This was on offer a little while back on XBLA, for 400 points. I decided, even though it’s a poor port and doesn’t have any Offspring music (TEEEEEN TWEEENNNTY TEEEEN!!!) I’d take a punt anyway for that price. And it’s actually pretty good. Sure, it’s rough looking, and yeah, I miss the music. Worst of all, I keep getting stuck inside things – trees, signs, walls… but it is still fun. So far I’ve C-Ranked Arcade Mode, A-Ranked Original Mode, …
This game is sort of one of those escape room games. It’s a lot like Rooms, which I played a while back, but each “room” is like a small scene built around a door that you need to get open in order to access the portal behind it. Each one is themed, and features a lot of smaller puzzles leading up to the main one of unlocking the door. There’s the usual things for this sort of game – pattern …
You know, I’ve often wondered what Guitar Hero would be like if it was a cute platformer full of birds. Well, actually I never have. But clearly, someone did because here it is. Songbird Symphony stars Birb, a little bird of unknown origin, who sets out to find his family and where he came from. This involves some Metroidvania-lite platforming but instead of unlocking new skills to reach new areas, you unlock new musical notes which you tweet at locked …
198X is a narrative discovery game played out over a series of 1980s style arcade games. There’s a story about a girl who is bored of her suburbian life, who discovers an arcade, with the games there played as both actual games and allegories. Each is pretty short, but they’re great “versions” of Out Run, Final Fight, a shooter like Gradius or R-Type, and an auto-runner Shinobi style platformer. There’s also a Phantasy Star-like 3D RPG game at the end. …
After being exposed to many people saying how much fun and how relaxing this game was, it isn’t a surprise that I bought it for the Switch. Also, all those people were right. You’re given a mountain, and a route to the bottom filled with twists, turns, jumps and cliff edges, and have to ride to the finish as quickly as you can with as few crashes as possible. There are many shortcuts, some of which are obvious, some are …
Family tree is a gentle, not very taxing, combination of something like Puzzle Bobble and a pinball game. You “fire” your fruitguy up a tree, collecting more fruit, and head for the goal. If you’re not quick enough, a skull comes after you. The difficultly is in getting high scores. Grabbing every last fruit, and all of the coins on the levels, without bumping into baddies or taking too long, is tricky. Often, the goal is really easy to reach …
Despite the hideous title, I’d seen this on the eShop frequently and thought it was silly enough to buy when I saw it cheap enough. And then it was cheap enough, so, well, here we are. It’s a hidden object game, only there’s only really one hidden object on each level – your Generic Handheld Gaming Device – which your mum has placed somewhere. You can rarely just pick it up, though, as there are things to avoid clicking on …
My favourite Diablo game is Heroes of Ruin on the 3DS. This is mainly because it’s my only previously played Diablo game. Of course, Heroes of Ruin isn’t really a Diablo game, because having Diablo on a handheld device would be ridiculous. UNTIL NOW. Well, until about a year or more ago when Diablo III came out for the Switch. I wanted it, but I always seemed to have other games on the go and kept forgetting to pick it …
Sparkle 2, or “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Zuma” was a free PS+ rental that I’ve been playing off and on for a few months. It’s not taxing, it’s not hard, but it is fun in the same way Zuma was. It’s just 91 levels of shooting balls at other balls, but it does it well enough and I enjoyed it. Not sure what else there is to say about it, really.
Membrane is an unusual platform puzzle game, where your controls are jump, shoot blocks, and shoot triangles. You can use the blocks, which stick together, to build bridges, act as conduit between electrical pads, become walls, barriers, ladders and so on. The triangles “break” these blocks and revert them to non-sticky blocks that you can collect back up – useful, since you’ve a limited amount. The plot, such that it is, is you’re a sort of synapse in a body. …
Imagine a cross between Peggle and Angry Birds. You can’t? Well just play King Oddball instead. The aim (ha!) is to chuck rocks at tanks and helicopters, so as to destroy them all. Of course, there are more things to blow up than you have rocks, so you need to rebound them or make use of other objects to drop on them instead. If you manage to bounce a rock back at your head, or hit one than three baddies …
A short point and click adventure game, with lovely pixel graphics and a few simple puzzles. There’s not a great deal to tell you about it, really, otherwise I’ll spoil everything. But I will tell you this: there’s something wrong in the library. If you’ve played these sorts of games before, then there’s nothing taxing here. I’ve just completed Thimbleweed Park, remember, so this was like easy mode compared to that. It looks and plays beautifully though, so it’s well …
I didn’t even know this game existed, let alone what it was about, until yesterday. Then someone recommended it on Twitter, mentioned it was by Mike Bithell, and I saw it was less than a fiver on the eShop. Of course I bought it. Subsurface Circular is a visual novel with light puzzling and investigation, manifesting mainly as conversations between you – a robot detective – and other passengers on the robot-only underground railway. In this world the robots, known …
