You Found a Secret Area!

Category: From the Bargain Bin

It came from the Bargain Bin… the mysteries of sub-$20 video games, where you weren’t sure if you were paying for a gem or an absolute clunker. These are the budget games that make you question whether it was worth the money spent…

Reload: Target shooting but without actually firing guns.

The first-person shooter in the 90s was still a new thing for gaming. Called “Doom clones” for several years before the current nomenclature took hold, these kind of games were often seen as violent and filled with gore, primarily made for adults, with very few kid-friendly versions of the genre readily available. Then again, it was mostly cartoon violence, but you try telling old decrepit senators like Joseph Lieberman that.

But then in 1997, Sunstorm Interactive, a developer of expansions for games like Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior, and publisher WizardWorks released Deer Hunter, a first-person hunting game. Still violent, but it’s hunting! People in the US of A love hunting, and that’s an untapped market!

Cue several different hunting and shooting games by a myriad of companies, including the scores of Cabela’s video games by Activision Value. But it wasn’t just hunting games. Hunting is basically shooting on an open range, and target ranges are popular, so why not games based on that?

A screenshot of NRA: Gun Club. Look at this riveting gameplay!

There’s a handful of those too, including the infamous NRA Gun Club, a game I wrote about many years ago. In a sense, the game I’m talking about today is basically the spiritual successor to NRA Gun Club in more ways than one, and likely was made to cater to that same niche market that Deer Hunter did all those years ago. Except now it’s a bit more of a crowded market…

That’s one chunky smartphone.

Reload, also called Reload: Outdoor Action in some regions, is a lightgun rail shooter. Yet another game that’s hard to find info on the web, much like when I wrote about Legendary. Reload was published by Mastiff, a brand mostly known for making shovelware fare during the late 2000s to early 2010s, like the Heavy Fire series among many other games. The developer on the other hand, Top3Line, is not a developer I’m familiar with, but I figure they’re yet another a dime-a-dozen bargain bin game developer. Reload came out for the Nintendo Wii, and later, bizarrely, on PC. For this article, I’m playing the PC version through Steam. I can’t imagine the Wii version being any different except looking a bit worse and a bit more Wii remote waggle.

“Welcome to Reload, here’s what you’re in for.” Pretty basic.

There isn’t much of a story to Reload. Your player character goes to various target ranges with many different types of firearms, with a goal at each mission: Get a certain amount of points, avoid harming too many civilians, that kind of stuff. Fulfill the mission requirements and we’ll move on to the next stage with different requirements than the last. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Well, it’s doing what it says on the tin, that’s for sure.
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March 23, 2026
R.I.P.D.: The Game – Deado on Arrival.

At the February 2026 PlayStation State of Play, a trailer for a currently untitled John Wick video game was featured. It was all CG renders and no gameplay, but it could be promising considering the last attempts to put John Wick in a video game was a passable crossover in Payday 2, the strategy game John Wick Hex that I heard was pretty good, and likely other crossovers.

Then it was announced that Saber Interactive was making it, and among my friends the hype immediately deflated. Saber’s games vary wildly from being “perfectly fine and inoffensive” to “absolute trash.” They’re kinda like Rebellion Developments in a way, where their best games are mostly above-average schlock, but their bad games are truly terrible games.

This got me looking into one of their previous attempts at a licensed game. I opted to go for the one based on a mostly forgotten 2013 movie based on an equally obscure comic book series. Bonus: we get digital Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in this one.

Dude, clean off your desk, man.

Based on the 2013 movie of the same name, R.I.P.D.: The Game is a product of Old School Games, a short-lived subsidiary of Saber Interactive based out of Russia. They only released two games, both in 2013: This game, and God Mode, a medieval horror shooter hybrid. This was published by Atlus USA in the final year before Sega acquired the Atlus brand, which might seem weird to folks finding out the same company that published Persona and Catherine published this. Then again, Sega published indie games like Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (which I wrote about here), so I guess it was kinda On Brand for companies to publish offbeat games like these in the early 2010s.

This was available on Patreon a few days early. If you wanna support my independent queer games writing, consider contributing to my Patreon. You don’t have to kill deados, just $1 will get you early access to my work

If only the game looked as stylized as this does.

