mimic much/at all either. If he is ever emotionally affected enough by something that it should trigger a crying response, something that crying would provide a release for, he will be unable to do so.

He's unable to manually choose to cry in a way that would adequately address that situation, and when he's left to his natural reactions he will not cry. He will feel extremely uncomfortable, especially because he's not used to strong (or even average level) emotional experiences and thus has a poor ability to manage his emotions if/when they do arise. He may know that he should cry in order to release them, but he can't, not in a way that would help, so they're left inside him.

[drabbledragon]

Idunno if you accept promts still but I have an idea: For some reason I've always imagined the Idea of Wild having Twilight - in wolf form - help him through a really bad panic attack, caused by regained memories.

That’s a wonderful idea! Prompt requests are always open, by the way; it just may take some time for me to get to one judging by how busy my life is. 

Deluge

Summary: Some memories affect Wild more than others.

Warnings: Description of a panic attack.

The cave shuddered as it was wracked with another set of small earthquakes. At the earth’s tremble, Twilight and Wild instinctively crouched in unison and moved together as Daruk’s Protection sheltered them from the oncoming bouts of dust and rocks. The former’s canine ears swiveled towards the pounding on the shield, his heightened senses allowing him to hear each bang overwhelmingly so and causing his nose to crinkle as the dry dirt threatened to make him sneeze. Once the tremors had stopped and Twilight’s nod had deemed it safe, they automatically went back to wandering down the narrow rocky corridors, never once uttering a single word.

A majority of their trip had been silent for the most part. Aside from the echoing taps of paws and boots, there really wasn’t much sound at all; they had ran out of conversation topics a few hours ago and the both of them were undoubtedly getting irritated at the lack of progress they were making. How much longer would they be trapped in this cave for? Hours? Days? Twilight wasn’t even sure if he could go another minute without seeing a sliver of the vast blue sky. He momentarily paused to listen for any sounds again, catching his protege fidgeting nervously in his peripheral. 

That was another one of their problems: Wild was acting unusually restless. He’s been tugging his hair and picking at his tunic ever since they’d shifted here and it was so unnervingly apparent how tense the young boy was; any attempt for Twilight to figure out why was met with vague mumbled responses of ‘I don’t know’ or ‘something doesn’t feel right’. It was strange, really: to see a self - proclaimed adventurer who laughed in the face of danger reduced to such an apprehensive mess admittedly frightened him a bit. Coming to the conclusion that his endless questions was a waste of precious air, he decided to use his Twili form to find some sort of exit instead, figuring that his stronger senses would give them a better chance. For both his and Wild’s sake, he hoped that moment would come soon; the quicker they get out of here, the better.

His ears perked up at the distant whistle of a soft breeze and he couldn’t stop his tail from wagging around excitedly. Was this finally a way out? With a sharp bark, he ushered his protege to follow as he began to take long strides towards the sound, being mindful to not upset the fragile ground of the earth. The whistle was getting louder the longer they travelled and Twilight hoped to the Goddesses that this wasn’t a cruel trick - that he hadn’t lost his sanity yet - and when they eventually stumbled upon a small section of the cave littered with boulders that leaked moonlight, he felt his shoulders sag with relief.

His legs moved before his mind could, leading him to a random set of rocks where he began to greedily nudge at them; they seemed loose enough - nothing a tough round of digging couldn’t handle. If everything goes well, they should be out of here in a matter of minutes. Without another moment of hesitation, he began to claw at their rough surface with newfound energy; however, as time passed, he couldn’t help but notice that his protege had never made a move to help him. He turned to cast a questioning gaze but felt his breath suddenly hitch at the sight.

Just a few meters away stood a rigid Wild staring fixedly on a particularly large boulder, his eyes cloudy and distant and his face without emotion. Twilight knew that look all too well and upon recognition, he was by his protege’s side in a heartbeat, laying himself down just a few steps away and straightening up his body in a protective manner. His entire being threw itself into high - alert without warning and suddenly every sight, sound, and touch became a thousand times sharper than before. Any previous sense of relief or triumph was immediately washed away by the overwhelming urge to protect his charge at all costs as he recovered yet another one of his lost memories. 

