To start this review with something very personal: My father passed away last week. It’s been difficult, to put it mildly. The reason I bring it up is that Dad absolutely loved Ten-Pin Bowling. Had his own ball, ball bag (I had no idea they made bowling ball bags), shoes, the works. He competed in social leagues all over the…
People who play board games are familiar with Dominion. It is considered the “gateway drug” to deckbuilding card games (and was indeed the first example of one), being both light and accessible and very good at showcasing the basic mechanics of this particular genre. It has sold millions and millions…
Temirana: The Lucky Princess and the Tragic Knights is a little bonkers,…
Sugoroku is, as far as the mechanics go, not the most exciting…
Here’s something about Japan that a lot of people in the West wouldn’t be aware of: The word “natsukashii”. There’s no real translation of that word into English. It’s related to “nostalgia,” in that it deals with memories of the past, but where nostalgia is typically associated with a longing…
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At first, when I heard that the revival of The Denpa Men was going to be a free-to-play title, I was disappointed. The three Denpa Men titles that were released in English on the 3DS were favourites. They were nothing spectacular, but as grindy, retro-themed JRPGs with an enormously quirky…
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The basic concept of Tokyo Xanadu is “Nihon Falcom make an action version of Persona. Oh, and it looks like the Trials of Cold Steel games.” None of this is a bad idea by any means, and Tokyo Xanadu has been around for quite some time now. We published our…
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I’m about to really age myself, but when I was young, the idea of (legitimately) free video games was very different to what it is today. There were no microtransactions, and no Fortnites, Genshin Impacts, or MMOs. If you were playing free, you were either playing shareware demos or very…
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It’s hard for us in the West to fully appreciate just how core idol companies and groups are in Japan. It’s not just about the music and performance, though that is certainly a big part of it. Idol groups act as talent feeder pools for just about every other part…
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Esports has become a ridiculously big business, sucking up so many dollars that could have gone into interesting, artful games instead. They’re holding an Olympic Esports Games now… and stupidly the IOC chose the authoritarian, puritanical hellnation, Saudi Arabia, for it. Hey, IOC, put Dead or Alive on the competition…
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One of the things that I find continually surprising about video games is the idea that, on the one hand, we consider them to be inherently an art form, but on the other, we just never talk about games in the same frameworks that we talk about every other art…
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I don’t want to spend too long mulling over its flaws, but Princess Maker 2 Regeneration is a good example of a remake handled poorly. I’m not commenting on the quality of the game itself, which is genuinely good and entertaining, and I’ll get to that as soon as I…
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There are conventional visual novels, and then there are the kinds of visual novels that Type-Moon produces. Tsukihime is a game that has a fearsome reputation, being one of the very first works of the company (it came before Fate/Stay Night, which has become the Type-Moon behemoth), and was essentially…
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The Japanese are a growing force in global tabletop game design. While the association with Japan and video games is long and deep, traditionally we haven’t embraced too many of their tabletop games (classic or modern). This is partly because many of the best were never localised, and partly because…
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