Today’s Nintendo presentation was a big one: it included a 20-minute Nintendo Indie World Showcase and a 20-minute Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase. One pattern that’s emerged: there are too many collections of past titles! Every game mentioned will be released for Nintendo Switch; most are likely to be released for…
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Spike Chunsoft is onto a particular theme right now. A few weeks ago it released a game designed to evoke a very specific cultural nostalgia that is core to a lot of aesthetics and narrative themes over there. Now, with Bakeru, it is tapping into something very different in terms…
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Ticket To Ride is, along with Catan, on the way to be our generation’s Monopoly and Risk. First released back in 2004, is has sold 18 million copies, been translated into most major languages, and has had innumerable expansions added to it. There have also been multiple video game adaptations,…
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It’s amazing to think that this is the first time there has been an official release of Fate Stay/Night outside of Japan. This visual novel kicked off one of the biggest anime properties of all time, turned into one of the biggest free-to-play mobile games, and made the companies producing…
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Hakuoki was my first otome game, right back when it was released on the PlayStation 3. Actually, I think it might have been my very first visual novel. It seems hard to imagine now, but a decade ago, digital distribution wasn’t in the same place, and visual novels being released…
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Every so often a new sport gains traction. It usually starts as a casual hobby activity, but then people being people find a way to make it competitive, and before you know it sponsors and organisations get involved and BAM, you’ve got a professional sport. The challenge these emerging sports…
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Here’s something about Japan that a lot of people in the West wouldn’t be aware of: The word “natsukashii”. There’s no real translation of that word into English. It’s related to “nostalgia,” in that it deals with memories of the past, but where nostalgia is typically associated with a longing…
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At first, when I heard that the revival of The Denpa Men was going to be a free-to-play title, I was disappointed. The three Denpa Men titles that were released in English on the 3DS were favourites. They were nothing spectacular, but as grindy, retro-themed JRPGs with an enormously quirky…
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Ace Attorney Investigations is the last compilation of the extended Phoenix Wright universe that we needed to have the full set on modern consoles. That in itself is a good reason to pick it up for completionists, but I would imagine that many people will also be interested in this…
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Who doesn’t love their Switch? It is arguably the finest console of all time (though the arguments you can make in favour of it are very compelling), and this week we dig into some of our most-played games of all time. Given that it’s the 2024 Olympic Games, we also…
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