A Drawing’s Journey

There's truly infinite potential with an idea like the World of Drawings, so it would have been nice to see it pushed harder here. As it is, A Drawing's Journey is a game that's unfortunately one I wouldn't recommend. Its gameplay is tedious and full of needless misdirection, its story is unfulfilling and rings hollow when it tries to make a big play at the end, and the whole thing just bums me out because it's nice to see small projects like this succeed. Having played it myself, I suppose I'm not surprised to see that the few people who bought it seemingly never made it far - I highly doubt normal people would stick with that nonsense battery puzzle as long as I did!

Stahlfeder: Tekkou Hikuudan

I'm really not sure why this game garners the hate it does (when it gets any acknowledgement, anyway). I know it's far from the peak of the genre and it's certainly not without things that would dissatisfy diehard STG players, but when you boil it down, it's… really not doing anything particularly wrong or different from what you'd typically expect. It's slower than the likes of, say, Ikaruga, and much easier than it too, but I think it's really nice to have something that's both an entry point and something you can just suck down in 30 minutes and have a good time, even if said time isn't an exceptional one.

Funky Jet

When you boil it down, I suppose Funky Jet isn’t much more than a fun 30 minute jaunt with some lively visuals, but it achieves that humble goal with such aplomb that I can’t help but think it deserves much more credit than it gets. The formula it strives to improve upon is a tricky one to touch since it’s the kind of thing that was practically perfected from the jump, but Mitchel Corporation really found a way to make it their own. It’s kind of genius how they took two genres with such straightforward fundamentals and figured out that they’d work together so well.