This has been very cheap on the Switch several times, and the graphic style piqued my interested. However, I’d never bought it because reviews put me off – it’s not the driving game it appears, it’s incredibly short, and there’s very little to it. But a free copy on Epic Games? Ah, gwan then. The reviews were right. Although there is driving, it’s little more than a mechanism to tell the story. You can’t really crash, the car will actually …
Another PC game? Why yes! Because it’s not on anything else and I’ve a Steam Link set up and it was free on the Epic store and I wanted to play it and life finds a way. It’s a gentle little game, where you play as a bird who needs to hike up a mountain. Doing this is made easier by finding golden feathers, some of which are scattered about and others from completing tasks, which allow you to climb …
Flashback is a great game. It always was a great game and I was slightly worried playing it might reveal it to be all rose-tinting. Luckily, once I’d turned off all the graphic-ruining “modern” filters (which are on by default), it turned out it was still excellent. I remembered the plot, and most of the first half of the game (the bit in the jungle and the bit in the city), but I thought that completing the Death Tower gameshow …
After the “fun” that was Crush Crush, I thought I’d try another clicker game. Time Clickers is properly free, with no IAPs needed to unlock anything. It’s a lot simpler in structure than Crush Crush too. The fact that there’s a ceiling you can hit, and there should be no barrier to getting there in a realistic time was appealing after the issues I had with Crush Crush. It is less interactive though, and there’s no funny dialogue or real …
Another game I really enjoyed, but rarely completed, back in the day. Some people suggest that the C64 version of Action Biker is superior, but they’re wrong. It’s a totally different sort of game, for a start! This version involves you riding around a town, searching houses for parts for you bike to enable you to travel underwater and in an area which is pitch black for some reason. You need to find your friend Marty (for some reason you …
Way back when, this was one of my favourite games. The main reason being that it had a built in level editor, but the catchy music has remained in my head for decades. My copy was one of four games in a compilation, the other four being Panzerdrome (which was impossible), Tidy Tony (which was a bit like Atic Atac only rubbish), and Steelyard Blues (which I liked until many years later when I found out it was a hacked …
Another of the SEGA Ages releases, and so it’s pretty much perfect. Except, of course, Tails is in it. But I suppose they couldn’t take him out so I had to manage with him there, getting in the way. Nicking rings on the Special Stages only to lose them because he’s stupid. Getting a hit in on a boss just before Sonic does so Sonic falls through him and dies. Tails is a bloody liability. Thankfully, the game is great …
Now this is an unusual game. Unusual in graphical style, setting, and gameplay. Sure, it might look a bit like Minecraft but it’s much more granular, cleaner and with much better environmental effects. Yes, there are gameplay elements similar to the old Tomb Raider games and Titan Souls. But it feels very different to any of these things. You’re a tourist, who travels between small islands taking photos of the strange towers present on most of them. You solve puzzles …
Now, this is a tricky one to categorise as completed, but hear me out. Crush Crush is a clicker game, albeit wrapped up in a waifu dating guise, but still a clicker. Girls become available, you spend hearts on them and money on gifts and dates, and the more you get them to like you the more you have to spend. Then more girls unlock and so on. It’s free to play, but after 400+ hours of play (well, probably …
If you’re wondering why this looks like a new Wonder Boy game to follow in the series after Wonder Boy/Wonder Boy in Monster Land/Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap/Wonder Boy in Monster World/Monster World IV, then you’ll not be surprised that it is in everything but name. Even the heroes of those games make appearances, sort of, in Monster Boy. The plot is similar to that of Wonder Boy III, in that your hero, Jin, has been turned into an …
It’s been a while since I played this back on the PSP. I noticed it on PSN, with other PSP games PaRappa the Rapper and Patapon for about £3 in total, so picked them up. PaRappa, which was the main reason for buying them, is actually unplayable but luckily this is fine. It’s a lot easier than I remember. Sure, if you’re going for 100% then yes, it’s tricky, but I didn’t even have any issues on the final level …
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 …
One of my favourite types of game is picross. There’s something relaxing about switching to autopilot and completing a load of puzzles. One of the best, quirky game series of all time is Phoenix Wright, with it’s gentle humour, amazing characters, and murders. Murder By Numbers is both these things. I talk about it a lot on episode 33 of the ugvm Podcast, but briefly, Murder By Numbers is very much like Phoenix Wright only each time you find a …