R.I.P.D.: The Game’s story is a loose adaptation of the film: Nick, played by Ryan Reynolds, dies and is assigned to the Rest In Piece Department, a supernatural police force meant to take out “Deados” – their version of zombies, basically – and either eliminate or arrest them. With the help of Roy, played by Jeff Bridges, the two must fight all kinds of Deados through various locales like a Meth Lab, a Library, a Construction Yard, and eventually gain enough to tackle the leader of the pack named Hayes, played by Kevin Bacon.
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February 19, 2026
Santa Rockstar HD: Christmas Hero.

If you’ve ever played a five-fret guitar rhythm game, you probably have a favorite one of those. Most of us have our most favorite fake plastic guitar rhythm games. But what about the least favorite guitar rhythm games? There’s probably a few well known examples that immediately come to mind: Rock Revolution, PowerGig: Rise of the SixString, PopStar Guitar, a game I previously covered here. Maybe Guitar Hero Live or Rock Band 4 or Fortnite Festival if you’re feeling really spicy. But I propose a new candidate for the worst five-fret rhythm game I played. Which, considering I played and wrote about PopStar Guitar, is an impressive feat.

The title is a bit confusing. Is it Santa Rockstar HD, Metal Xmas Santa Rockstar HD or just Santa Rockstar? Make up your minds, y’all!

Santa Rockstar HD is a five-fret rhythm game for PC made by Bekho Team, a studio based out of Santiago, Chile. Outside of a few games of theirs that are knockoffs of existing games, this is probably the most standout product the company has made. This is the sixth installment in the Santa Rockstar franchise, a series that initially started out as a series of Flash games released from 2008 to 2012, during the first boom and bust of the rhythm game genre. Santa Rockstar HD is the first one to not use Flash, instead opting to use Unity to make the game.

I was made aware of this game back in 2023 when Twitch streamer and overall guitar game god Acai covered it on a stream during the holiday season. He was absolutely floored at how bad it all was. Since I am a trash connoisseur and rhythm game nut, I bought this on a whim not long after. Since it’s the holiday season, it seems like a perfect time to talk about Santa Rockstar HD.

There really isn’t much of a story to Santa Rockstar HD. A rock and roll dude, who goes unnamed here, notices Santa Claus has been hurt. Being reminded of the memories of getting a guitar from Santa for Christmas, decides to wield Santa’s axe, of which he suddenly becomes a buff Santa himself. So now our buff Santa Claus must save Christmas with the power of rock. It’s like if The Santa Clause had a baby with Brutal Legend. I wasn’t expecting an outstanding story out of a rhythm game here, but it’s a good enough premise to keep things going.

We’re off to a bad start if I’m seeing typos here….

The main story quest involves you playing notes to the tune of various Christmas songs of note, with a more metal flare. Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful, Jingle Bells, all the iconic Christmas songs, plus a few original songs and arrangements of symphony classics like Rondo alla turca. Charlie Parra, the game’s composer, did a pretty darn good soundtrack here. I’m usually not big on metal covers of songs – I think they’re a bit cliched and overdone sometimes – but I totally would throw these in a Christmas songs playlist. (There is a soundtrack of this available on Steam, but it seems to come from playing the songs in-game rather than the raw audio files, so save your money.)

These gems almost look like candy. I wonder if you can eat the gems…

If you’ve played a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, you’re gonna be easily familiar with the game’s mechanics: Tap a note, get points, hit a string of white notes to get Rockpower – this game’s equivalent to Guitar Hero’s Star Power – and try not to miss too many notes or you’ll fail. One of the more interesting changes through the quest mode is that your multiplier, rockpower and note streak carry over from song to song in the setlist. It’s a bit unconventional than standard rhythm game setlists, which usually reset everything upon playing a new song, but I guess it can be useful if you’re trying to get the high score.
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December 18, 2025
Soldier of Fortune: Payback – the low budget finale.

CONTENT WARNING: Blood, gore and violence.

Longtime readers of this site know that I am a trash connoisseur. I will watch terrible shows and bad movies, and of course I’ll play bad video games. I chalk it up to just absorbing a lot of critically panned media in my youth, but I also look at it as a learning experience: Just why did they make it like this? Engaging with media known for its negative reception is important to critiquing media, in my opinion. Gives you a better understanding of what’s actually good or bad.

