Grizzly Man is the fourth title in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulps series, beginning a second trilogy titled “Pixel Pulps DTV Collection.” (DTV is short for direct-to-video.) It is a psychedelic slasher game about a former MIB agent who was severely injured in a mysterious attack, waking up with full amnesia. Ten years later, he is working as a field…
Game collections are all the rage these days, and are becoming increasingly something that goes beyond just the game. Retro collections aim to be museums as much as things you play, with Digital Eclipse in particular mastering the “interactive museum” format. Riki 8Bit Game Collection isn’t really a “retro collection,”…
Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament is actually an older title, being…
Koei Tecmo’s JRPG house, Gust, is a factory for the genre. It’s…
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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I am absolutely terrible at SHMUPs, bullet hells, and other such action game experiences. For this reason, I don’t generally play them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, it’s just that my progress through them is so slow – on account of my own lack of skills – that…
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The basic concept of Tokyo Xanadu is “Nihon Falcom make an action version of Persona. Oh, and it looks like the Trials of Cold Steel games.” None of this is a bad idea by any means, and Tokyo Xanadu has been around for quite some time now. We published our…
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Every time Starship Troopers pops up as a topic, we get to “enjoy” the most surreal arguments on the Internet as a bunch of people argue that the film is not a satire of fascism, and that the book is not an argument for fascism. These are some of the…
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Shinto is one of those things that most people who know anything about Japan have some vague concept of, but don’t really know anything about. From experience, they’re also rarely interested and that’s depressing. Tourists in Japan do cheerfully visit Shinto shrines, before mistaking them for Buddhist temples (and vice…
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I’m about to really age myself, but when I was young, the idea of (legitimately) free video games was very different to what it is today. There were no microtransactions, and no Fortnites, Genshin Impacts, or MMOs. If you were playing free, you were either playing shareware demos or very…
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The best thing about Flintlock is the setting. It’s a hodgepodge of historical influences – the opening sequence focuses on trench warfare and sappers that could be straight out of a World War 1 drama, before the game settles back to a more colonial era affair, set against a horde…
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It’s hard for us in the West to fully appreciate just how core idol companies and groups are in Japan. It’s not just about the music and performance, though that is certainly a big part of it. Idol groups act as talent feeder pools for just about every other part…
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Esports has become a ridiculously big business, sucking up so many dollars that could have gone into interesting, artful games instead. They’re holding an Olympic Esports Games now… and stupidly the IOC chose the authoritarian, puritanical hellnation, Saudi Arabia, for it. Hey, IOC, put Dead or Alive on the competition…
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