ARPG + MORPG hybrid with looter shooter characteristics.

It doesn’t really fit anywhere cleanly, though.

Terms can definitely be confusing. Diablo is definitely a hack-n’-slash, but it’s very different from the likes of Golden Axe and God of War.

The ARPGs you’re probably referring to, I call them Diablo-likes to distinguish them from all the other action RPGs.

RNG = random number generator. In gaming, this just means random chance. Whenever loot drops, critical hits land, enemies spawn, or dice rolls decide outcomes, that’s RNG at work.

Eurojank is a term for European-developed games (usually from Central or Eastern Europe) that are ambitious, creative, and full of unique ideas… but also full of technical rough edges.

There’s a lot of subgenres I wanted to include, but I felt this document was already too long. Here’s more of them:

• DBRPG = Deck-building RPG
• SurRPG = Survival RPG
• RLRPG = Rogue-like RPG
• SLRPG = Souls-like RPG

I don’t know why I overlooked GRPGs since Germany has some pretty important ones. You mentioned Gothic, but there’s also both the Sacred series and ELEX series.

I’d say that while both GRPGs and PRPGs are releated to each other, there’s some big differences that go beyond nationality. I’d say GRPGs are more like a muddy Renaissance faire going on while PRPGs have more of a storybook style.

EDIT: In the interest of thoroughness, I added even more subgenre acronyms.

Tetris Plus is quite neat because, not only is there PlayStation and arcade versions, it was released for Game Boy too.

I regularly play it on my cabinet—it’s got a great PvP mode.

They’re gone. No mascots. No background worlds. Just the “elemental” machine skins.

Tetris Worlds had eye monsters because THQ wanted a console-friendly mascot game.

Tetris Elements has industrial pipes because ValuSoft (THQ’s budget imprint) wanted a cheap, self-contained PC release that didn’t require any cross-project asset wrangling.

It’s neat, but it’s not an officially licensed version of Tetris—whereas Tetris Elements is.

Use vJoy + Universal Control Remapper (UCR), or reWASD, to mirror the controller input to all emulator instances.

This means pressing A once sends “A” to all 8 games.

Helen of Troy? Oh, don’t even get me started on her! She didn’t just cause the Trojan War—that was her warm-up gig!

The Crusades? Helen. Napoleonic Wars? Helen again. Both World Wars, the Cold War, Star Wars, Cola Wars—every single one is her fault!

Honestly, if she’d just stopped wishing for wars, we’d all be riding unicorns and eating ice cream for breakfast by now.

Thanks a lot, Helen.

That woman’s name? Helen of Troy.

It’s interesting because everyone has their definitive version of Tetris.

For me, it was the arcade coin-op made by Atari Games.

I have a friend, though, who swears by Tetris Plus for the original PlayStation. That was the first Tetris she ever played.

Here, this exhaustively explains wall kicks and how they affect basic play in Tetris:

https://tetris.wiki/Wall_kick

This is my original work, but here’s some further links if you’re curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(Spectrum_HoloByte)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1630/tetris

https://www.livescience.com/56481-strange-history-of-tetris.html

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/tetris-fun-cold-war

https://youtu.be/K8omJvkHag4

Nope, they are abandonware. You either buy the physical disks or sail the seven seas.

Both Thexder and Sorcerian were distributed by Sierra.

Thexder, in particular, was quite popular—got a Western-only sequel called Thexder 95 that was a showcase for Windows 95:

https://youtu.be/iI_qGdgybmU

It’s still playable on modern Windows.

As for Japanese games, they’re largely hit or miss on DOS. If it’s a Capcom or Konami game—it’s probably terrible. SEGA is good.

I think the game that really humiliated Capcom was the DOS port of Street Fighter II. In the early 90s, a bunch of Koreans made their own unofficial port and it shamed the official port.

This might explain why Super Street Fighter II for DOS was so much better.

I’ve played many games from the era. There were quite a few DOS games that had much smoother scrolling even if there wasn’t specialized hardware for it. Thexder, made in 1988, is a good example of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwHKg2aUB0I

The truth is, a good many Japanese games that were converted to DOS just weren’t very good.

There were exceptions, though. SEGA games tended to be excellent. And I have to say that anything by Nihon Falcom was amazing – to this day, Sorcerian is a standout on DOS.

That happened to me more than once—though not with this game.

Really want to find GBA Tribal Edition in the wild—if it actually exists.

Actually, those rear buttons are unique. They are not the same triggers and buttons. They are highly useful in FPS games for functions like crouch.