Alex Kidman is an award-winning Australian journalist with more than 20 years games and tech writing experience under his belt. Critics have accused him of being a heartless and relentless word-writing machine, but this is clearly false. Alex will deal with those critics once he's finished his latest software upgrade.
Idea Factory International is bringing otome visual novel Battlefield Waltz to the West over a decade after its original Japanese launch. First announced during IFI’s Summer Festival 2024, the game will be available in physical and digital editions.) It follows a young woman named Lan on her journey as the Maiden of the Cursed Sword. Following tragic circumstances, she ends…
It’s that time of year again! We’re counting down the days to Christmas with our own little “advent calendar” – one new game to play over the holiday season each and every day. As the year winds down, things get really busy. We’ve got Christmas parties to attend, the end…
Set in an alternate 19th-century Japan near the end of the Boshin…
Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament is actually an older title, being…
Wonder 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…
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Gaming 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…
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A 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…
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Religion 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.…
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TMNT 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…
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Without 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…
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Is 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…
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In 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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Picture the scene, if you will. Socrates approaches the Lyceum, deep in thought. His disciples gather around him, and he poses this question: What’s a Greek Urn? The answer is, of course, about five drachmas an hour, and that’s a very old joke. Probably not quite as old as Socrates…
Read MoreAsk me what my all-time favourite game is, and I’ll tell you that it’s Bubble Bobble. Ask me for my top five, and I’ll list off five different variants of Bubble Bobble before expanding my tastes out to other titles. I can’t play Bubble Bobble all the time. I mean,…
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