Pinging all Backlog Burner participants/conversationalists: here's the new topic for the week!

If you would like to be removed from/added to the list, let me know either here or by PM.

We are two weeks in, and I'll have everyone know that I haven't deleted my card or had to reinstall Linux even once! This is a personal triumph.

My dog also didn't eat my writeups this time. I did type them in my notes app rather than the web browser this time, so even if he did jump on the computer again they would have been okay. But, as is the case with backups, issues like that will only happen when you don't have recovery set up. When you do? It's like the universe knows and leaves you alone.

General life things have kept me quite busy and, correspondingly, have kept me from being as present in the comments of this event as I'd like to be, but know that I'm thrilled with all of the great writeups everyone is doing. The true fun of Backlog Burner for me isn't just in playing my own games, it's in hearing what everyone else has to say about theirs too! So, big thanks to everyone for being so thoughtful and forthcoming in talking about what you've been playing.

Midtown Madness

This is a racing game from 1999 that looked SO cool to young me but that I never was able to actually get my hands on. We're spoiled these days with availability. If a game wasn't in my local stores back then, I never even had a chance to play it. As such, this is one of those games that I've always been interested in but never actually scratched the itch to pick up and play.

The game is noteworthy for having an open world back when that was novel and exciting. For example: I played hours and hours of Carmageddon back in the day not because I liked its over-the-top violence (it actually put me off a lot) but because you could drive anywhere and that was SO COOL! Midtown Madness does the same thing minus the violence, with its map being a facsimile of downtown Chicago.

I streamed the game from my Windows PC to my Deck, and set up a Steam Input profile to play the game with a controller which works better than it has any right to. It's inevitably clunky, especially in menus, but being able to stream a game to my handheld gaming device and use a control scheme it was never intended for is one of those reminders that I am living in the future. The me from 1999 never could have imagined such a thing!

Anyway, in terms of racing, the game is pretty standard. No rubber-banding, which is nice, and it's got various adjustable settings like time of day and traffic and "physics realism" (whatever that means). I turned the "realism" slider almost all the way down, and my car rolled when I went around a corner, which was unexpected and kind of fun?

In the middle of the map are these big drawbridges that open and close, so of course you can hit them while the sides are up for a perfect ramp that gets you massive air. It's a little quaint by modern standards, but I can assure you that it was undoubtedly breathtakingly cool back at the turn of the millennium.

I can't really say I recommend the game outside of a novel curiosity these days. As much as I love retro racing games, I also think they're one of the genres that ages the poorest. I don't know that the game has a lot to offer unless you're looking to relive your own nostalgia for it or, like me, scratch a decades-long itch.

If anyone is wanting to visit it, an abandonware download of it is really your only option. This is one of those games that will never see re-release due to its use of actual licensed cars (a problem that is still a death knell for most racing games in terms of long-term availability -- even the Forza games can't stay available for more than a few years!).

Firestarter

This one does have a modern re-release, being, from what I can tell, a GOG Exclusive.

It's from the same developer that did the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, though it was put out several years before the first of those games.

It's an arena horde shooter with quite possibly the worst onboarding I've had in recent memory. Instead of spawning hordes of enemies, the tutorial levels of the game laboriously and slowly spawn enemies in isolation, one-by-one, complete with multi-second cutaways to introduce each new enemy and weapon. Once you get past this the game gets more interesting, picking up in both pacing and difficulty.

The game does have a lot of cool ideas. There are different classes with different stats, and as you advance through the game you choose from among different boosts to your character in the now-familiar pattern of a modern-day roguelike.

The game is something that I would have enjoyed keeping up with, but unfortunately it was marred by some bugs that I have to assume are the product of running a 2003 game on 2025 hardware. I died for no reason at multiple points on multiple levels. In starting the game I had to adjust Windows settings to make my mouse not be stuttery in-game and finally got that working, only to have the stutter return when I used the first ability I unlocked (time slow).

Enough of these little issues accumulated that they would have made the game frustrating to continue, so I decided to shelve the game. I was glad that I was able to play enough to get a feel and an appreciation for it though.

Pepsiman

You are Pepsiman, a distribution superhero bringing Pepsi to people in need.

A few scattered thoughts:

• It is remarkably not terrible, which is high praise for a licensed game.
• It was a runner game long before the runner game genre was standard (my mind wants to say Canabalt from 2009 was one of the first major games to be identified with the genre)
• The recurring "PEPSIMAAAAAAN" vocals in the soundtrack are hilarious...
• ...at first. By the end of the game I found them kind of grating.
• The cutscenes were entertaining in a deliberately bad sort of way.

This game is a perfect example of what I will henceforth call "The @vili Principle:"

Nowadays, a game often contains 100 hours of content, of which you play 50. Back in the day, games contained 2 hours of content, of which you also played 50.

The game is short. I probably beat it in about an hour or so?

But that's only because I abused the crap out of save states.

If I hadn't, it would have taken me hours, maybe dozens of them, to see the game all the way through. It relies on you learning its patterns and cycles through repetition so that you can avoid them. The game has a lot of cheap deaths or obstacles. If you don't collect enough Pepsi cans you can run out of lives and have to start all the way over. It's a bit unfair by modern standards to the point of potentially being unfun by modern standards as well.

That said, this isn't exactly a criticism. Back in the day, I was the kind of gamer that would have eagerly put those dozens of hours into this game. It was just how we played back then. I'm glad I was able to try out the game, and it was genuinely enjoyable playing it with save states. Without them, however, I think I would have hit a frustration wall pretty early on.

Vib-Ribbon

Similar to Midtown Madness, this is another 1999 game that always interested me but that was completely inaccessible to me as a kid (it never came out in North America).

I don't think I even knew about the game in 1999. Instead, what put it on my radar was when I started making my own custom DDR stepfiles for Dance With Intensity (anyone else remember that?). I embedded myself into several online stepfile communities, including one that had a custom map for the track "Laugh & Peace" from this game.

I was entranced by the song. It was odd. Quirky. It had drastic tempo changes and memorable lines. It feels like something that would fit right in on the amazing Katamari Damacy soundtrack.

My knowledge of and interest in the game stopped there for decades, until I finally picked the game up for CGA.

The game is a delight. Full of personality and charm. Its minimalistic, monochromatic graphics punch well above their weight in making the game feel lively, exciting, dynamic, and cute. Vibri is adorable.

The soundtrack is also excellent. I have since acquired a copy of it and uploaded it to my Apple Music account, so that I can listen to the tracks from the game whenever I want.

The gameplay is, well, there.

Unfortunately, for a rhythm game, Vib-Ribbon has some timing issues. I suspect even the built-in tracks for the game were procedurally generated rather than hardcoded in, because there are obstacles that do not follow the song's beats correctly. I took to watching Vibri's footfalls to know when to press buttons, rather than going with the "feel" of the song, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.

I did still enjoy it, particularly the wrinkle the game throws at you in the final Hard stage. I also haven't played any custom tracks yet, but I plan to try to get a custom disc going with my emulator. Despite what I see as an unignorable issue with the game's obstacle timings, I was ultimately won over by the game's irrepressible charm. It's got a personality all its own, buoyed by a bright, endearing, wacky cuteness.