You know how the saying goes: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” I do feel both very foolish and a great deal of shame for playing Taito Milestones 2. It’s not because this is a retro compilation of poor games. Far from it. The…
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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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Before there was Bubble Bobble, there was Snow Bros., and the original remains the best. I should explain. Bubble Bobble did actually come first chronologically, but Snow Bros. (the “clone”) was the first single-screen platformer I personally played. Way back on the Game Boy, there was a shrunk-down version of…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I don’t actually like Space Harrier and its ilk. Because I’m also a fan of arcade games that’s a kind of blasphemy, I know, but I am really, really bad at Space Harrier, and so it’s never clicked with me. I think it has to do…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I grew up with the Asterix & Obelix series. Where other kids around me were more into the American superheroes, the very French antics of these very French characters were much more my thing. Consistently hilarious and nonsense but also full of big adventure and fisticuffs,…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. Building upon the ideas of Cotton 100% (which we reviewed here), Panorama Cotton takes the series out of 2D and into pseudo-3D, using the Super Scaler technology of the Sega Mega Drive. The gameplay as a result becomes similar to titles like Star Fox or Space…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. When you have a moment spare, go and look at a picture of the Gamecube controller. Take a close look at the analogue sticks. Notice something? If your response was “the case around the stick has eight little ridges”, then you’re looking at the biggest problem…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. There’s that rare beautiful moment when playing a scrolling shooter where the speed and the tension fade away, and the player is suspended in a perfect state of flow. I get this feeling on the rare occasions that I make it past Stage 2 on Gradius,…
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Review by Matt S. These days, I spend most of my time railing against the obsession that this industry has with content and game length. I don’t believe that it’s relevant to the quality or value of a game, and if we’re going to see games as…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. You’ve got to be impressed with the kind of gonads a developer team would have to have to look at the whole zombie arena thing and think to themselves “hey let’s do a no-frills, budget version of that!” Undead Battle Royal is a perfectly playable game,…
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