Vampire Savior (Switch): COMPLETED!

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No, not the horde-based twin stick only one stick sort of shooter. That’s Vampire Survivors, even though I keep getting the two names mixed up. No, this is the Capcom 1-on-1 fighting game from the late 90s heyday of Capcom 1-on-1 fighting games. There was a cheap bundle of bundles (a bundle^2, if you like) on the eShop recently where you could get Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Collection together for less money than either collection had …

Metroid Zero Mission (Switch): COMPLETED!

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An actual Metroid Metroidvania game! Released on the Switch Game Boy Advance Online Service Thing presumably to tie in with the re-announcement (and gameplay footage) of the upcoming Metroid Prime 4, I thought, why the hell not eh? It’s good. Oh so good. Yes, I’ve played it before, but almost 20 years ago so I remembered very little of it. In fact, I’d even forgotten about the whole “zero suit” bit where Samus loses her armour and you have to …

Animal Well (PS5): COMPLETED!

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What if Jet Set Willy was a Metroidvania and it was a still all pixels but all the pixels had thousands of colours and there was amazing light and shadow effects and you got special toys that gave you new skills and it was all creepy and weird and there were ghosts and rooms in total darkness and there were puzzles and switches and you could warp around the map by climbing into the mouths of animals? Animal Well. Well, …

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Did I completely forget that this was also an arcade game? Pretty sure I only ever knew it as a SNES title, but no – here’s the arcade version. It is, as you’d expect, very similar to the original version but with better graphics and animation, and levels set in various time periods like “dinosaurs” and “pirates” as the title would suggest. It felt somewhat easier than the original, perhaps because there are a few more moves and certainly more …

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes! The arcade version! It’s another game on the Cowabunga Collection, and probably the best one on there from what I remember. Sure, it’s mindless and lacking in combos and special moves like newer examples of the genre, but it’s a classic and you can never hear “SAY YOIRE PRAYERS, TOITLES” too many times. Also, being an arcade game designed to extract as many coins from your purse as possible, it’s really rather hard and the bosses especially are just …

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Originally a Game Boy game, this TMNT game is now one of the games on the “Cowabunga” collection, and it… isn’t great. Pretty sure it wasn’t great at the time, either, what with the flickery graphics and barely-there animation and repetitive gameplay and the tiny viewport and, well, it goes on. It’s not that far from Kung Fu Master for most of the game, having to attack enemies as they approach from left and right, but there’s also some basic …

Lost in Play (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A point and click adventure game set in the imaginations of two kids playing with a weird collection of creatures and characters, some Alice In Wonderland-esque trippiness, and some fantastic art and cartoon level animation? Sure, why not. Not unlike The Many Pieces of Mr Coo, Lost in Play is wordless, with intent and conversations in the game taking place via icons, gestures and various non-vocal grunts and outbursts. It does mean that a bit of nuance is lost, but …

Super Mario Land (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Ah, who doesn’t remember the chart-topping MC Mario “Folks round here think I’m crazy, but I gotta rescue Daisy” song that was based on the music from this, slightly odd in hindsight, Game Boy Mario game? Kids, that’s who. Tch. And it is a bit odd. Super Mario Land starts out as a seemingly normal, low resolution and black and white approximation of the NES classic, but adds different enemies and the fire flower is a bouncy ball and there …

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I have mentioned many times here how I do like a good (or even, a fair-to-middling) Metroidvania game. So when I discovered that the already great looking Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was such a game in that genre, I leapt on the demo and was so struck by it I did a very rare thing – I bought an actual physical copy. It’s really good. It does all the great things Metroidvanias do, by giving you additional powers …

FAR: Changing Tides (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Remember a while back I completed a game called FAR: Lone Sails? If not you can just click that link. I refer to it because the ending of that game was a bit of a damp squib and didn’t make any sense. Turns out, this sequel is actually sort of the other half of the game and that’s why. Whereas in Lone Sails you had a land-boat where you travel across what appears to be a dried up sea, in …

Streets of Rage 4 (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Oh would you look – a PS+ monthly game that’s actually good and I don’t already own! How rare. And yes, it is good! It’s a long awaited sequel to the original Mega Drive fighting games, if we ignore the Fighting Force game which was obviously supposed to be Streets of Rage 4 for the Saturn anyway. And even that was decades ago. SoR4 doesn’t deviate from the previous games very much at all, really. You punch and kick through …

A Monster’s Expedition (Through Puzzling Expeditions) (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I maintain that I am not really a fan of sokoban type puzzle games, and yet somehow, I seem to enjoy them. Perhaps it’s just when there are crate-pushing puzzles in otherwise crate-push-free games that I don’t like? In any case, A Monster’s Expedition was one of the ones I did enjoy. You are a monster, who navigates islands which seem to make up a sort of Museum of Humans, as there are many artefacts (sometimes amusingly mislabelled as to …

Beglitched (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Someone recommended this game over on Mastodon and it looked interesting. Then it turned out I already owned it and could play it on my Steam Deck. Result, eh? It’s a match-3 puzzle game, but one that messes with the rules a bit. The idea isn’t just to match-3 (or more), as it matter which icons you match. For example, you only have so many moves, but matching certain symbols gives you more moves. Additionally, there’s a digital creature on …

Sküljagger (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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Sküljagger (no, I’d never heard of it either) is a Bad Game. Originally a SNES game which seemed to have been completely ignored at the time, it’s yet another 16-bit platform with literally nothing going for it. It seems to have a pirate theme or maybe a viking theme or who actually knows, or cares? You have a sword and have platforms to navigate. Wow. Even at the time this can’t have been more than a 5/10 title. It’s janky …

Gal Guardians: Demon Purge (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Why yes, this is another Metroidvania style game! And yes, it’s another one based on a different game, this time Gal*Gun by Inti Creates. Inti Creates, who have made some of my favourite platformers (including some other Metroidvanias) like Azure Striker Gunvolt and Blaster Master Zero. Of course I’m going to buy it. The ‘hing with Demon Purge, which differentiates it from all the other “explore a castle” games is that you control two characters at once, each with different …