The seconds ticked by excruciatingly slow to Twilight. Every small crack of the earth rang loud and clear in his ears and constantly reminded him that they were on a very fragile time limit. There was probably a good reason why they hadn’t encountered any monsters yet; based on how often this cave seemed to be plagued by earthquakes, he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that everything that lurked down here was probably crushed under the weight of heavy boulders - honestly, it was a miracle that he and Wild had made it this far to begin with. But with his protege now unresponsive, they practically stood no chance against their crumbling surroundings; one more small earthquake without Daruk’s Protection to aid them and they’re as good as dead.

A feeling of detestment nudged at the back of his mind. He hated that they both had to be thrown into this situation. It was painfully obvious that Wild was uncomfortable here and the way how every step seemed hesitant or how every breath seemed forced tugged at the wolf’s heartstrings; throw in the fact that Wild had to relive a memory on top of it all made their circumstances a thousand times worse. Plus, Twilight couldn’t do anything to speed up or ease the process, either;  Wild had to take the memory head - on - pain, mental anguish, and all - and it undeniably stung when Twilight was rendered nearly helpless the entire time. To see someone so clearly in anguish and be able to do nothing about it left him heartbroken. It was times like these that he wondered if the Goddesses were truly on their side - if all this pain and misery were really worth the opportunity to bear the Triforce of Courage.

A shuddering breath abruptly pulled him out of his thoughts and his seething hatred was quickly replaced with a quiet worry. He was moving to get his paws underneath him, comforting words already preparing to spill off his tongue as soon as he shifted, but he seemed to freeze in place once their eyes locked. 

Wild was there, fully conscious and back in reality, but instead of the usual look of remorseful acceptance he always settled on or the small bittersweet smile tugging on his lips, there was a look of absolute fear. Those breaths that he had worked so hard to keep even and under control had suddenly become quick and shaky and the hands that were constantly pulling at his tunic began to tremble uncontrollably by his sides. He stood frighteningly still but his legs wobbled threateningly beneath him as if they were ready to give out at any moment. 

Twilight stood hesitant at his side, mind racing with a million thoughts and questions but unable to act upon any of them. Did he miss something? Was this a result of a recovered memory? This has never happened before so what makes this time so different? He wanted to shift and move - ask his protege what exactly was going on - but Wild was so caught up in his own thoughts that he didn’t even seem to acknowledge that his mentor was there to begin with. 

The walls around them began to shiver violently and he could feel the ground starting to crack underneath his paws and his mind was suddenly made up. He bounded forward with urgency and grabbed onto the back of Wild’s tunic, pulling him down to the ground as gently as he could. There was no orange glow of Daruk’s Protection to indicate that the younger hero was even aware of what was going on so Twilight decided to take matters into his own hands and wound his body tightly around the other, preparing to take all the impact from the inevitable fall.  

The ground finally gave out from underneath them and allowed the two heroes to plummet helplessly through the air. For a brief moment, Twilight was suddenly reminded of his leap off the Bridge of Eldin when he first set off on his adventure and sense of fearful nostalgia crossed his mind. How naive and hesitant he was back then but his trials and tribulations had made him strong, making him leap in the way of danger without so much of a second thought. His back harshly collided with the ground a few seconds later and he couldn’t help a muffled howl as sharp rocks dug painfully into his skin.

A shocked gasp sounded somewhere beside him and he felt hands suddenly dig into his abdomen, gripping deathly onto the fur as if the body underneath it would disappear without warning. The side of his face and a majority of his body seemed to pulse with a burning pain but he paid it no heed as he forced his head up to get a better look at the huddled form that was latched onto him. Aside from a thin layer of dust covering his hair and tunic, Wild seemed to be relatively fine: no scratches, no bruises, no anything to indicate that he was hurt in any way yet his head was buried deeply into the Twili’s fur and his breaths were still coming out in fearful, ragged gasps.

Twilight was at a loss of what to do. Any attempt to catch the younger hero’s attention either resulted in a flinch or no response at all; it was as if he was dimly aware of what was happening but couldn’t seem to process it, too overwhelmed to consider anything around him and quite frankly, it worried Twilight. It was rare - extremely rare - for Wild to get worked up over anything and to see his protege so panicked and fearful caused his heart to shatter. He wished he could stop whatever was bothering him but he was powerless; Wild wouldn’t acknowledge him and Twilight couldn’t read minds so the best he could do now was lean his head across the small of his back and hope that this would all be over soon. 

