I am really quite confused by the release of Spy Bros.: Pipi & Bibi’s DX. This is an obscure arcade game that almost no one would remember, from a “series” that never got a sequel. It was one single arcade release, and then it was relegated to MAME history. Sure,…
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“It’s more of the same!” You just know that this is going to be the main comment (and complaint) about Octopath Traveler II. “It’s too much like the first.” Except it’s not. Of course it’s not. Octopath Traveler was a narrative-driven game that focused on the stories of eight distinct…
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There are three things I look forward to in a Yakuza game: Exceptional writing and storytelling, a vibrant and interesting open world (rare, given how dull and bloated most open worlds are), and an authentic setting that makes me homesick for Japan. Like A Dragon: Ishin! might not have “Yakuza”…
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I often wonder how successful I’d be working as an air traffic controller. It seems like it would be a stressful job, given how quickly air flights can turn deadly, and how busy airports are these days. I also suspect I’d be less-than-good at the job, given how many nightmare…
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When Five Dates – one of the first (if not THE first) FMV games filmed and made 100 per cent remotely during quarantine – came out, it was at a time people were craving human interaction. It scratched that itch quite well despite those being fictional interactions. Its sequel, Ten…
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Square Enix is a company that has many decades of history, and over that time has built a business filled with competitive advantages. It is a company rich with products, services and IP that are unique to it and continue to underpin its value. Perhaps its greatest single advantage of…
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WBSC eBaseball: Power Pros isn’t quite what I was hoping for out of Konami. For the longest time, I have hoped against hope that the company would start localising its excellent baseball games again. I wasn’t fussed which! Either the serious simulations or the eBaseball bobbleheads arcade titles would have…
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Brave’s Rage is fine. It’s a new entry in a very over-saturated genre, and doesn’t do nearly enough to stand out, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the game itself. It’s just disappointing that there seems to be a shrinking pool of gameplay structures that indies work with, at a…
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The “Golden Age of Piracy” will never cease to fascinate historians and amateur enthusiasts alike. While the caricatures of peg legs, eye patches, and parrots on the shoulder might not fascinate the imagination long past childhood, the political environment that allowed piracy to flourish, the role it played in the…
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I feel so naughty. Risen is banned here in Australia. It was refused classification back in 2009, for predictably nonsense reasons (it features drug use, which the Australian Classification Board absolutely hates in the context of video games). It has never been re-classified, meaning that it’s still not available here…
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