I’ve written about several bargain bin games over the years. Often made by small teams on shoestring budgets and quick development time frames, these are fascinating to play for me. Many times they’re not very good, and I can finish them in just a couple hours. Though, sometimes you can see what they wanted to do, but couldn’t for whatever reason. In some rare cases, a budget label will decide to release a new installment in a long-dormant franchise in an attempt to get a few extra sales from longtime fans. Much like today’s entry.

Confirmed: That’s a gun firing, alright!

Soldier of Fortune: Payback is the oft-maligned third and final installment of the Soldier of Fortune franchise, loosely based on the magazine of the same name. Released in 2007, a mere two weeks after the massively popular Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, this game came and went to negative reviews, and is mostly forgotten outside of ragebait Youtubers or trash connoisseurs like me.

Payback was not developed by Raven Software, makers of the previous Soldier of Fortune games. Instead, it was developed by Slovakian development studio Cauldron, who was one of a few studios Activision Value relied on for developing their bargain bin games. According to The Cutting Room Floor, the game was tentatively titled “Mercenaries Wanted,” and likely got the Soldier of Fortune branding due to similarities between it and the previous games.

While it may seem weird for Activision to publish this game right after the biggest video game to probably come out in 2007, it actually isn’t. You see, for a while, there were two Activisions.

From 2000 to 2016, Activision Value was a publishing arm of Activision based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was created from a merger of several budget publishers, including Expert Software – known for publishing a good chunk of Sega’s PC output, like Sonic & Knuckles Collection, which I’ve written about – and Head Games, makers of such infamous games like Extreme Boards & Blades and Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II, which I’ve also written about. If you’re familiar with the oodles of video games based on the Cabela’s brand of sporting good stores, that’s almost entirely Activision Value.

Unless you looked closely, there wasn’t much of a noticeable difference between the Activision based out of California that was putting out Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty; and the Activision based out of Minnesota that was putting out stuff like Secret Service or the oodles of History Channel video games. They both had the Activision logo on the box, after all. I find this late 2000s era of Activision fascinating for that reason. They not only wanted be the big AAA publisher, but they also wanted to put out average schlock for $40 a pop. Guess they wanted to eat their cake and have it too.

Just another day at the office.

In Soldier of Fortune: Payback, you don’t play as the bushy mustachioed protagonist John Mullins from the previous games, but instead a generic faceless soldier by the name of Thomas Mason. (No relation to Alex Mason, I assume.) Mason gets double-crossed by another Shop mercenary named Miller, and with the help from Casandra “Casey” Decker back at The Shop, Mason goes through middle eastern towns, South American jungles and Ukranian hotels to figure out who is bribing mercenaries to defect. It’s a fairly basic story pretty much meant to move the player along various locales while shooting bad guys in generic environments.
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November 22, 2025
Shadowgrounds: Survivor: Top down alien shooting, Now with Physics!

Way back in 2016 I wrote about Shadowgrounds, a top-down horror shooter by Frozenbyte, the developers of the Trine franchise. I thought it was a neat little game for what it was, and while it wasn’t super unique, it was at least a bit of fun for a few hours. Towards the end of the article I wrote:

One day I’ll get around to the sequel, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, which might be more of the same, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

Then I mostly forgot about it. The original Shadowgrounds was a fun little romp for what it was, and I guess I felt I needed some time before I jumped right in. It wasn’t until almost a decade later would I actually get around to playing it. It wasn’t quite worth the wait.

Wouldn’t be a 2000s video game without a cute lady on the title screen.

Developed again by Frozenbyte and published by Meridian4, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is basically a standalone expansion pack to the original game. This was released one year after the original Shadowgrounds, and since Frozenbyte wasn’t a super big developer at the time, this felt a bit more like a tech demo than anything resembling a sequel.

Taking place concurrently with events from the original game, you play as three characters: Luke “Marine” Giffords, a generic soldier; Bruno “Napalm” Lastmann, a Russian drunken soldier stereotype; and Isabel “Sniper” Larose, a cute goth assassin lady. During the story you switch between these characters as they all get a message from McTiernan, a scientist who is trying to help fix a base in New Atlantis to cull the impending alien threat.

