What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Beast Busters (Switch)

October 19th, 2022

I, somewhat shockingly, met my ten games cleared goal! Because of that, there's been some updates to my Cleared Games page, which is up in my site's top navbar. This page is mostly for my accounting purposes, but it feels good to mark things off of arbitrary lists. I'll fully admit that I cleared ten games by scumming short and easy indies and retro quarter munchers, but it was a fun experience. Since I usually don't manage to clear games at all, it felt like progress, too, enough so that I'm dialing back to a requirement of two games cleared before I can buy another. Scintillating stuff, right?

As my tenth cleared game, I went back and played Beast Busters, an old SNK light gun game I've mentioned here before, start to end on Switch. There's no motion control at all, so the control in this port felt super janky to me, but it was still over the top enough to be enjoyable. Maybe it went on a little longer than it needed to, but whereas I usually hate the end of an arcade game's rematch with all the bosses, that part of this one was kind of fantastic. I think it was a good mix of weird monster designs, boss attack patterns that felt fairly fair, and my just being better at light gun style games than the beat-em-ups I usually gravitate towards. Beast Busters was a decent way to kill a few minutes!

September 7th, 2022

I'm still feeling kind of foggy-brained and tired, so tonight's post is way too late. I was worried about what to play again last night, too, so to try to push past that, I got out the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection for Switch. It's a really cool complilation, so there's always something to mess with on it.

My first idea was that it was finally time to beat Athena, which didn't happen because, despite the fact that it's charming, pastel, and cute, I always forget that I absolutely hate playing it because it is a barely functional game. Please note that I am so sure another attempt'll be made I marked today's new page specifically for the NES/Famicom version. Despite my many failures and frustrations with the arcade version of this game on PSP, I will eventually wonder if I was just trying to play the wrong version and then try the arcade version again. This loop shall never end.

After I gave up on Athena, though, I tried Beast Busters, and hoo boy, is that a hell of a game! The zombies had guns, the owls had zombies, and my player character was named Johnny Justice. All of it was great, and I am smiling just typing about it. In fact, I shut it off in stage two because I felt like I'd need to really be awake to appreciate how dumb it was.

All that being said, I am not sure it works well on Switch. The Joycon controls were pretty terrible proxies for the arcade light gun, and the total lack of visual or aural feedback when I took a hit was a little frustrating. I also don't care because devil owls were bringing football zombies to kill and eat a man named Johnny Justice, and that's the magic of video games.