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 …
Imagine Geocities was a place you visited via a headset while you sleep, and you’ve been made a mod and have to stamp out crimes like piracy, copyright theft and scams. That’s Hypnospace Outlaw. Surf webpages like you did in 1999, and complete tasks sent to you by the system maintainers. Download virtual pets and desktop toys! Read about conspiracies! Traverse fora about teen angst and musician worship! Get sucked in by Squisherz which definitely aren’t anything like Pokémon! Solve …
I have always maintained that Super Mario Sunshine is an excellent game. I know many, many people complain about the camera – in particular on the ferris wheel – but to those people I’ve always said: Just control the camera yourself. I never had a problem with it. So it was with some trepidation that I would turn out to be wrong that I went into Super Mario Sunshine on the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection on the Switch. And …
I’ve said before that although Super Mario Galaxy is a fantastic game, it isn’t as good as Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. I was never able to really put my finger on why, though, until this playthrough. There’s three main things – it’s a bit disjointed, in that each world is very small and there are so many of them so it doesn’t feel like you get to spend much time learning them like you do in the …
This was sold to me as a Mario 64-like game and you can tell from the screenshots it definitely seems to be aiming for that. Since it was about a pound, I bought it and… it isn’t like Mario 64 in any real way aside from the graphics. In fact, even in that respect it looks (and sounds) much more like Banjo-Kazooie as there’s a more than a bit of Rare DNA in the characters and music. But still, it …
Yes, I have played and completed this before. A fair few times too. But! This is the Switch version, on the Super Mario 3D All-Stars pack that recently came out, where the game is (slightly) upscaled, (slightly) less blurry, and with a nicer looking HUD and font. I’ve said before that Super Mario 64 is one of the best games ever made. It sits comfortably in my Top 5, and was probably at Number Two (after Run Baby Run of …
