Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider Reviews

6/10

A modern gameboy game with just as much charm.

In my weakness, I seek to belong. Once in a blue moon I look back to the two arcade cabinets I perused on two separate days of my life as a kid and pretend I'm like those boys from Honshu. That I also have the stick itch. So I launch a game like this. Turn on the vintage visual effects. Pick up the controller. Platform. Attack horizontally. Learn the way of the diagonal kick. Honestly restart the level as my lives run out. Nod in rhythm to the 90s Yamaha samples. Then as you replay the same segment for the seventeenth time, you can't help but think how much better the game would feel if you just had more limited choice of games. Sure, one replays everything, but arcades are made to be replayed - and in exactly the same fashion you played them for the first time. With the exception of a few that offer creative replayability for higher score - and those are commonly lauded as masterpieces. Good for a quick fix at a bar or to spend lunch quarters on with three of your schoolmates peeking impatiently over your shoulder. Something for a weird friend of a friend of your dad to brag about, like that guy I knew who was so good at a claw machine he cleared them out for the fun of it and handed all the toys to kids he'd never met before that gathered to gawk at a stranger whose Kung fu was divine like so. These are games of real place, of community, of good times, of action. In the world of games arcades are cinema. But then I remember. I am not from Honshu. I'm from the Urals. And my games are of imaginary place, of vanity, of solitaire times, of meditation. Not cinema, but Kinetoscope. United with the Poles. United with the Chinese. United with the Indians. United with the Koreans (South and North). United with any part of the world where they fly the flag of Queen Anne's Revenge and proceed to salute it in profane resolve. We are the glorious PC master race. Our manes are mesmerising even when lice and life leave us bald.