The problem with Metroidvania games, like Kunai which I are completed just last week, is they’re somewhat moreish. Thankfully, Timespinner – which I’ve had my eye on for a while and was on sale recently – was there to feed my habit. And it is excellent. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s no Hollow Knight or Axiom Verge, but it is a really well put together action platformer with some time travel elements and nice pixel graphics, as well as …
Secret Little Haven is a visual novel type game that plays out in the form of an AOL Messenger style chat application, a little like Emily Is Away. You’re Alex, a fan of a Japanese Sailor Moon type anime and you take part in his interactions with friends in real life, from a fan forum, and his dad. Alex isn’t happy for a number of reasons, but centrally he doesn’t identify as male, and part of the game how he, …
When Little Big Planet was announced, there was a lot of excitement over how innovative and clever and creative it was. And it was all those things, and it looked fantastic and everything. Then we all realised that it was just a platformer with horrible physics and a rubbish, game breaking and unnecessary third dimension. The fact that virtually all of the user made levels don’t bother with any level depth speaks volumes. Despite the lovely narration by Stephen Fry, …
Fairly recently, Microsoft added a “feature” to Live Mail (formerly Hotmail, remember that?). It’s a feed of all your “social” activity, called “Messenger Social”. I’m sure it’s lovely and all, but in a school where we block everything to do with Facebook and MySpace (remember that too?) and all other fun stuff like it, but still allow web-based email, it causes us a problem. How do we block just this bit of Live Mail? You’d expect that just filtering the …
Amazing. You can now play the classic text adventure (or “interactive fiction” as they seem to be called these days) game version of Douglas Adams’ book via an instant messenger client. It uses the Jabber network, but Google Talk is compatible so if you have that (or even just the Google homepage gadget, as shown below) you can play! Just send a message to “prakbot [at] jabber.org”, and once connected, type !startgame to, uh, well, you can guess. See here …
