It has been a while. I’ve often thought about playing through Portal again, especially since I have it on Steam and so could play it on my Steam Deck. So, naturally, I bought it for the Switch. To be fair, it was a bundle of Portal and Portal 2, and it was on sale for under £3. And you can’t own the same game on too many platforms. Although it looks a little dated now, perhaps not as much as …
Donkey Kong ’94 on the Game Boy is one of my favourite platformers. After the first four levels, which are the same as the original Donkey Kong arcade game, it becomes this massive puzzle platformer with a very agile Mario up against Donkey Kong. Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the Game Boy Advance sequel, was also great, but it introduced levels with mini Mario toys in it that you have to help to the exit in a very Troddlers/Krusty’s Super Fun …
Imagine a cross between that weird hypercube animation optical illusion thing and The Stanley Parable, and you’re some of the way to understanding Superliminal. Like The Stanley Parable, it’s a narrative discovery game in a series of corridors, offices, warehouses and… other places. Whereas Stanley is trapped in a Groundhog Day style scenario, your nameless hero here is inside a dream which has been engineered to help them deal with something in their life. So, almost the same thing. However, …
Well, what a lovely surprise this turned out to be! It had been on the periphery of my want list for a while, but I was sceptical that it was just going to be a Pikmin clone like the reviews suggested it was, and Pikmin is fantastic so that’s a hard wall to break through and every likelihood it’d be a bit pants. And, while there’s definitely a Pikminny taste to Tinykin, it’s certainly its own thing. You’re a little …
With the original Golden Sun ending on a cliff-hanger, and The Lost Age carrying on directly from it (or rather, from slightly before the end of the first game), I didn’t really have a choice but to start it immediately afterwards. Well, not quite immediately, as you can transfer your saved game from the first game to the follow-up but this required half an hour of password input and correction. Not that you see the benefit of the password for …
Yes, this again. Seems I didn’t play it at all in 2023! How did that happen? Anyhoo, this time through I played as Caesar (the green one), and for the first time I can remember, I wasn’t asked to form an alliance at all for the whole game. Normally at least someone panics and tries to get me to join with them, although I almost always decline. As usual, I reached the Mother of All Battles as the end of …
Another game off that SNK 40th Anniversary Collection thing I found Prehistoric Isle on. The game title really doesn’t match anything in the game itself, which is a platform shooter starring Athena (the SNK girl who is in a few of their games) and there aren’t any soldiers, psycho or otherwise. And you know what? I really enjoyed it! It’s quirky, very different to other superficially similar titles from the same era, and Athena sings her theme tune as you …
I totally forgot (again, I expect) that I had access to that SNK game collection on my Steam Deck. I think it came from Amazon original, so isn’t Steam-native, so maybe that’s why. Anyway, stumbled across it again and had a look, and Prehistoric Isle caught my eye. So I completed it. Standard Arcade Shooter Disclaimer applies: yes, I used All The Credits. These games are designed to swallow 10ps, so I’ve no shame in pumping it full of virtual …
For clarity, the specific game called “Subsurface” that I’m talking about is the cute little Metroidvania for the Pico-8 fantasy console. It’s a fun, short, platformer/shooter with a few upgrades (like being able to swim, or glide) that allow you to access previously inaccessible areas. Er, like any other Metroidvania. This one, being on the Pico-8, has tiny pixel graphics but the main character is clearly a miniature Samus Aran clone with that colour scheme! Not a difficult game by …
There seems to be a lot of “find the cats hidden in these pictures” games. I’ve played a few recently, but this one is by a different developer, and is one huge picture rather than a series of connected ones (like A Castle Full of Cats). The idea is the same, though. Not much more to say, really, aside from as well as finding 100 cats, you can also get an achievement for finding 5 gulls. Which I did. It’s …
No, I’m serious. I really did play and complete Paw Patrol on a Roll. For Science? You see, one of the ugvm people bought a charity bundle of games and one of those was Paw Patrol on a Roll. As they were clearly above playing it (or even claiming the code) themselves, it was offered up and naturally I took it. Beholden to play it, I did. It’s a bad game. I don’t think anyone was expecting anything else, what …
Once upon a time, in a different era, this game was a viral hit on the Xbox Live Arcade Indie Games service. It was that platform within a platform that let pretty much anyone publish games for the Xbox 360 and sell them for peanuts. Well, I recently discovered it still exists – for free on Steam! And here we are, after I’ve completed it. In some way, IMAGWZII is a precursor to the modern phenomenon of “survivors” games. It …
Many years ago, so long ago that my Gaming Diary didn’t even exist, I played Golden Sun on my Game Boy Advance. It was great. At least, I remember it being great, but I remember very little about the actual events in the game. I recall the catastrophe at the start, and the village you’re in, and that your friend goes missing and it turns out later on he’s working with (under duress) the bad guys. I remember there was …
This game is both a game, and not a game. And also, but mainly, an exploration of games and game mechanics. In some ways, it’s a bit like a serious version of something like The Beginner’s Guide, presented in the form of a third person action game through the lens of a university project about video game interactivity. The goal is just to get to the end, but the purpose is to explain to the player how there are different …
It’s been a long time coming, what with the original game coming in at the end of the Nintendo 3DS’ viable life, and it now being the twilight hours of the Nintendo Switch, but finally it was released and, having given it to my daughter to play first, the time eventually came for me to finish the story that cliffhangered on the previous game. Now, I may be misremembering the first game, but I’m pretty sure this one is somewhat …
