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I feel like this particular version of Zero Wing isn’t the one that should have been preserved. Or, at the very least, the folks at Bitwave Games should have added the option for us to change between the arcade port (the better one, mechanically speaking) and the Mega Drive port (the one with the meme that made it famous) via a menu option. It’s not a bad game, far from it, and Bitwave did a good job at porting and remastering it, but this was a missed opportunity. Vanilla Zero Wing just doesn’t have that many interesting elements that make it stand out from the ten billion other space shooters released in the early 90s.
Red Tape is a really tedious and mundane game… and weirdly enough, that’s why I actually kinda liked it. The joke was turning Hell into a boring and bureaucratic office building where you’re told to spend the rest of eternity as an intern doing pointless jobs, and against all odds, the joke landed. The fact the game was short and, oddly enough, somewhat visually appealing, also did help a bit. It’s not for everyone, and there are other office-like comedic games that are way more enjoyable, but for the minuscule price tag the publisher is asking for, you could do a hell of a lot worse.
Wanted: Dead is certainly an interesting game that won’t be for everyone. It’s full of jank, isn’t particularly well designed, and often feels incomplete. However, it is a good time, and I had a blast with it despite its flaws, and it left me wanting more by the time I was done.
Pharaoh: A New Era doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to city builders. As a straightforward remake of a 1999 game, it did gain a much better UI and faster gameplay, but it’s still a slow-paced experience focused on micromanagement and logistics. Only a specific niche of city building fans will really get a kick out of this game, but it’s still one worth checking out if you’re into strategic titles which reward patience and long-term planning.
Describing SEASON: A Letter to the Future to a colleague, their reply was, “sounds boring”, and that is totally fair. In description, it does sound boring, but it is so in the same way that a puzzle is boring. Watching someone hunt for pieces and slowly make progress can be boring, but not nearly so for the person putting it together. Looking for a piece where there may or may not be one, discovering that one you need, figuring out how the picture forms, building snapshots of key areas that later become this bigger world. That is Season‘s sweet spot. That’s its letter to the future.
Hogwarts Legacy impressed me, and not just as a lifelong fan. I especially loved its dedication to exploration and puzzle solving, two things modern RPGs are finding less and less time for. I think it’s possibly the best RPG for newcomers to the genre and people who don’t otherwise play RPGs. Unlike most RPGs, setting the difficulty to Story doesn’t invalidate everything. With Hogwarts Legacy, there’s still plenty of game to explore and puzzles to solve. You can still have a fun fulfilling gameplay experience, without complicated combat getting in the way.
EA Motive has done an excellent job recapturing the magic of the original game, whilst expanding and improving on several key areas. Managing to take what was already a superb game and make it even better. Although, a couple of extra tweaks really could have brought it to the next level. The Dead Space remake stands up there with Resident Evil in “how to do a remake”, and it’s one that I highly recommend for fans and newcomers alike.
The long and short of it is that Risen is a fun action-adventure RPG. It is very rough around the edges, not to the extent of some other games in the genre that came out around the same time (looking at you, Two Worlds), but it has charm. If you’re a fan of Oblivion, or Skyrim, and want to see another game that has a similar style, this might be a good pickup.
I think it’s worth the trip. Labyrinth of Galleria doesn’t just have excellent game mechanics and some cute artwork, though it certainly has those in spades. More importantly, it has a fantastically paced story that slowly pulls you in, giving you more and more to think about and keep in mind, before using your own investment against you. It’s superb tale spinning, and I haven’t seen this level of involvement in a dungeon crawler in a long time. Don’t let the mystery of this cursed dungeon slip away: there’s so much to discover in the Galleria.
This is how a remaster of a Nintendo game should look, run, and play. What was already near-perfect is even better, all thanks to Retro Studios just improving upon every single aspect of the original game, making this particular version of an all-time classic the ultimate way to play it. Not to mention the fact you can now take it on-the-go. I may have one or two small issues with it, but to call them deal-breakers would be damn near blasphemous. In short, grab Metroid Prime Remastered.
There’s more to it than your average demo, but way less content than your average sports title. It’s very simplistic, feeling like a remaster of a Nintendo 64 sports title at times, but it’s cute, runs well, and its controls are pretty good. Also, as a means to test the Western public’s perception on a Japanese-as-hell franchise, this isn’t so bad. And considering it costs a mere dollar… eh, what the hell, we only live once, go for it.
There’s nothing inherently bad about Rhythm Sprout, nothing that makes it a deal-breaker. Sure, it gets repetitive after a while, but considering its level-based structure, you can easily play it in short bursts and have quite a bit of fun with it. It’s a very competent rhythm game with cutesy visuals, a decent gameplay loop, an adequate difficulty curve, and a sizeable amount of content.
As you can clearly see, I loathed playing Albacete Warrior. It’s not just because it was painfully unfunny. It was the fact it had NOTHING else to offer besides some of the dumbest jokes ever put into a video game, since the game completely failed elsewhere as well. Bland visuals, terrible cutscenes, bland music, awful sound effects, terrible level design, and controls that don’t work… all while forcing you to play as a character that made Duke Nukem feel and sound as classy as Leslie Freaking Nielsen.
I can’t powerwash my home. My apartment is tiny, has grass floors, and is on the 6th floor: nothing about it says “high powered water will make this better.” But with Powerwash Simulator, I can pretend. I can clean up things that have been neglected and ignored, and I can make them pretty again. I can relax and know that I’m doing a good job of bringing zest back, and I don’t even care for whom I’m doing it. It’s the ultimate simulation, one where I’m happy with what I’ve done and have zero cares as to why I did it. Because I could.
We know we are probably not going to get a new Wario Land anytime soon. As a result, Pizza Tower feels like a massive breath of fresh air. It took everything that worked in those games (excluding the portability, unless you’re a lucky Steam Deck owner), added in a truckload of funny, 90s-as-hell imagery, and dropped it into Steam like the homage we’ve been waiting for.
This was a bold attempt by Microsoft. I applaud them trying to adapt the most mouse-friendly game in existence to a console, with a controller. It’s still fun, and it’s certainly very playable, but it’s off-putting. It’s far from being the ideal way to experience this classic, and to be fair, the PC version isn’t even THAT demanding, even on laptops. I really don’t know who this particular port of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is for.
It’s a shame that, for whatever reason, screenshots have been disabled on the Nintendo Switch, because I would love to show firsthand that there is little difference between the Xbox and handheld versions. Still, it overall didn’t affect my play, and the end result is still the same: a battlefield soaked in blood, a boy fulfills his debt, and the player is left torn between relief and unease. Was this truly the only path to redemption? Or was the loss worth the price of revenge?
Fashion Police Squad does get repetitive and annoying after a while, but I cannot deny how creative this title is. The idea of a fashion-based, death-free DOOM clone sounded ridiculous on paper, but the developers sure delivered a brand new take on retro-styled shooters with an additional layer of puzzle-solving, dad-worthy puns, and a ton of color and personality.
I went in with high expectations from Chained Echoes, but remarkably, it managed to exceed every one of them. The characters are enjoyable (although Robb can be a bit insufferable at times), and most of them are fleshed out pretty well by the end. The storyline isn’t overly convoluted either, and has just enough depth and twists to keep it interesting. The combat in particular surprised me with how engaging it was, all thanks to its inventive Overdrive system.
As a huge fan of Shin Megami Tensei in general, Persona 3 Portable cannot be ignored, and should not be. It spawned the series as we know it, and the updated version, though not as magnificent as it could be, is still leagues better than the original Playstation 2 version, and it has the additional character and bonus content that helps this title dominate a large block of your time.