Despite how useless Twilight felt in that moment, his gesture seemed to spark something inside Wild. Suddenly, he felt his protege’s head press harder into his chest and felt the trembling grip on his fur become tighter yet steadier. The harsh, uneven breaths that echoed hauntingly throughout the large cavern started to become longer and deeper and no matter how many times he would choke up, he would force himself to start the process all over again.

He was obviously trying to gain some semblance of control and Twilight was quick to help out with a quiet whine and a nudge to Wild’s side. Slowly but surely, Wild’s ragged breaths fell back into that forced rhythm from before and the uncontrollable trembling that wracked his whole frame dwindled down to barely a shiver. He still wouldn’t speak or sign for that matter but the way he loosened his grip on the Twili’s fur and the way the tension gradually left his shoulders spoke volumes.

Wild was going to be alright.

With a relieved huff, Twilight settled his head back down to the dust floor, acutely aware of his charge slowly relaxing against him. They had fallen quite a distance away from the entrance they found earlier and there was practically no chance that they would be able to climb back up after the events that had just transpired; he eventually settled on forcing himself to calm down, even if there were a large amount of questions bouncing around in his head. He would undoubtedly ask all those questions later but for now, Twilight just wanted to revel in the fact that Wild was going to be alright.

It was a while before a raspy voice finally broke the silence.

“I think I … woke up when I was healing at some point.”

One of Twilight’s ears perked up in silent question and he directed a curious look towards the other. He watched as Wild hesitated for a second, choosing to focus on blowing out a steady breath before continuing. 

“I don’t remember exactly when but I woke up, saw I was stuck in some kind of weird bed, and tried to break out. The catch was that that thing was also filled with some kind of blue liquid and before I could figure that out, I was already drowning in it. My hands were shaking, my vision was starting to go black, every breath of air felt like fire down my throat -.”

A hand suddenly flew up to his throat and he started to gasp as if he was reliving the pain. The wolf quickly let out a whine and nudge his arm in an effort to bring him back to reality, thankful that it seemed to anchor the younger hero once again. Soon enough, Wild was back in the present, hands gripping deathly onto the fur underneath him as he was reminded of where he was.

“I was trapped. I couldn’t find my way out, I couldn’t call for help, I couldn’t breath, - I couldn’t do anything but sit there and take it. I think I eventually passed out because the next time I woke up was when I heard Zelda calling my name and telling me to fight Ganon.” A humorless laugh sounded after despite the severity of the situation. “ I guess being in such a small space for so long brought back that memory.”

Twilight paused, taking in the recount. All of Wild’s fidgeting and restlessness started to make sense now. Of course he wouldn’t remember something like that - the Shrine of Resurrection seemed to do its job exceptionally well - yet despite how buried those memories were, his body never seemed to forget them. It was a blessing and a curse and Twilight wasn’t sure which way Wild would be better off: have his protege scarred by the atrocities of what he’s been through or go happily through life until certain memories began to pop up. He didn’t know what to say but Wild didn’t seem to care.

“Really, what kind of hero am I? Being scared of something that happened literally a century ago?” A trembling hand flew up in frustrating and dug itself into his long hair as he turned to Twilight with self - hatred burning in his eyes. “ I can fight Moblins, Lizalfos, Hinoxes, - Hell, even Lynels alone but when it comes down to being stuck in a stupid shrine, I’m helpless? It’s annoying. I shouldn’t be this way, I shouldn’t -”

The Twili was quick to cut him off with a harsh bark before pressing his ears flat against his head. He leaned forward to press his forehead against the younger’s, letting a soft whine escape him as a form of comfort and although bewildered and confused, Wild understood and gave in to the touch, tangling a hand through the fur between the creature’s ears. 

“Yeah, you’re right. I shouldn’t be thinking like that.” He fumbled through the strands of hair as a small smile graced his lips. “ Thanks, Twi.”With a content huff, Twilight pulled away and settled back on the ground. It turned out he didn’t need to say anything at all; he just needed to be there for Wild - remind him that he’s not as useless as he feels. 

His two ears perked up despite his sleeping appearance and his protege seemed to take the hint: he was urging him to get some rest while they still could and his mentor would alert him when it was time to move. With a grateful nod, Wild leaned back into the wolf, his hand gently combing through the fur until he was eventually lulled to sleep. 

Wild was going to be alright. 