Why is there always sewers……

Like its predecessor, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is a top down action game. Each character has a unique set of weapons they use and procure throughout their journey to kill the alien threat, which is the general gamut of pistols, assault rifles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and railguns.

All the major arsenal from Shadowgrounds reappears here, but this time locked to specific characters. Marine only gets a pistol to start, but eventually picks up the legally-distinct-from-Alien Pulse Rifle. Napalm starts with a flamethrower, natch, but can get a shotgun. Sniper naturally has a special handgun but later picks up a railgun. Each character also has grenades they can throw at any time, as well as a tactical dodge to avoid gunfire.
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March 19, 2025
Save Room – Organization Puzzle: Got a collection of good things on sale, stranger.

I like Resident Evil. Whether it’s the horror aspects of the first few games, or even the goofy action-driven pivot the series took after Resident Evil 5, it’s one of those franchises I have a soft spot for. Except for Resident Evil 6, that game is… not good.

One of the core mechanics Resident Evil relies heavily on is the inventory system. Your character can only hold a fixed amount of items, thus there’s a bit of strategy beyond exploring a place and killing all the zombies. Knowing what items and weapons to bring, making sure you’re equipped for whatever the game throws your way, whether or not it’s worth getting the big ticket item now or coming back later once your inventory’s empty. While it can be frustrating that you can’t just hold everything, it’s a deliberate design choice that I can appreciate.

The RE4 inventory system in action. (courtesy of r/oddlysatisfying on Reddit, likely taken from elsewhere.)

By the time we get to Resident Evil 4 it starts being more complex, where they use a grid system, with each item taking a specific number of slots in the game’s inventory system, now depicted as a large briefcase. It feels a bit more realistic, but also a game within a game, as one has to occasionally do a bit of adjusting to fit the new weapon or the dozens of fish they caught. It’s that one thing people always mention when they talk about RE4 that isn’t complaining about Ashley Graham being annoying. In 2022, 17 years after the original game’s release, a bunch of Brazilians were inspired by this interesting inventory system and liked the concept so much that they made a game out of it.

I assure you, in spite of the simple title screen, this is not an asset flip.

Save Room: Organization Puzzle is a game made by Fractal Projects, an indie studio based out of Brazil. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much information on the studio itself, but it’s made a few indie games like Npc Problems: Vertex Coloring and How to Bathe Your Cat, which are mostly pixel-driven indie games that are likely enjoyable games for the sub-$5 price all of their games go for. They don’t really have a website or a broad social media presence, so I can’t really pinpoint if these folks have prior game experience outside of their own work. Funny enough, while there aren’t clear credits for who made this, they do credit the assets they used in from the Unity store, so they’re at least considerate even if they’re semi anonymous.

If you want to progress stranger, solve my puzzle!

There isn’t much of a story. A Merchant – likely a reference to the merchant from RE4 – asks you to solve his puzzles, which involve having a bunch of items and fitting them within a specific grid of tiles. You click and drag them into specific spaces, right click rotates the item 90 degrees, and clicking on an item without moving it gives an option to inspect, combine or use, like in Resident Evil 4. Once you’ve filled all the slots, you can move on to the next puzzle.
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January 18, 2025
Legendary: Maybe we shouldn’t open Pandora’s Box.

(Update 10/24/2025: Minor grammar edits, removed mentioning “generations” (a Wikipedia standard that is incredibly stupid) and specifying what console or time period I’m talking about instead, added a link to the soundtrack article.)

I kind of miss the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era of shooters. Sometimes you’d find a game that while not amazing, was at least trying something interesting. Other times you could end up stuck in the sluice gate of Activision’s budget hell, with games like Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Jurassic: The Hunted or The History Channel: Battle for the Pacific. (By the way, those are all by the same developer: Cauldron, a Slovakian game studio that’s since been absorbed into Bohemia Interactive, makers of ArmA.)

But regardless, I miss that B to C-tier type of game, something to waste a few hours of your time with that might’ve had promise but couldn’t deliver for whatever reason. And the game I’m talking about this time around definitely fits that criteria perfectly. Time to open up Pandora’s Box with this one.

Not endorsed by Barney Stinson.

