Blue Reflection has been a difficult series for Koei Tecmo to manage thanks to its enormously niche premise. Four products in, it’s also difficult to suggest that bad missteps were not made along the way. The original Blue Reflection got itself released and then un-released in parts of the world like Australia for being too much for an R-18+ rating…
Fuck AI. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi is a good example of why game developers should never touch Gen AI. It’s an actual insult to the intelligence that Kazuma Kaneko would actually put his name to this and believe that people would just accept it. For…
Read MoreSquint hard enough, and the AYANEO Pocket AIR Mini x B.Duck Limited Edition looks like a Chocobo limited edition. That was a good enough reason for me to buy one. It’s actually my first AYANEO device, and I can certainly see the appeal of them, sitting in the growing pool…
Read MoreThe Two Point series has a lot to answer for. Yes, SEGA’s brand of casual business simulations is silly and charming, and it’s fun to see what whacky schools, hospitals and museums you can cobble together. But in their desperate effort to be feel-good fun times, the Two Point series…
Read More(Many thanks to Ray N. for letting me use his art of Pragmata’s Diana for this piece. It was too cute and funny not to share to balance out how miserable the material this article deals with is) Pragmata is a very good, intelligent, emotional and meaningful game. Unfortunately, you…
Read MoreDid you know that, while mazes are designed to confuse and confound you by messing with your sense of direction and location, there’s actually a very simple way to escape from any of them? Put your hand on the left side wall and don’t take it off. Eventually, you’re going…
Read MoreTradespeople have their power tools, and become very attached to the equipment that supports their livelihood. Athletes have their preferred racquet, shoe and clothing brand, for the comfort and competitive advantage the right gear can provide. As a writer, I am always on the lookout for a keyboard that is…
Read MoreI went into Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream, having not played the original, and not really followed it. That is to say, I went in entirely unprepared for the utterly surreal experience that awaited me. I started by making myself, as is fairly standard for “life sim” games like these.…
Read MoreHere’s a stealth drop that was more than appreciated: SNEG and Games Workshop partnered up to bring 20 classic Warhammer and Warhammer 40K games to Steam. Many of these are games that had already been released on the platform but, for one reason or another, had been delisted. However, many…
Read MoreI suppose it was inevitable that at some stage, some indie developer would look at Scrabble and think to themselves “Roguelike!” After all, that r-word seems to be perennially glued into the indie developer mindset these days. Despite my growing hesitancy to touch anything with said r-word in the feature…
Read MoreThere was a time when Capcom was the most experimental game publisher, by a long way. Those of us who had PS2s and GameCubes at the time will remember that alongside the likes of Resident Evil 4, Capcom developed highly experimental stuff like P.N.03 and published Killer7, which was the…
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