[coolgreatwebsite]

Why DotEmu Has Me Worried About Windjammers On The PS4

Early in 1994, an unassuming little game named Windjammers made its way to arcades. Developed by Data East for the Neo Geo Multi Video System, Windjammers is essentially high-octane video air hockey. Players pick one of six characters with different skills and shots, one of six courts of different sizes and layouts, and proceed to volley a frisbee back and forth with the hopes of jamming it past their opponent and into the goal. It’s a game that’s dead simple to pick up and play, but that simplicity masks an amount of depth to its mechanics and variety in a player’s options that makes Windjammers something special. When two skilled competitors go at it throwing rapid fire shots, counter-shots, trick shots, super shots and counter-super shots, the game is an edge-of-your-seat adrenaline pumping blur. Unfortunately, most people just didn’t seem to catch on to that hidden layer, and Windjammers was generally met with a middling reaction.

As time went on and arcade game emulation became easier, Windjammers gained a bit of a cult classic status. For a good long while it was a side-tournament staple in the fighting game community, and a French community had rallied around it and were doing their thing, but it wasn’t until website about video games Giant Bomb started playing it in 2013 that North American awareness of the game really started picking up. As much as I would like to be a cool on-line guy and say that I was way into it before that, I was only tangentially aware of the game prior to Giant Bomb’s coverage (I was more of a Street Hoop guy when it came to weird Data East Neo Geo sports games, for whatever reason). Nevertheless, it’s a game I feel like I’ve been a fan of for a long time, if that makes any sense. It’s an immediately and deeply lovable game.

The only port Windjammers has ever had as of this writing was a Japan-exclusive release on the Wii Virtual Console in 2010. This release eventually got delisted in late 2013, shortly after Giant Bomb’s coverage started strangely enough. Ever since then, there’s been a steady rumbling of people asking for the game to come to modern systems with online play, mainly aimed at PlayStation’s Third Party Production team. After all, they’re the guys who got us a Final Fantasy 7 remake and Shenmue 3, right? If anyone can get this weird obscure frisbee game out of whatever licensing hell it fell into following the death of Data East and years of turmoil SNK has gone through, they could! Well, at PlayStation Experience 2016′s showcase event it finally happened. The lights dimmed, a familiar tune started playing, and there it was on the big screen: Windjammers was coming to the PlayStation 4. The wish had been granted.

And then the monkey’s paw curled.

Pictured above is the banner for the Windjammers booth at PlayStation Experience 2016, and pictured in the zoom-in of that banner is the one thing powerful enough to instantly turn a retro video game fan’s excitement into dread: the logo of French video game company DotEmu. Founded in 2007, DotEmu is a company that specializes in bringing old video games to not-so-old platforms. Over their nearly 10 years of existence they’ve built up a network of connections with Japanese developers and rightsholders and have been responsible for bringing a sizable amount of classic games to various platforms (an exact list is hard to compile, as even their website’s game list is clearly incomplete). The rub here is that, despite the years of experience and web of trusted business partners, DotEmu consistently puts out products that can be described as poor at best.

Generally not poor in flashy, attention grabbing ways mind you. They’re competent enough that a passerby could go “sure, that’s Metal Slug!”, but for the people who love and care about these classic games the vast majority of DotEmu’s output may as well have shipped with crash bugs. It’s not just old game obsessives that suffer either as, even though it may be difficult to point out specific shortcomings without side-by-side comparisons, the way DotEmu’s ports are busted have an undeniable effect on the way these games play at even the most casual levels. These problems aren’t flukes, they’re consistent and documentable, but they often go ignored in media coverage of the company and general discussion of their releases. 

I don’t think this is due to any sort of nefarious intent or anything, but rather a lack of education about the subject. Most of the complaints are loosely organized tweets, or squirreled away in niche message boards, and the informative reviews that hit Steam are easy to lose among the less-than-informative ones. The reason I set out to write this article was to attempt to find and document the issues plaguing DotEmu’s ports (with a focus on their Neo Geo offerings as they pertain more to Windjammers) and, most importantly, put everything somewhere easily viewable and shareable. With that mission in mind, I jumped into the Steam version of one of my favorite arcade games: Metal Slug 3.

