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 have them guest in my own game (which is getting…
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…
When it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And in the case of…
Of all the examples of comfort food gaming that are out there,…
“If a little is good, more must be better.” That’s how the saying goes, right? That certainly seems to be the approach that the developers have taken with Hatsune Miku Logic Paint S+, in that they’ve taken the previous quality take on the Picross formula (itself an already big game),…
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Golden Tee Arcade Classics is a fascinating package. As far as I can tell, it is the first time that Golden Tee has been released on console. I’m sure someone’s going to correct me on that, but I’m a fair golf fan, extending right back to the Microsoft Windows Golf…
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Super Mario Party Jamboree was an impressive return to form for the Nintendo digital board game/minigame multiplayer mania series. After years of pointless experiments and some uninspired maps and minigame collections, the creative energy that went into Jamboree, combined with some fun side-distractions, help get it back to the top…
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In The Wandering Village, you build a small community for survivors of an apocalypse to live on. The world has been ravaged and left effectively uninhabitable, but there is a giant dinosaur-like beast that has enough room and resources on its back to sustain some people. Your goal is to…
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The third in the now-trilogy that started with AI: The Somnium Files is the first that Kotaro Uchikoshi took a back seat to. He still had a supervisory role, but it’s one of Uchikoshi’s mentees, Kazuya Yamada, who gets the creative credit for this one. The good news is that…
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Before I played Bustafellows, if you had told me that you could take the narrative qualities of noir fiction and pair it with the otome genre, I wouldn’t have believed you. As a genre, otome isn’t quite the “doe-eyed romance and frivolity for girls” genre that those who haven’t played…
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One of the quieter events that piggybacked off the Nintendo Switch 2 launch was the release of the first in Hamster’s Arcade Archives 2 series. Ridge Racer launched with the console, and now there’s already a second title, with the arcade dogfighting sim, Air Combat 22 (don’t be surprised that…
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Tamagotchi are one of those iconic things that you just hope hands around forever. The little devices that you pin to your backpack or carry around in your pocket for micro-distractions throughout the day are wholesome and charming. You’d be lucky if you spent more than five minutes with your…
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Hideo Kojima is the video game industry’s big auteur. The Stanley Kubrick of games. The guy who somehow gets a big budget to make his strange experiments, even when they defy the industry best practice, and as we all know, the games industry is very best practice orientated. It’s all…
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How do you “guarantee” 60 million clicks on a mouse? I get that’s an impressive number, but a guarantee is a legal term, and so does that mean that if you can somehow prove that you’ve only got 59,999,999 clicks on your mouse before it craps out, you’re entitled to…
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