This is supposedly an old NES game the Oliver Twins never finished, but released a couple of years ago after a campaign to get it completed. It’s a pretty simple side-scrolling platform game, which doesn’t really stand out in any way (aside from being incredibly easy!) but does look and sound good for a NES title. There are only 15 or so levels, and they’re not especially long. Most of them have a powerup which you can collect which makes …
It’s Metroid Prime! Only with humour and all the colours! And with big eyed aliens who meow at you! And it’s very, very good. Like Metroid Prime, there’s first person shootering, although that’s not really – bar some bosses – the main focus of the gameplay. No, you’re expected to explore, find upgrades to enable further exploration, and you need to discover what all the strange alien artefacts on this supposedly undiscovered and uninhabited planet mean. You find resources either …
Ah, I know how to play this, i thought. I would surely be able to remember the puzzles. Since I’d played it a lot on the Spectrum back in the day, right? Wrong. Because this, which is the NES version, is different! Sure, it’s similar to what I remember – although it would appear I don’t remember much of the specifics anyway – but there are different puzzles and items! It’s like a new game. Fortunately, it also appeared to …
I got an Evercade for Christmas, and this – originally an Atari Lynx game – was the first title I completed. Not sure why I chose it, but a brief play as I was running through the various games hooked me a little and soon I’d finished it. It’s a platform shooter, except you don’t jump much as you have a jetpack. Across about 15 levels, all of which feel exactly the same, you have to find elements of a …
Yes, i bought a PlayStation 5, and yes, I know I’ll regret it at some point, but let us not get into that right now, shall we? My first completed PS5 game is this free one that came with the console. It’s clear that the main purpose of Astro’s Playroom is to show off the features of the DualSense controller, but in the form of a playable game. I have to say, the way in which the features of the …
A short game about an old lady waiting to see if her son will be home for Christmas, Grand Story involves you doing some daily chores – getting firewood, watering plants – while slowly getting more depressed that your son hasn’t written. Disappointingly, the house doesn’t appear to have a toilet which, I’ll be honest, was the main reason I decided to play it as it looked like it would. Still, it was a charming little game despite the bleakness …
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. …
As a massive fan of the original Hyrule Warriors (I own four copies and across them have put in over 900 hours of play), I was really excited to start on this and it was a rare situation where I pre-ordered a digital game such was my need to have it immediately. But, I was worried it might not live up to my hype. Did it? Well, when I realised that the real “meat” of the first game, that is …
It’s Where’s Wally? on hard mode! Level after level with minute characters and things hidden behind other things and the occasional puzzle, where you have to find stuff from a list with sometime cryptic clues as to where they might be. Click on everything just in case! It might sound easy, because Where’s Wally? is easy (and the Mega Drive game based on it is probably the easiest game I’ve ever played), but this is not. Things aren’t static like …
Yes, the original NES game, here in the Castlevania Collection on the Switch. And oh my was it harder than I remember. Mainly the medusa heads in the later levels. It’s still a great game, and having played other NES platformers this year so many of them just don’t play well these days – and they’re all the bloody same. But not this one!
Paratopic is a narrative discovery game with what seems like a number of characters with related stories and jump-cuts between them. Think of Virginia and Thirty Flights of Loving, with a PS1 graphics aesthetic. It has a story that I can’t really share because the story is the reason for playing games like this and it’d be a big spoiler, but I will say that that there’s someone transporting illegal videotapes which appear to be like drugs and/or The Ring, …
Back when i originally played Journey, I was a bit unkind. I didn’t really get it and felt there was no actual game. Later, I came to realise that wasn’t really the point. So now I’ve played Abzû, I’m wary of doing the same thing. There’s no game, sure, and again, that’s missing the point. But the point is even less of a point than it was with Journey. Like that game, you travel a world with a lore uncovered …
I previously started playing Horace on the iPad via a Steam Link from Windows on my Mac, but although I persevered using this setup for the whole of Lair of the Clockwork God, Horace’s tricky platforming needed something a bit more so a couple of hours in I stopped playing. Not that I hadn’t enjoyed it, just I thought I’d wait for a console version. And here it is! Firstly, let me get one thing out of the way. On …
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 …
I was a big fan of the 3DS original version of this, what with it basically being a new Guardian Heroes game and all. A while back, the Switch HD remaster was cheap on the eShop, so I picked it up. Since then, I’ve dipped in and out every so often. It’s a bit grindy once you get about halfway through, which isn’t a problem as the fighting is great, but it doesn’t real lend itself to long periods of …