The Steam version of Metal Slug 3 was, unbeknownst to me at the time, my first brush with DotEmu. I ran through it once back in mid-2014 and here in 2017 all I could recall was that it was the worst port of the game I had ever played, so it was a natural pick to start off with. I played the Steam release simultaneously with the game running in MAME, trading off every other level, just to make sure I was getting all the facts straight. The most immediately apparent issue with the Steam release is that the audio is wrong on almost every level. Most of the sound effects are off in different ways, the worst of them reduced to nothing but shrill screeches, and the music is mangled in one of the oddest ways I’ve ever experienced. It has trouble keeping a steady beat, but it doesn’t quite skip and instead sort of tries to rush back to where it’s supposed to be. It almost makes it seem like the music is being performed by some sort of drunken orchestra, or as if someone were briefly holding back the turntable of a record player in the few cases where it seemed to affect the pitch. I’ve taken the liberty of making a video comparing the music of both versions, below.

The other two big issues are slightly more subtle, but much more impactful on the gameplay itself. First off, the Steam version drops frames like crazy, which means the game consistently stutters and jumps around erratically. Metal Slug 3 is pretty chaotic so it can be a little tough to pick out amidst the explosions, but the DotEmu port drops frames at all times, even during the game’s rare quiet moments. I found that the tiled background of Stage 3′s pre-sub cave area offered the most readily visible comparison (below). [UPDATE 1/12/17: This is actually an issue with frame-pacing rather than dropping according to John Linneman of Digital Foundry. Frame-pacing issues are where, rather than completely skipping over frames of the game, individual frames will stay on screen for longer or shorter than they’re supposed to. The end result is still a stuttering, choppy mess.]

This problem only exacerbates the next issue: the Steam version has input lag. Input lag means, well, there’s a lag on your inputs. You press a button and it takes a little bit longer for the corresponding action to happen on screen. Don’t know why, don’t know how, but there is a slight amount of input lag present in the DotEmu port that just isn’t there in the MAME version. Weirdly enough it wasn’t anything visual that tipped me off, but instead something auditory. The gap between pressing the fire button and hearing the gunshot sound effect is a bit wider in the Steam version, and it’s fairly noticeable when you’re going back and forth between versions.

These two issues are bad enough alone, but when combined it causes the game to feel muddy and unresponsive when in actuality it’s quite snappy. Easily dodgeable attacks suddenly become less so, simple actions such as jumping and shooting below you become more difficult to perform effectively, and the game is much more likely to register jumping and shooting as a simultaneous press of A+B, making you accidentally activate your kamikaze Slug Attack while in a vehicle. This isn’t any sort of scientific evidence, and I certainly wasn’t playing amazingly in either version of the game, but I did demonstrably worse in my playthrough of the Steam version and I attribute that to the generally awful feel of the controls.

The one nice thing I can say about DotEmu’s port is that the online play seems, from my extremely limited experience, totally fine. I played the first couple of levels with a friend and it was smooth throughout. The port’s underlying problems still existed, and I’m not sure how the netcode would hold up to something more timing intensive like a versus game, but online play did not accentuate any of the port’s issues from what I could tell.

A brief check-in with the Steam port of Metal Slug X revealed that it, unsurprisingly, has the exact same problems Metal Slug 3 has. This is where my firsthand experience with DotEmu’s products ends, because I’m not enough of a sucker to buy three bad versions of old games. Just two. Craving more info, I put out the call to my wonderful, smart, definitely non-sucker Twitter followers. What follows is everything I was able to gather from them.

Now, I love Metal Slug 3, but I’m far from an absolute expert on it. There are people who have played the game for longer than I have and are way better at it than I am. I doubt the same can be said for friend of the site LordBBH regarding Shock Troopers. One of his favorite games of all time, BBH has probably put more hours into playing Shock Troopers than anyone on the planet (and plenty of those hours are on video). He knows the game inside and out, and he found all of the same issues in Shock Troopers that I found in the Metal Slugs, but he also stumbled upon a couple of things I would have never even thought to check. Such as the difficulty settings, for instance. Every Neo Geo game has about 8 or so different difficulty options that you can change in the system settings, but DotEmu’s ports have just four: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard. Whereas the original release of Shock Troopers adjusted the damage you take depending on what difficulty you were playing on, the difficulty options in the Steam version, from what LordBBH can tell, do... absolutely nothing. If it were anyone else I would chalk it up to not knowing the game well enough to spot the differences, but this guy knows.

