deKay's Lofi Gaming

Gaming Diary

We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I’m a bit torn on this game. On the one hand, it’s Katamari so is automatically fantastic and fun and relaxing and nonsensical. But on the other hand, it could have been so much better. A few years ago, the original Katamari Damacy got a Reroll remake on modern consoles, and with it they fixed some of the niggles of the original, like loading times (and mid-level loading), slowdown, and made it all smoother and higher resolution and prettier. Then …

Pikmin 4 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Pikmin is, essentially, Nintendo’s take on the real-time strategy format, only you direct little carrot creatures to fetch and carry and multiply and stuff, rather than build tanks and so on. There are different colours of Pikmin which have different strengths and skills, and there are baddies to fight who all want to eat them. Pikmin 4 doesn’t deviate too much from this, but it is just so much more relaxing than the other games in the series. In the …

Advance Wars 2 Re-Boot Camp (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Obviously having completed the first game, I had to set about doing the same for the second. It is, of course, very much more of the same but with some new COs, more involvement of the Black Hole Army right from the start, and a new unit – NeoTanks. Unlike the first game, you don’t play as Orange Star for the majority of the game. You do a few missions as them, then unlock the next area and play as …

Doors: Paradox (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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This game is sort of one of those escape room games. It’s a lot like Rooms, which I played a while back, but each “room” is like a small scene built around a door that you need to get open in order to access the portal behind it. Each one is themed, and features a lot of smaller puzzles leading up to the main one of unlocking the door. There’s the usual things for this sort of game – pattern …

The Revenge of Shinobi (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I know this was highly lauded on release, but I’ll be honest – I’ve never been a massive fan of the game. Or the Shinobi/Shadow Dancer series, actually. I don’t hate them or anything, but I certainly wouldn’t hold them up as fantastic examples of the best the 8 and 16 bit consoles had to offer like a lot of people seem to. See also Ninja Gaiden, actually. [Edit: Oh, it seems I like the 3D port of Shinobi III …

Advance Wars 1 Re-Boot Camp (Switch): COMPLETED!

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After much publicised delays thanks to An Actual War, Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp finally came out. Only it was not long before Tears of the Kingdom so although I got it, Zelda was The Thing as so it was put to one side until that was completed because who can be doing with swapping game cards? Not me. It was with a little trepidation that I went into it. I’d heard horror stories about how terrible the performance of …

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (PS5): COMPLETED!

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A PS5 game? How rare! But yes, this game was on my Switch wishlist for a while waiting for a decent sale, but then it recently appeared on PS++++++ as a free rental so I played it there instead. It felt wrong, somehow, even though it’s on the same TV the Switch version would have been played on. Went through the game with my daughter. I was Mikey, she was Don, and it was great. It’s a proper sequel to …

Kemono Friends Picross (Switch): COMPLETED!

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As you might expect, I’m a massive fan of Kemono Friends. Sorry, no, the other thing. Picross. Kemono Friends is something I’d never heard of, but the themed Picross game is by Jupiter who do all the Picross games. so of course I was going to buy it at some point. Apparently, it’s a manga or anime or both, where there’s a zoo but all the animals are anthropomorphic and resemble human girls. Could the premise be any more anime? …

Alien Breed Special Edition ’92 (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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I seem to remember this getting really good reviews upon original release, but I’m struggling to see how. I did look up some of them, and came across this incredible bit of art editor drunkenness from Amiga User International, which attempts to show the screen that comes up when you access a computer terminal, but fails, rather than any of the actual game itself. Incredible work. And also look out for some great whitespace issues: Anyway, that review also tells …

Project-X Special Edition (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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Bloody hell that was hard. Save states at the start of each level and still the last couple of levels were near impossible. Although I loved this back on my Amiga, what I hadn’t realised back then was how poor the collision detection was, which, coupled with the jerky movement, caused so many deaths as I slammed accidentally into walls as I tried to scrape by. Perhaps this was because the first two levels are pretty easy but I never …

Moo Moo Move (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Jeff Minter tooted about this free game on Steam so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a very simple cow herding arcade game (so probably right up Jeff’s street) with about 20 levels. Some levels have bulls that interfere with your rounding up, some have aliens that try to abduct your cows, as aliens are wont to do, and some have snipers with tranquilisers that put your cows to sleep. It’s not very hard, although getting 3 stars (i.e. …

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch): COMPLETED!

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What’s this, you say? It’s been over a month since I completed anything? You thought I was dead? Well, no! Turns out that Tears of the Kingdom is Quite Large and so it has taken me 95 hours to complete it. Which, across a month, is about three hours a day. That’s fine, right? There’s a lot to talk about regarding the game. For example, a number of people complained that it’s just using the same overworld as Breath of …

Doctor Who: An Unlikely Heist (iPad): COMPLETED!

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This is a bad game. Do not play. You want more? Sigh. Fine. Doctor Who: An Unlikely Heist, which was renamed in an update to “Doctor Who: Hidden Mysteries” presumably because there was no unlikely heist in the game, is a hidden object game. I’ve no beef with hidden object games. They can be fun but they are very shallow, and usually, that’s fine. However, it’s not just a hidden object game because there’s a tenuous Doctor Who story here …

Nebulus (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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It’s not often I play the C64 version of a game I liked on the Spectrum (and in this case, the Game Boy too) and think, you know, this is actually better. But it is. The animation of your main frog/gonk guy especially is really nice, and the vertical scrolling is less jerky. it’s great. And hard. Very hard. Previously, I don’t think I’d ever even passed level 2, so I’d not experienced how much of a mind-stewing maze the …