I have a soft spot for games by Chibig. I like how they’re all set in the same universe, often with recurring characters (like Mûn). Probably the biggest game of theirs was Summer in Mara, a sort of Wind Waker-ish, Harvest Moon-lite adventure. Most of their games are of slightly different genres too. Mika and the Witch’s Mountain is a sort of arcade adventure. It’s set on an island, at the top of which is a witch, whom you want …
Yes, it does look a lot like a Game Boy Colour Zelda game. It feels a bit like one too, not least because you have a sword and a hookshot and there are block pushing puzzles just like in Link’s Awakening. Only it’s only an hour or two long and there are only really three short dungeons. Which is fine. It was enjoyable and tight and all that. Once completed, however, you get access to a roguelike dungeon mode, where …
This is one of the games on the recent Taito cartridge for the Evercade. I’m not 100% on the timings, but it feels very much like a precursor to Bubble Bobble – loads of single screen platforming, baddies to destroy, a particularly nasty baddie that appears if you take too long, and so on. It isn’t anywhere near as much fun as Bubble Bobble though. The main issue I had is that often, especially on later levels, some of the …
It’s been a while since I last completed a Picross game, but I’ve actually been playing this one off and on for six months or more. It is, as they always are, more of the same – a polished, Jupiter developed, game of Picross with loads of puzzles. The difference this time, however, is that it’s Namco themed. Specifically, 8-bit Namco games from the 1980s. Pixel representations of the likes of Dig Dug, The Tower of Druaga, Pac-Man, Rally-X, Mappy, …
Teddison Inc is a cookie-clicker type numbers-go-up game. You’re a bear (for no explained reason, except – presumably – to enable the pun in the title) and you’d discovered you can use a bike to generate electricity. So you crank the Playdate and the number of watts goes up. Then you can spend these watts to buy automations so you no longer have to crank. And more cyclists. And then better electricity generators like solar farms and wind turbines, as …
Maybe I should have looked up the game before playing, but I naïvely assumed that this follow-up to Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! would be more of the same only instead of the sort of fantasy setting of that game, I’d be creating weapons in a more sci-fi environment. Which, I suppose, you do. But actually, it’s a turn based RPG. Whereas in Weapon Shop you just made weapons for other spuds, here you’re actually pilot of a spaceship and …
89p? Well why not. The two other Holy Potatoes games were also 89p each, so I got them as well. Yes, I know I have them on Steam already. Shut up. You’re not my mum. I’d played a little bit of this before and seem to remember it’s one of those management type games, like the Kairosoft ones, only you’re potatoes and you run a weapon shop. I mean, you could have discerned much of that from the title of …
It’s not often I play a big all-the-graphics modern games these days. In fact, even Spider-Man 2 is now a few years old. It does look amazing but the important thing is how it plays. Very few games are this much fun to just get from A to B. Batman: Arkham Knight was, and the first Sony Spider-Man was, but most other games don’t give you the freedom and the tools and the verticality that just make it a joy …
New Evercade cartridges arrived last night! one of them is the Taito Arcade 3 compilation, the highlight (for me) on it being Puzzle Bobble. The original one! In the arcade! As I already knew, it’s great. Only, because it’s the arcade version, it only has 30 levels so I was done within an hour. 30 levels! I’m sure later home versions had many hundreds of them or randomly generated endlessly, but no.
Yes! I was one of those idiots that paid SIXTY SIX POUNDS for a piece of plastic that you put your Switch (or Switch 2) in, so you can sit awkwardly while playing games made for one of the worst consoles ever made! It’s like having two red-tinted Game Boys stuck in front of your eyes that you can only really play at a table (or, as I did, on the sofa with a teetering pile of lap cushions), all …
Almost exactly 11 years ago, I played and completed (and then played some more) the original Fantasy Life game on the 3DS. I really enjoyed it, and after all this time I was excited to play the sequel. Only, it isn’t really a sequel. There’s nothing, plot wise at least, that links this game to the previous one. Sure, the mechanics and graphical style are nearly the same, but there’s no story continuation or even, as far as I can …
A while back, I played the demo of this and enjoyed it enough to stick it on my wishlist until it went on sale. Eventually, it did! While it might not look like anything special, and there are a million late-90s style 3D platformers around, what this has that most of the others don’t is a properly controllable character. As in, the jumping and “steering” physics and controls feel right. You know how on the Super NES, Mario in Super …
This is great and it is so obviously using Hades as a template it’s not even fair to suggest it’s anything but a clone. But a really good clone. It even mentions about the powers you obtain as being “boons” at one point, which is what they’re called in Hades. So, in case you don’t know how Hades plays, I can explain for Turtles. You start in the sewers, and face room after room of similar but random layouts and …
And here it is! Party House is one of the games on UFO 50. The idea is, on each level, you are hosting a house party and every time you open the door a random guest from a pool of guests turns up. Each guest has a different effect on the party, however, and that’s where it gets hard. So to start with, your house can only hold 5 guests. Some guests increase the popularity of the party (which, each …
UFO 50 is presented to you as a collection of 50 games from an 80s game development company called UFOSoft, for their three computer systems called the LX-I, LX-II and LX-III. The thing is, UFOSoft never existed, the games never came out in the 80s, and the LX series of computers aren’t real. It’s all a lie. Except that there are actually 50 games here. All full games, fully realised, and they all could have plausibly existed in the 1980s …
