I know reading an article about an old digital recreation of a traditional tabletop card game might not sound like the most exciting way to spend a few minutes of your precious free time but this is a good one (honest), and a longstanding personal favourite of mine. Card games are card games - nobody … Continue reading Finding fun in strange places
Taito's Densha de GO! series has often turned up in all sorts of places you wouldn't really think a train sim with a fondness for difficulty and rule-based realism would over the past twenty five years - arcades for starters. Nobody could seriously say the N64 was crying out for tightly scheduled locomotive action either. Or the Neo Geo … Continue reading Taito’s tiny trains
Hataraku Chocobo does something so incredible when you turn it on I'm almost reluctant to talk about it, because when typed out it sounds as if I've resorted to pathetic "My uncle at Nintendo said..." level lies. You see, Squaresoft's game was exclusively designed for and released on Bandai's WonderSwan - the original monochrome WonderSwan, the … Continue reading Feathered friends in new frontiers
The dad of Bokura no Kazoku's made-up family is sitting cross-legged in a very ordinary living room, making animal-shaped shadows in the light of the TV. He's doing this for his baby's entertainment, woofing with enthusiasm as he moves his hands in a vaguely dog-like manner. His tiny son notices this display, crawls over to the spot … Continue reading It’s all about family
The House of the Dead 2 is fondly remembered for many reasons: Its incredible gameplay, its abundance of enjoyably gruesome enemies, its complex route system bursting with secrets... and its cheesy dialogue, spoken cheesily by cheesy characters. Today I am going to defend that giant block of gaming Cheddar, and I'm not going to fall back … Continue reading Suffer, like G did!
Today we're taking a look at Plum's Vic Viper model kit (Gradius V version), all plastic parts and "Make sure you clip this off" and "Make sure you definitely don't clip this off" and "Please glue on this tiny thing that's barely an atom wide the right way first time" - if you've ever built a Gundam kit, … Continue reading A DIY Vic Viper
In 1945 a mysterious black moon appeared in the sky and waves of mythical beasts - goblins, gorgons, naga, and worse - began to roam the land, their only goal to kill, without malice or anger, every human they could before they expired. It's now 1999. Humans have been erased from entire continents and the situation is … Continue reading Students, statistics, and bloodthirsty beasts
I vaguely remember the Barcode Battler being sold in the UK in the early Nineties backed by a sort of "Warriors everywhere!" kind of sales pitch; the idea being that a pack of biscuits, or favourite book, or a loaf of bread, was "hiding" a powerful hero or fearsome beast. History shows the device had the lifespan … Continue reading Soup can warriors
Should you happen to be someone eager to dive in to Youfu Makai's card battling action, leaving the manual and the rest of the box's content aside for later, you'll definitely come away from your brief time with the game confused and disappointed. The game will crash - garbled screen, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP music, and all - at the slightest … Continue reading Always check the packaging
Ah, Mahjong Cop Ryu. Mahjong Cop. Mahjong. Cop. The title alone makes it obvious this game is going to be a lot fun. Who wouldn't want to play a daft Mega Drive mahjong game from 1989 created by none other than Sega themselves? And just to make sure you know you're in for an absurd … Continue reading You must be this cool to play
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 