Legendary – which is such a very generic title that it definitely will be hard to find info on in Google searches – is a first-person shooter that definitely fits this C-tier 360/PS3 mold. Developed by Spark Unlimited, a developer best known releasing Turning Point: Fall of Liberty and this game in the same calendar year; as well as working on the third game in the Lost Planet series and a Ninja Gaiden spinoff, before closing up shop just as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were coming out, and the 360/PS3 era was coming to a close. They definitely were a C-tier developer.

I can’t see this logo without thinking of Noel Videogames from Gigaboots, who upon the start of the stream of this game, saw this logo and yelled “GAMECOCK!”

This game was also published by the rather infamous Gamecock Media Group, a publisher that was known for having fairly aggressive marketing tactics. I tend to remember them most for storming the stage during the Spike Video Game Awards while Irrational Games’ Ken Levine was about to give a speech to promote Hail to the Chimp. In essence, they were basically the proof of concept of what would become Devolver Digital. (Fitting, since Mike Wilson was one of the head honchos at Gamecock, as well as Devolver.) Besides that, I couldn’t tell you any other game they published that was memorable besides the game I mentioned and the one I’m talking about now.

Our… “hero,” I guess.

Anyway, the story goes a little something like this: You play as Charles Deckard, a generic white dude protagonist who’s a graduate of the Gordon Freeman school of FPS character development. Deckard is given an offer from Osmond LeFey, leader of the sinister-sounding Black Order, to procure Pandora’s Box, which is conveniently hidden in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After sneaking in and inserting a fancy key and a blood sacrifice, all hell breaks loose, as Pandora’s Box opens a portal to evil gods and beings flooding the city. With the help of Vivian Kane and his new Signet powers, Deckard must close up Pandora’s Box, while making sure LeFey doesn’t get it for evil nefarious deeds that evil nefarious villains do.

Sewers…. why does it always have to be sewers…

Legendary is a bog-standard FPS for the time. WASD moves, Left click to fire, right click to aim down sights, Shift sprints, E uses objects. Deckard can only hold two weapons, following the Halo and Call of Duty formula, alongside his trusty axe and two explosives that you switch between. Despite taking several pages from the 2000s FPS ethos, there are a few things it tries to do differently, such as no regenerating health, and fancy powers thanks to the Signet on his arm. Though, Deckard also has the cool ability to turn valves and “hack” keypads to open doors.

Deckard’s abilities really boil to down to two things: A kinetic blast that helps destroy objects and stuns Pandora’s foes, and healing yourself. I ended up using the blast a lot to make certain foes easier to fight, and a few times for destroying physics objects when the game asked me to, but the heal feature was the most helpful. That is, if I could find places to heal and have enough animus energy to even heal in the first place.

To quote Spaceballs: “Suck… suck… suck!!!”
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November 24, 2024
Daikatana: John Romero’s “expert FPS.”

Sometimes I think a lot about what defines “the worst video games of all time.” There’s a lot of games in that category that I question if they deserve that distinction. After all, sometimes people get swept up into the zeitgeist of it all and hate a product without really thinking if it deserves it. While I’m thinking about this topic, there’s one game that comes up in that category.

So I’m on a Discord server where a random bad game is picked every month and people play it. This time around, the game chosen was John Romero’s Daikatana, a first-person shooter developed by Ion Storm and released in 2000 for PC and oddly, Nintendo 64.

Yep, this is how the game starts: Right in the Single Player menu. No splash screen, at least on this fan patch.

I’m not gonna go too deeply about the game’s history here. There’s lots of places that have documented the history of this infamous game and Ion Storm as a studio overall, and I kinda wanna make this something shorter than my usual fare. If anything, I just want to get past talking about that one ad where they proclaim that “John Romero is about to make you his bitch.” (You can thank Mike Wilson of later Devolver Digital fame for that one.)

Everybody loves a sewer.

I’m no stranger to Daikatana. I remember watching the Something Awful Lets Play by Proteus4994 and Suspicious, which was my first experience of seeing the game beyond cultural osmosis. Stuff like “Thanks, John” is permanently burned into my lexicon thanks to this LP. (I don’t think if it’s worth watching nowadays, there’s probably a lot of offensive language that makes it age like expired cottage cheese.)

I actually got to play it myself in 2016, and I don’t remember the experience all that well. The only thing that stuck in my memory was somehow getting Superfly Johnson stuck under a stairwell. Besides that, it was just shooting enemies in various time periods.

