What Did We Play Yesterday?

I bounced off this game when I first bought it because of the sheer volume and layers of stuff on the screen, but I picked it up again as part of my Survivorslike Rodeo and fell right in. Time Wasters by Proton Studio is an aptly-named Survivorslike in a shmup skin (shmuplike?) that gives the player the maneuverability of a space ship, including a boost ability, and loads of pilots and weapons to choose from. The level is filled with different types of timed based the player can use for recovery and other effects, and bosses and invasions of those bases occur at regular intervals. The player picks up permenant upgrades by collecting Space Cubes, but there are a variety of powerups scattered or generated across the levels, including healing, rerolls (Time Cubes), and other items. The goal is to survive 120 enemy waves, including bosses.

The faster-pace of this game means the player must rely on boost and manuverability to get out of tight spots. The enemy ship swarms are utterly relentless, and figuring out how to corral and destroy them efficiently is a significant part of gameplay. Later in the round, more shmup-like bullet formations come into play. At regular intervals, bosses appear or enemies attack one of your bases, and in the case of the bases if you're not adequately powered up you won't be able to save it from destruction.

Once you get the hang of All The Things this is a lot of fun, and I thoroughly enjoy it with a controller. What's particularly neat is once you start perma-upgrading your captains, you sometimes get a random opportunity to recruit a captain and add her perma-upgrades to your current ship, which is a nice boon.

This game is truly the epitome of "just one more" and this feels like a natural evolution of Vampire Survivors for players who have sunk some time into that game but want something a little faster.

There are a few things that diminish the fun for me. The game rounds can last much longer than other games I've played in this genre. My longest run was 40 minutes, but it was that long in part because I ended up in holding patterns with bosses multiple times. Elite bosses often have intermittent invulnerability, which drags out boss battles even if you're properly weaponized. The general sponginess of the bosses is one of my chief complaints because often I find myself "hanging out" in a boss circle, slowly wearing it down, and not really doing much of anything else. Getting Space Cubes to upgrade your character and bases occurs at probability, so sometimes you fail and sometimes you gather as many as 5. This is a bit different than the loot boxes in other survivorslikes, where you are always guaranteed at least 1 upgrade.

Puzzli is a somewhat obscure match-3 style game where the player tosses fishes into a pond. Matches occur when at least 3 fish are connected and at least one fish is at the surface, or top row. The game is super cute and a fun puzzle, and it's satisfying to get a chain combo (the fisherman spins like a top if you get a certain number of matches in a row). The water level gradually drops as you play, and if one of the columns of fishes is too long to drop, the game is over.

Puzzli hasn't been released outside Japan. Alekmaul created a homebrew port of this game for Nintendo DS (which he says does not work with emulators) and Mega Drive (which does). The MD port isn't quite as responsive as the original, but it provides an English-language alternative if you can't get MAME running. The game was also ported to Colecovision by Michel Louvet for purchase, and he has since provided the source code for those who wish to compile their own ROM. For me, the colorful graphics of the arcade version are a big part of the draw, but this led me down an interesting rabbit hole of Colecovisison paid homebrews.