It’s been a while since I went cold turkey on Animal Crossing, so I thought I’d inject a bit of something similar when this came up on sale on the Switch eShop. Apparently it’s the first Doraemon game to be officially localised for the West, but it’s also a Story of Seasons (née Harvest Moon) crossover title. How that robot cat/farming game amalgamation works is like this: The plot is about Noby, Doraemon and chums being magically sent back in …
In a sea of coattail riding Vampire Survivors clones, it takes something for one to stand out. HoloCure did this by being free. As in, completely free. No cost, no IAPs, no paid DLC. Free. That, and it came to my attention via a recommendation from Gaming on Linux, who I follow because apparently I’m a Linux gamer now what with the Steam Deck and all. Anyway, the game. it’s Vampire Survivors only with anime girls and cute baddies. Apparently, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
It’s been a while, but with it recently popping up on the Switch Online service, I gave it another go. This time, I’d remembered how damn difficult it was, but even so, a few later levels (especially one which was an autoscroller) are properly brutal. Yes, I used save states. You have to, and not even because it is difficult – it’s just so, so long and there aren’t any built-in save options or passwords or anything. All you can …
I do wonder sometimes what it is that makes me decide to play certain games. I’d cast a rough eye over reviews of Biomutant around the time it came out and it seemed to be an average open world adventure/explorey game, so ignored it. It’s now on PS+ (or possibly PS++ or PS+++: It’s hard to tell these days) and I downloaded it for reasons unknown, then started to play it. After picking the fur colours for my… rat? Meerkat? …
It was only a few days ago when I was saying about playing baffling games, and, well, here’s another one! About An Elf is somewhere between a visual novel and an RPG, where you play an elf trying to rediscover Elftopia or something. The plot is nonsense and, frankly, not what you’re going to be focussing on if you play it because that art style. Are the characters real people dressed up? Are they CGI? Models? Some combination of all …
Let it be known: I actually spent actual money (rather than money gained from selling farmed trading cards) on this Steam game. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. The things a Steam Deck make you do. I’ve wanted it for some time. Yes, it looks a bit pants and yes it’s cheap and yes, yes it rips off the Castlevania aesthetic to the point of why-hasn’t-Konami-stepped-in, but there was something interesting about how you just get ridiculously overpowered …
A rare (these days!) post about a game I’m playing but have not yet completed! So I’ve very much enjoyed recent, as in, 3DS onwards, Pokémon games. Partly because I’ve played them all while my daughter plays the other game (Violet, this time) and we sort of race to the end. Naturally, I win. This time around there has been more than usual in the way of complaints about the game. Mainly to do with bugs and performance issues, and …
I aborted an attempt to play Pony Island on my Mac a few years ago, as you have to press the left and right mouse buttons at the same time at some point, and with a Mac mouse you can’t do that. I had a PC mouse I could have plugged in instead, but I also had eleventybillion other games that didn’t require that sort of effort, so it got shelved. Until now! Sure, the Steam Deck actually has no …
The first game to be “free” with the new higher tiers of PlayStation Plus on the day of release, Stray was a lovely surprise. I knew it existed, so I don’t mean like that, and it was announced to be coming to the service a while back. No, what I’m referring to is the gameplay, the setting, and just how good it is. Until downloading it, my interested was “ooh, a cat game? That might be fun”. But it’s so …
Since I mostly gave up computer gaming back in the early 2000s, the Syberia games passed me by completely. In fact, point and click games – a mostly PC based genre at the time – were lost almost entirely, until Telltale came along with console versions of their adventures. Now of course, they’re on everything. I’d eyed up Switch ports of Syberia and its sequel on the eShop a number of times, but never got round to buying them until …
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. …
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 …
