The Cotton series started life in an era where bullet hell wasn’t even really a thing, because back in 1991, even the state-of-the-art arcade technology could only throw so many pixels around. Since that date, there’s been a number of Cotton-related titles, including 2021’s Cotton Reboot, which took that original 1991 classic and reimagined it for PC, PS4 and Switch.…
Well, fellow Final Fantasy fans, here’s our chance. For years now we’ve been begging Square Enix for a new 2D, pixel-based Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy Resonance isn’t Final Fantasy XVII, but after the success of the Octopath Traveler series and Dragon Quest remakes, it’s pretty clearly an effort by the…
A persistent issue I have with video game adaptations of stories from…
Time really does fly. If you had asked me when Earth Defence…
When I think about the correct term to describe Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, I find myself alternating between “whimsical”, “playful” and “twee”. It’s also saccharine, and that will make it polarising to an extent, but then if you’re not open to Yoshi melting your heart, I would argue that…
Read More
Every so often, a game gets released that gets all kinds of kudos, but when I sit down to play it, none of the “hype” makes sense to me. Mouse: P.I. For Hire is an example of that. This game makes no sense to me. Mouse: P.I. For Hire should…
Read More
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 More
The 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
I 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 More
I 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 More
There 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…
Read More
This is the first time I have played Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and I feel fortunate for that, as this has been an unmitigated delight to experience for the first time, especially now that it has the multiplayer stuff added into it. The result is a big package of Nintendo…
Read More
Satire is a difficult challenge for a game developer. On the one hand, the satire needs to criticise the subject. On the other hand, if the game feels too good to play, it is very easy to feel like a celebration of the subject instead. If you were to undermine…
Read More
Nintendo’s timing with its no-pressure comfort food games has been fortuitous. Animal Crossing landed at almost the exact moment that people around the world were desperate for some no-stress escapism from COVID-19. Now, Pokémon Pokopia launches right at the time that America massively escalates global tensions by committing war crimes…
Read More