Mirroring Contra is a sneakier design test than it sounds. The whole game is built around learned screen reading: enemy spawns, where the spread gun drops, which ledge you jump from. Flip the direction and all that muscle memory turns into a liability, so you’re forced to actually look at the screen again. Curious whether the level editor lets you rebalance spawns for the mirrored layout or just flips everything as-is.

Dark Messiah’s kick is still one of the best design decisions in an action game: one button plus Source physics turned every ledge, spike rack and barrel into a weapon. Glad a community team is keeping it runnable, because “won’t launch on modern hardware” kills more old games than bad reviews ever did.

Cover-disc demos from that era are a good thing to hunt for, since the Internet Archive hosts a lot of scanned magazine CD images that you can browse or search. The TipOfMyJoystick community listed in this sub’s sidebar is also good at identifying half-remembered games from a description of the ship, music or level look.