To this day I don’t know how this happened.

For this replay, I decided to send my NPC allies to the shadow realm, and Hiro Miyamoto would fight everything singlehandedly. From advice from a supporter of Daikatana – elbryan42 on Youtube – I turned on auto-aim, which made hitting a lot of the smaller enemies a lot less painful. I also decided to kick it up to Shogun difficulty, just for the extra challenge.

This was available three days early for Patreon subscribers. Wanna be one of those? No Daikatana needed, just head to my Patreon and chip in at least a buck and you’re already there!

Don’t try fighting these folks without auto-aim. It’s complete suffering.

The first episode that takes place in the 2200s is an absolutely terrible first start for a game. Lots of small enemies that are hard to hit and hard to see. Lots of green, showing off all that pretty colored lighting that Quake II popularized.

What was with FPSes of this time and using fruit as healing items?

And of course, fruit you can interact with to heal yourself. The later levels of Episode 1 throws so many enemies and very little health that there were a lot of moments where I’d finish a combat section, then make the long backtrack to the nearest health “Hosportal” to refill. It didn’t help the game gives weapons that will do damage to you if you’re not careful: Stuff like the C4 Vitzatergo and the Shockwave Cannon will do lots of damage to foes, but it’s easy to kill yourself with them than the enemies. Even stuff like the Shotcycler seem like an interesting idea in concept but realizing you’re gonna be wasting ammo by killing an enemy with a single shotgun blast.
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June 17, 2024
Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? – A casual classic meets the modern casual game.

In the many years I’ve been writing about oddball video gaming stuff, I thought I covered it all. The unofficial expansion packs, the weird cross-promotions, the mostly forgotten cheap games that came out during the 2000s. But it wasn’t until recently did I realize there was one genre I never talked much about: The hidden object game.

A genre I haven’t really covered on here, the hidden object game involves usually finding a bunch of items inside a room to make progress. For a good long while, the hidden object genre was the go-to game for super casual gamers everywhere. I assume it’s still modestly popular, but I figure most people have since moved on to Candy Crush Saga and similar easy-to-understand mobile game offerings.

Normally, I wouldn’t cover these, but then I found an interesting hidden object game. One mashed up with a classic online game I remember from my teen years. When I spotted this game at a thrift store, I had wondered how they decided to bring back a mostly dormant franchise and combine it with one of the most popular casual gamer genres out there. Turns out it’s quite a journey.

James Bond this ain’t.

Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? is a game developed and published by Funkitron Games – no relation to Toejam & Earl – that combines the popular hidden object game with Slingo, a game show-like game that mixes slot machines with bingo. Released around 2007 for PC platforms, this game seemed to slip through the cracks, as I didn’t realize this existed until I picked it up last year at a thrift store.

A screenshot of Slingo Deluxe, one of the earlier offline versions of the game. Sadly, there isn’t much footage of the original online game available, so this will have to do.

But before we get into the game itself, a small primer on what Slingo is. You have a bingo card and every spin of the reels gives you five numbers to fill the card with. Alongside the numbers are jokers – a wild card that can be used to mark any number on the column its on, gold coins – gives you extra score, and the devil, which cuts your score in half. You have up to 20 spins to fill the card, and the first to do so wins the game.

Slingo is a game I fondly remember from my days of playing it on America Online. For people of my generation, Slingo was one of those classic games people played in the early 2000s, web 1.0-era internet. That, Yahoo Games, You Don’t Know Jack: The NetShow and Acrophobia are many of these online games I fondly remember. Sadly, most of these are gone now, or live on through fanmade clones.

Totally forgot how jovial the Zynga Slingo joker was.

I’ve talked about Slingo once before: Way back in 2012, covering the time Zynga licensed the game for a Facebook mobile game that was fairly short-lived. It was perfectly fine, but filled with microtransactions and nagging your Facebook friends for help, which was pretty common at the time. Thank god we kinda moved past that.

But I’ve waxed enough nostalgia. Let’s get into the hybrid Slingo meets hidden object game that is Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold?

