Look, the Nippon Professional Baseball league – the NPB – is just better than the MLB. I don’t mind if you disagree, but you’re wrong. From the personality of the teams to the quality of the games, the way the league is organised, and the atmosphere when you’re actually there, the NPB represents the finest side of baseball. The fact…
I knew that I was in for a mighty slog when the tutorial of Sword Art Online: Echoes of Aincrad, felt like it went for an hour all by itself. What a winding, long-winded, slow-paced dungeon that was. And then the game opens up to become a massive… long-winded, slow-paced…
To review the Gothic 1 Remake, I played it side-by-side with the…
I was genuinely concerned that Dead or Alive was, well, dead. On…
If you haven’t played Resident Evil 4 before, the game follows Raccoon City disaster survivor turned government agent, Leon S. Kennedy, on his mission to [undisclosed Spanish-speaking European country] to rescue Ashley Graham, the daughter of the US President, who has been kidnapped. Leon explores a village, a castle, and…
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We don’t hear as much about the Eastern Front during World War 2. This is, of course, largely because the heroes of the piece were Soviets. Anything that could be perceived as lionising the heroics of Soviets doesn’t play well with the West’s official propaganda line on what happened during…
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Catan’s trajectory has been incredible, given that it’s only 28 years old. Initially, it was something of a disruptor, helping the “Eurogame” become a dominant approach to board games. From there it became a Monopoly-like thing – a game that absolutely everyone owns a copy of and is aware of…
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Koei Tecmo is no stranger to the classic Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The entire Dynasty Warriors series is, of course, based on that classic text. In many ways, it’s what makes Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty such a captivating game, because it’s such a different creative take on…
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I am, in many ways, the worst possible person to review a Raiden game. It’s not because I hate the series, or can’t appreciate the beauty of a vertical shmup. Quite the reverse. I’ve loved Raiden ever since the first time I lined up a 20c piece against a grubby…
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There are three things I look forward to in a Yakuza game: Exceptional writing and storytelling, a vibrant and interesting open world (rare, given how dull and bloated most open worlds are), and an authentic setting that makes me homesick for Japan. Like A Dragon: Ishin! might not have “Yakuza”…
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The “Golden Age of Piracy” will never cease to fascinate historians and amateur enthusiasts alike. While the caricatures of peg legs, eye patches, and parrots on the shoulder might not fascinate the imagination long past childhood, the political environment that allowed piracy to flourish, the role it played in the…
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I don’t really understand why Idea Factory continues to experiment with action combat systems. Action combat systems are far more resource intensive to get right, and for a company producing JRPGs on a very small budget, it seems counterintuitive. Recent Neptunia titles, including Neptunia Virtual Stars and Cyberdimension Neptunia, have…
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One Piece Odyssey is a particularly impressive game for one reason in particular: You don’t need to be a fan of One Piece to enjoy it. So often anime tie-in games consolidate the main anime plotline to an extreme degree, just so the developers can squish some form of it…
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I have reached the point where I cannot stomach the Marvel cross-media franchise’s approach to storytelling, at all. Sadly, Midnight Suns is full of it. The relentlessly juvenile and quip-based humour that Americans seem to think passes for dry, droll and/or sarcastic humour pervades every single one of these things…
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