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,” though it looks like it from the screenshots. Rather it’s…
Koei Tecmo’s JRPG house, Gust, is a factory for the genre. It’s just as well that their output is a reliably good time, but they are without a doubt a studio that churns out its work. Fairy Tail 2 comes four years after the original (with a whole lot of…
“They don’t make them like they used to” is such a facetious…
As a rule of thumb, it’s a good thing when developers and…
The Western release of The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance will probably be ignored by the majority of the occidental gaming world, and with no marketing at all aside from word-of-mouth advertising from video game diehards, I feel that’s a real shame. So I’ve come out of my…
Read More
They really should have called this “The Legend of Link”, to keep up with the series syntax. That aside, Nintendo’s first significant effort to make their good princess (sorry, I never cared for Peach) a protagonist is an absolutely delightful experience, and shows that while Nintendo enjoyed massive success with…
Read More
Is it strange that of the four titles in the Castlevania Dominus Collection, the one that was most interesting to me was the bonus? That’s not to say that anything else in the collection isn’t very worthwhile, but it’s a full-scale, total end-to-end remake of Haunted Castle, the classic (and…
Read More
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about Popcap’s classic Peggle – and that’s not helped by the series being dormant since 2013 – but I’m willing to bet that back when I did, I never once considered that what Peggle, that classic and relaxing mix of Pachinko and bagatelle…
Read More
Doraemon is one of the most iconic, influential cultural icons in Japanese entertainment history. It’s a blue robot cat with a pocket that contains everything, and he and his human pals (Nobi and co) have gone on so many adventures that it’s almost impossible to count. The manga came first…
Read More
What if Harry Potter was something that you could enjoy without the knowledge that every word you read came from someone who is deeply, aggressively hateful? What if you could jump into the body of a student of magic and fall in love with all the characters? That’s essentially where…
Read More
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…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More