Firebugs is a cool game! It’s simple, but it’s polished and just plain enjoyable to play if you want a dose of high speed hijinks. Even though it’s very easy to beat, it sold me on its best qualities and I had fun the whole time through. Not all of its choices are perfect, but they all felt experimental or understandable in some way, so I really couldn’t muster up the energy to be mad at all about any of it. I normally hate item spam in these kinds of games, but Firebugs was so accommodating that every time it told me to get back in there, I happily did so. If you’re like me and you just love being in the presence of the PS1, this game is a pretty dang good way to do just that.

As a fighting game, Elfmania also isn’t something that I think most people would enjoy since it stands in such defiance to everything we know about the genre. There’s almost no special moves, no combos, the roster is super small, the story only exists at the end and I assume in the manual, there’s just not much for people spoiled for choice to latch onto if they’re not playing it in 1994. But if you have a second person with a sense of ~culture~ and a joyous spirit, then we’re talking! Despite all its problems, despite how weird it is to play, Elfmania is probably really fun to mess around with when you have other people!

Honestly, this game ended up being way harder to write about than I expected! It’s a late Famicom Konami game, so I expected to do nothing but gush about how awesome it is, but things ended up getting more complicated real quick. I still stand by what I said briefly before- this game is good and you should try it- but I also don’t necessarily think all of its “improvements” make for an unambiguously better game…

I came away quite impressed with Gateway to Apshai, I gotta say. I know it’s the more casual game for casuals compared to the games that came before it, but its choice of platform plus the way it adapts so many ideas that weren’t quite mainstream yet makes it a really interesting time capsule and blend of early action RPGs and roguelikes. It’s simple enough that anyone can play it, but it has the tactical depth and knowledge checks that roguelikes do in order to make them interesting. It’s a much simpler RPG compared to any other Dunjonquest, but it still has juuust enough of those RPG elements that you could call it one of the premier examples on the ColecoVision. It’s a game that wears multiple masks and wears them pretty well!

I wanted to like Spark World a lot more than I did. Obviously, I’m a big Bomberman fan and I love seeing people find their own ways to mix up the formula (especially since Konami can’t be relied on to do the same consistently…), but Spark World’s ideas are simply too unrefined to be worth dealing with. There are absolutely things I like here, such as the theming and the faster pace in multiplayer specifically, but the choices Spark World makes all contribute to one of the most unenjoyable and obnoxious Bomberman-style single player modes I’ve ever experienced.