The Weekly: 10/27/25

So of course I start a "weekly" and end up unable to do anything for a month. Forgive me, there were Real Life Circumstances involved. The mahjong section is actually from quite a bit back, and relatedly I have a review of Senba Kurono's new strategy book on the way.

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Checking in from Sonic Crossworlds

I did go ahead and pull the trigger on Sonic Racing Crossworlds after reading that it’s a product of the classic Sega arcade lineage. The specific sentence that got me was that the driving was from Sega Rally, the drifting from Outrun 2, and everything else from Initial D. Say less, developer, I’m getting my money together right now.

I’m not actually in a place in the game where I can give you a full review so I wanted to talk a little bit from where I’m at in the game, having unlocked most customization options and full-speed difficulty. The first credit roll, basically.

This is Mario Kart for the competitive type who’s ever thought “why doesn’t it matter what I do in this game?”. Crossworlds doesn’t have the kind of rubber-band catch-up that’s apparent in most kart racing games: all the chaos on the course is caused by items and other distractions, and those things are largely manageable by player skill.

Items are much more important than they were in the beta I reviewed, and you can pretty easily get hit by something and passed by ten players. But this game also has defensive items as well as weapons. You’re expected to hold on to items like the shield or the tornado and pop them right when danger is on its way, and you’re warned well in advance of an attack. Even just outrunning an opponent can cause some attacks to miss. There’s still an element of luck— more often than not you’ll be caught without a defense— but the simple existence of defense goes a long way.

And while players who are far behind often get strong catch-up items, there also isn’t the feeling of being punished for first place with crap items, like getting only bananas and coins in Mario Kart. The defensive items you get at the front are exactly what you need when you’re up front trying to defend your lead.

I still haven’t messed around with the various character types, car customization, or even the unique Gadget stuff I enjoyed so much in the beta. I’ve been heavy on playing online and time attacking as Sonic, though other characters are starting to beat him on stats as I unlock more stuff. I don’t expect to have a review ready until I’ve been through all that, and I just unlocked the highest difficulty last night so it’ll be a while.

Perhaps soon between this and the new Virtua Fighter, we’ll see the beginning of a Sega “post-arcade arcade era.” I just hope the game doesn’t get shut down: it just had a Persona 5 collab, after all! (This is a gacha-game joke; the game is not going to shut down.)

Raindrop Sprinters is minimalist arcade perfection, and you get to be a cat

Raindrop Sprinters is a retro arcade game by room_909 (Shuhei Miyazawa) that, like the finest arcade games, offers layers of challenge and complexity underneath a minimalist veneer. The goal is very simple: get from the left side of the screen to the other while raindrops drip from above. There are score items that raise the difficulty and the risk, cat ESP to slow the rainfall, and the ability to show off by dodging raindrops just as they’re about to hit, like parrying the rain. Contact with a single raindrop ends the game instantly, as our cat is very sensitive about cold water.

When the rain reaches its maximum speed, the screen is flooded with curtains of fast and deadly rainfall. The key skill is to read the rain in advance at a moment’s glimpse, and then to seize the perfect moment to dash through, or else stop under a safe spot to charge through again. The ESP slow-motion/super speed helps you speed through in the endgame, but if you’re not careful you’ll run yourself straight into a raindrop.

Have a particularly good run, and the game will reveal the rest of its secrets by changing the instruction cards on the left and right of the vertical screen. Once you know the secret requirements to unlocking the badges (similar to The Tower of Druaga, but a lot simpler), it becomes second nature to work them into your run.

The interconnected nature of the badge requirements mean that you’ll inevitably construct an order to run them in: first I unlock the cat’s dash, then I sit around parrying raindrops until there are five stars in the screen, which is my signal to… you get the idea. High scores in the main mode unlock different game modes which aim for different styles of play: one forces you to make heavy use of ESP for points, another has you getting soaking wet rather than avoiding raindrops, and another allows you to add various handicaps to the main game to make it harder or easier.

I’ve only come close to beating the standard game– because I have clumsy monkey fingers and the max speed rain really is quite tough to navigate– but I think a cat would defeat it quite naturally and gracefully. It is good of the developer to let us imagine what “catlike reflexes” would really be like.

Mahjong ranked ladder report: I ranked up

After significant effort, I recently made it to 9th dan on Riichi City. I am not sure where to place this rank relative to other online mahjong clients, but the promotion does place me within the top 250 players on the server. I don’t believe that I’m the only RC 9-dan in the English-speaking world, but I’m the only one I’m personally aware of.

(That’s significant, too: when most of the player base is on the other side of the world, it’s much harder to get a game in the highest ranked lobby. I can’t easily play RC ranked until after 7 PM EST or so. I can confidently say I had a tougher time getting to 9-dan than someone in Asia.)

I certainly didn’t expect to rank up, because you never expect it. Not expecting it keeps you sane, and wanting it too much makes you tilt. Statistically, you will eat losing streaks and you will grasp defeat from the jaws of victory. I have a rule of two full East-South matches (hanchan) a day; this keeps me in practice but keeps me from burning out, both of which I consider to be equally valuable goals. But when you’re up on the high end of that experience bar, when promotion is right around the corner, you start to grind, and I was doing more like three or four matches, desperate to get that little meter to fill up already no matter how much I wanted to stay cool about it.

The most important thing about the ranked ladder is to make sure you’re in good condition, able to focus and play your best. If you’re in a half-assed physical or mental state— tired, distracted, or otherwise compromised– you’re going to play a half-assed game. This includes when you decide to suck it up and grind it out. Ask yourself: are you committing to playing your best or are you merely committing to more games? This matters a lot when one blunder can lose you a whole game, when every loss sets you back as much as or more than every win, and when often, you cannot avoid losing. You need to scrape out that edge with your own hands.

The sessions of the last few weeks were tough. Twice I got within a single win of ranking up and twice I fell, significant distances. More than once I asked myself why I was doing this; like, don’t you already know you’re decent at mahjong? What’s to prove?

But the climb is more about self-improvement than glory; it’s just a guideline. And it’s proof, too. I’m objectively pretty strong at mahjong because I can maintain that record. I belong at the table. I’ve been told that my rank and my wins are illegitimate because I got them on Riichi City. I'll keep winning, and they'll find some other excuse.

(Additionally, I am studying for my pro certification with World Riichi. I was too slow with my mental math and bombed the written test, but I think I did alright in the practical. Nobody really knows what this pro program will become, so it's a big leap of faith. I could be joining an MLM, for all I know. I might even have to start streaming (for myself, not them, don't worry).