JRPG-inspired, hand-animated sidescrolling Metroidvania game Fallen Tear: The Ascension now has a release window of early 2026, and a new animated teaser is available. The game is set in the lush lands of Raoah. As the mysterious Hira, players will explore the world while seeking friendly allies. Your new friends will each have skills and perks. Challenge powerful, brutal gods…
Annual sports game refreshes all tend to get a little stale over time, but few have had such a fall from grace as we saw out of 2K Games’ WWE line of games back with WWE2K20. The shift from Japanese developer, Yukes, to US Studio, Visual Concepts, led to one…
Read MoreI am, in many ways, the worst possible person to review a Raiden game. It’s not because I hate the series, or can’t appreciate the beauty of a vertical shmup. Quite the reverse. I’ve loved Raiden ever since the first time I lined up a 20c piece against a grubby…
Read MoreWonder Boy is one of those classic gaming icons that you’ve probably encountered at some point in your gaming life, whether it’s the classic arcade game or the more recent remakes of titles such as Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap. I say “recent”, and then I look it up…
Read MoreGaming history is important – if you don’t think so, you’re reading the wrong site, I fear – but all too often, collections of important gaming archives boil down largely just to dull lists of simply emulated games, robbing them of their all-important context. It’s the cultural equivalent of displaying…
Read MoreA wide variety of companies have held the licence to produce TMNT games over the years, but Konami can lay claim to having been the first. If you were playing a console TMNT game in the late 1980s or early 1990s, it was made by Konami, or one of its…
Read MoreReligion is one of those topics you’re never meant to discuss in polite society. When it comes to video games, it’s one that’s historically either been airbrushed out of games to avoid offence, or dealt with in very broad brush strokes to define it away from existing real-world religious groups.…
Read MoreTMNT is a seriously well-established brand in 2022. However, if you weren’t there in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it’s easy to underestimate just how ubiquitous the adventures of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael were… if you were a certain age. The Turtles of that era were relentlessly marketed…
Read MoreWithout fail, every single one of my kids has picked up the HyperX Clutch Wireless while I’ve been reviewing it, thinking that it was an Xbox One controller. The resemblance is uncanny, and while you could debate whether or not imitation is indeed the most sincere form of flattery, it’s…
Read MoreIs there a video game character that has been more exploited than Pac-Man? I’d argue – and I’m right – that Toru Iwatani’s famous pizza slice (or corruption of the Japanese kanji for mouth, depending on which interview he’s giving) – is the video game character that’s been most exploited…
Read MoreIn 2022, the view of retro gaming is almost always tilted towards classic console systems, leaving the computers that were for many of us foundational aside as mere curios. That’s a huge shame, because it ignores a rich trove of gaming history, creativity and innovation. If you’re talking all three…
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