Freddy doesn’t really seem happy to be there…

You play as Maggie Gold, a divorced, destitute woman who finds out from her friend Kyle Sparks that her ex-husband Freddy has passed, and decided to give his massive Las Vegas casino, “The Gold Casino,” to his current wife Gloria. Throughout the various areas of the casino, Maggie tries to find out the secrets of the casino, which involves a bunch of unusual item hunting and puzzle-solving.

This is the usual fare for hidden object games: Mostly licensed properties like Gameloft’s The Blacklist: Conspiracy.

Now, normally I wouldn’t talk too much about hidden object games. They always seemed to be the kind of genre that would flood the bargain bins of office supplies and department stores, sitting alongside a rack of cheap PC releases of games past like Braid or Far Cry 2. To me, these kind of games peaked when books like I Spy and Where’s Waldo came out. I couldn’t imagine these kind of games were anywhere near my wheelhouse.
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August 30, 2023
Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit: Cutesy, yet gory.

(content warning: cartoony violence and blood within. there’s also an aside about a game designer’s transphobia, but not in the game itself.)

Ever had a moment where you’re scrolling through your library on Steam or some other digital storefront and spotted a game in your library that you have no memory of acquiring? Something that made you wonder “when the hell did I buy this?,” causing you to frantically search Humble Bundle and the 3-4 other discount key storefronts you have accounts on just to have the record of when you purchased that game? Well, the game I’m writing about this time was like that for me, a game that somehow was in my Steam library for literally years. I was confused on how it got there. Maybe I bought it from hell or something.

Or, as the game calls it, “Ugh yeah!!!”

Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit is a… rather bizarre action-adventure/metroidvania (ugh) game that was in my Steam library for a long time. Released in 2012 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Steam, it’s an unusual choice of game in my library mostly because of the game’s publisher: Sega.

“SEG-” *frantically mashes start to get to the main menu*

You know Sega, right? The company that puts out okay-to-great Sonic the Hedgehog games, the amazing Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, and occasionally dabbles in their back catalog once in a blue moon, right? In addition to its main headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and the oft memed USA branch, there’s another important division, an unsung hero of the company: Sega Europe, publishers of iconic PC gaming franchises like Total War, Company of Heroes, Endless Space and Football Manager. They dabble in other games as well, but Sega Europe’s is the reason Hell Yeah! was published by them and not like, 505 Games or something.

Pretty sure this is also the name of a my bloody valentine tribute album.

Hell Yeah! was offered as one of the free gift packages in “Make War Not Love,” a promotion Sega Europe was doing with its iconic strategy game franchises where playing either of those games – Company of Heroes 2, Total War: Attila and Warhammer: Dawn of War II – would result in unlocking content for those respective games. Hell Yeah! was packed in alongside other Sega games like Viking: Battle for Asgard, Renegade Ops and some of the games in the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Classics Collection. All of these were offerings for the third “Make War Not Love” event, which happened in February 2016, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

But let’s talk about Hell Yeah! itself. Developed by Arkedo Studio, a games studio based in Paris, France, was mostly known for relatively forgotten platformers in their “Arkedo Series” of games. Said games had fairly unremarkable titles like Jump!, SWAP!, and Pixel!. Hell Yeah! would be their last major game released while the studio was still active. Eventually one more game would be released not long after the studio shut down: Poöf vs the Cursed Kitty, released one year later and published by Neko Entertainment. Surprisingly this game doesn’t end with an exclamation point in its title.

Don’t try to go to that web address, it doesn’t exist. Though, watch as Google suddenly makes .kom a top level domain…

In Hell Yeah!, you play as Ash, a bunny rabbit who reigns supreme over the realms of hell. Through negligence on his part, pictures of him are taken by paparazzi and spread around the shores of hell, causing it to damage his reputation. With help from his servant Nestor, Ash opts to seek revenge by finding the culprit who leaked those photos in the first place, which requires defeating 100 monsters around the world.

Why does it feel like I’ve waltzed onto a bullet hell shooter?

Ash has a fairly modest arsenal to start. Not long after the beginning, Ash acquires a super-sawing jetpack that allows Ash to drill through certain materials and fly to certain areas. In addition, Ash can acquire a slew of weapons: Slow-firing missiles that can blast through rock and destroy enemies with ease. Eventually after the tutorial area, Nestor gifts Ash with a second weapon: A machine gun, one that looks similar to the famous M41A Pulse Rifle from the Aliens films.
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May 23, 2023