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…
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have played ArcRunner. While it looks the part of a cyberpunk dystopia, the game itself was clearly only ever going to be a roguelike shooter drenched in neon. While it’s easy to say that you shouldn’t criticise a game for not being something it never…
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Once upon a time Kemco was a developer and publisher of a very wide range of games. These days it sticks to generic RPG Maker-like JRPGs designed primarily for mobile, but the company has been operating all the way back to 1984 and the NES era. Back in those days…
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With the same creative team behind it as Olympia Soiree, Tengoku Struggle: Strayside was always going to be an interesting visual novel. As it turns out, it’s going to be particularly interesting for people that are students of Japanese historical figures and spirituality, and perhaps a little befuddling for those…
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I cannot think of a worse possible time to release Outward Definitive Edition on Nintendo Switch than right now. Just weeks after the almost shockingly similar-themed Dragon’s Dogma 2. One’s an JRPG, the other is a survival-style RPG, but they both want to be the same thing, and the former…
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Full disclosure: I have no semblance of a green thumb. Sometimes it feels like I can just look at plants and kill them. I think that’s why I have come to appreciate games with/about gardening in any capacity: I use video games as an escape, and escaping to something you…
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I can only assume that the modern media’s obsession with the idea of a metaverse has to do with the fact that in this particular reality that we live in, we drew a really crappy hand, where stupid things are happening with such frequency that it’s nice to imagine that…
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I love playing cricket on the go. I think it’s because of the longer span of time that it takes place over. With football, or ice hockey, or tennis, or volleyball, a game’s over in under an hour (when playing in video game form) and so, consequently, when I sit…
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The Touch Detective series has always been a bigger deal in Japan than the West, and it is easy to understand why. When the original was released in Europe and North America, it was several months after Phoenix Wright landed, and (in Europe, anyway), a few months after the first…
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If there’s anything that’s going to inspire me to get super fit, it’s Hatsune Miku. Well now, Big Fitness, you figured out the trick with me and I now belong to your cult. In all seriousness, though, Fitness Boxing feat. Hatsune Miku is a great time and it does, in…
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Violet Wisteria is two things – firstly, it’s a brute of a game that wears its old-school homage on its sleeve. It’s also heavily inspired by the classic Valis series of fanservicey magical girl platformers. Things start off really well with a story sequence pulled directly from the PC-98 era…
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