Lego Party is a Mario Party clone. Let’s not beat around the bush about that. It is what it is, and the development team at SMG isn’t for a second trying to claim otherwise. The problem is that Mario Party is a pretty challenging formula to get right, and… well,…
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I’ll admit that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of mecha games. I appreciate their appeal, but spending hours tinkering around with mech builds simply isn’t something I’m overly fond of – I’ve never been a min-max statistician when it comes to my beloved JRPGs either. So I missed the…
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Let’s get this out of the way up front: Varlet very badly wants to be Persona. It’s a game about dungeons that form out of people’s wayward “desires”, and those desires just happen to offer an opportunity for personal reflection while casting a broader analysis on society. It’s not a…
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Of all the many golf properties out there, Everybody’s Golf has reliably been the best of them. It’s also a series that has gone through a fair few developers, starting with Camelot (which would go on to develop the Mario Golf series), then Japan Studio and Clap Hanz for many…
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Last year, a humble Ukranian developer released Light de Deux, a sweet little romance visual novel about ballet dancers that I absolutely loved. The dance theme got to me, of course, but it was also well-written, well-drawn, and the characters inspired me so much I arranged with the developer to…
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I love it when a lost project is dusted off and finished. It happens, rarely, and often it is attached to a project that was either so far ahead of its time that the money overlooked it, or was a real passion project of some artist who ran out of…
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When it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And in the case of Hideo Kojima games, they’re never broke. Konami’s new Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a very different kind of project to the Silent Hill 2 or Resident Evil remakes that really turned heads in recent years. This…
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Of all the examples of comfort food gaming that are out there, I’d have to say that Story of Seasons is my comfiest and tastiest. Right back as far as the Game Boy – when the series was still Harvest Moon (remembering that the “Harvest Moon” titles that get released…
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While I’ve never been much of a FPS fan, and even the mighty Doom and Quake I’ve respected but had little patience to play myself, Heretic and Hexen are the exceptions to the rule. It’s amazing what a simple change in setting can do. Despite being only minimally different to…
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Iwakura Aria caught my attention for several reasons: It’s a MAGES visual novel, and as a big-time fan of Steins;Gate and the rest of that series, I’ll play anything MAGES attaches its name to. Secondly, the project was being compared to The House in Fata Morgana, Raging Loop and Umineko,…
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