There’s also another issue that’s entirely specific to Shock Troopers and definitely worth noting. There were two versions of the game, and the thing with Shock Troopers is you can either select one character or a team of three that you can freely swap between in-level. In what’s generally considered the “main” version of the game, a team has individual life bars for each character. In the other version, the whole team shares a single life bar. This minimizes the difference between playing as a team and playing as a single character, and the version of the game that uses the shared life bar is treated as more of a curiosity than a thing people play. The DotEmu port uses the single life bar version, and there’s no option to switch to the other one. This is probably an easy thing to overlook if you’re not, you know, a company in charge of porting the game to a different platform. But if you are, it shows a real lack of knowledge and care for your product in my eyes.

If you want a really, really long look at LordBBH playing and discussing the Steam version of Shock Troopers (and a little bit of the next game), he uploaded a video of it to his YouTube channel. For now though, let’s move on.

Twinkle Star Sprites is a cute versus shoot ‘em up game where players compete to clear out the enemies on their side of the screen and launch attacks at the other player. According to the info I received, the Steam version has all the general problems of the previously discussed games, but with a couple of fun unique wrinkles. First of all, the online leaderboards report impossible scores. Like, scores in the billions. For a while people weren’t sure whether it was a bug or people were hacking, but it turns out the leaderboards take the sum of all scores attained in all the versus matches you’ve played and post that. This makes the feature useless for competition, as you can rack up higher and higher scores simply by playing more. 

The other thing I was told is by far the weirdest one I’ve heard. While the previously mentioned useless difficulty options actually do something in Twinkle Star Sprites, what they do is increase the frame rate. The game itself is unaltered, it’s just sped up. I have absolutely no clue how or why this would happen, and I didn’t receive details on how much each option increases it by, but this is apparently a real thing that happens and I kind of can’t believe it.[UPDATE 1/12/17: My source on this has gotten back to me with claims that this does not actually happen. Whether or not it never did or was fixed in a patch is unknown. The difficulty settings currently do nothing. Leaving everything here for transparency.]

With that we’ve gone through all the specific examples I was told about and could find on my own, so that about wraps up the “what” of this whole situation (for now). Now we have to move on to the “why”. Why are these ports so consistently shoddy? Why does a company that positions itself as trying to make sure classic games don’t “get lost” continue to bungle everything in both the most basic and most baffling ways? The answer to that isn’t exactly clear. We could look at the case of DotEmu (legally, don’t start) using Nebula, an emulator last updated in 2007, for their 2015 Neo Geo Humble Bundle releases and question their competency. We could look at stuff like the apparently lacking Heroes of Might and Magic 3 HD release or the fact that their promotional Windjammers PS4 theme contains no actual elements from Windjammers and question their passion. We could look at any number of things and take any number of guesses, but I have a feeling the real reason for all of it is simple: they can get away with it. You can technically play through everything beginning to end, and the amount of people who care about these games to the point of easily noticing and articulating these flaws is minuscule compared to the greater number of players. Major outlets aren’t going to report on the input lag of a specific port of a 17 year old game. Negative Steam reviews complaining about frame drops aren’t going to drown out the people going “just like my child days!” and giving a thumbs up (except in the case of specific franchises where obsessives outnumber nostalgia fiends). The people just coming to these games for the first time aren’t going to have the frame of reference to know something is wrong, for all they can tell the game just normally sounds like that. DotEmu can phone it in because there’s not enough people to get the word out that they’re calling collect.

As for the final question: “where” does all this leave the PlayStation 4 port of Windjammers? Only time will tell. DotEmu has been talking up how they’ve had the French Windjammers community constantly playtesting and giving feedback to make sure they get things right, but then again David Sirlin said the same thing about having pro players help with the development of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It’s just not enough of an assurance to make me overlook the company’s extremely rough track record. I hope they prove me wrong and knock it out of the park. I would love to have an official and fully featured re-release of this game that I love, but I’m not holding my breath. My money’s on it being another in a line of DotEmu botch jobs. For a company supposedly devoted to making sure old games aren’t forgotten, it’s almost ironic that they’ve so consistently helped make sure they’re something even worse: misremembered.

Did I miss something? Get something completely wrong? Do you have something to add about a different game? Let me know! I want to update this article with as much relevant and accurate information as possible! Feel free to get at me on Twitter or send me an email.