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- Robokku
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Review Super Animal Royale - Fortnite X Animal Crossing + Skunk Gas = What's Not To Like?
Mortal wombat
Super Animal Royale is an animal-based, free-to-play, 2D, top-down, 64-player, crossplay battle royale with premium cosmetics. That’s a lot of concepts piled up on top of each other – and it shows how our gaming vocabulary has expanded over the last decade or so. There are notions here that you would have had to explain in detail...
Mini Review Townscaper - A Peaceful, Pretty, City-Building Plaything
If you build it, they will come
They say only the boring are ever bored. Back in the day you’d have been lucky to have a wooden stick to play with – unless it was sunny, in which case you could have the shadow as well. Kids these days with their mobile phones… where’s the imagination? It’s here! In Townscaper, a game which publisher Raw...
Mini Review Hoa - A Gentle Platformer With Stunning Studio Ghibli-Esque Art
Lovely Ghibli
Those of us who played Super Mario Bros. as kids had our minds blown the first time someone pointed out that World 1-1 taught you how to play the game. The Goomba comes along and makes you jump; you’re likely to bump your head and discover a mushroom; the pipe helps you jump onto the blocks and so on. Who’d have thought there was...
Mini Review ISLANDERS Console Edition - Serene, Superb, And More 'Tetris' Than 'SimCity'
There can be only one
What’s the meaning of a game? Is it the essentially human nature of interaction? The intricacies of the universe’s fundamental laws? What does it mean to be human? What is the universe? What’s the meaning of life? These are the questions Islanders Console Edition came to us to answer. Woah. In Islanders, you build mellow...
Mini Review Last Stop - Touching Tales Of London Life In Annapurna's Latest
The Tube is out there
As a storyteller, gaming has several personalities. Sometimes we go story-game-story-game with cutscene 'movies', or we pick through branching prose with interspersed decisions, or we read out comic book narratives interrupted by puzzle breaks. Sometimes the action is the story, like Breath of the Wild’s millions of private...
Mini Review Densha de Go! Hashiro Yamanote Line - Yes, You Just Drive A Train
Come on, baby, do the locomotion
The eShop trailer for Densha de Go!! Hashirou Yamanote Sen (“Go by train! Drive the Yamanote line”) is just a guy singing “Densha de Go!” repeatedly while trains drive. For series fans, nothing else need be said. But let’s fill in the blanks. Densha de Go! is a Japanese train driving series that started in...
Review A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism - Switch Tracks With This Complex Business Sim
You'll be chuffed to bits
Choo! Choooo! All aboard! Land ahoy! Now, we’re not train experts but we know a good game when we see one – and A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism signals (pun intended) the first-class return (intended again) of a unique management sim on the Switch (again) platform (yep). Coupling (that’s five) railway construction with...
Review Blizzard Arcade Collection - Dig Into The Vaults Of The Creator Of Warcraft And Overwatch
Is it dominating the race or about to blow?
Note: Lost Vikings 2 and RPM Racing have both been added to this collection via an update, along with several other features, including a Design Documents gallery, a Streamer Mode for Rock N Roll Racing and various other quality of life improvements. Blizzard Entertainment turns 30 this year and, to mark...
Mini Review Mighty Fight Federation - Power Stone-Style Brawling Action That's Best With Friends
Romancing the Power Stone?
Mighty Fight Federation may look like a party game, but Canadian developer Komi says its aim is to bring “a focus on fighting game fundamentals” to the 3D arena fighting genre. The genre we’re talking about here is not a player-character-tracking arena fight like ARMS or Virtual On, but rather a Power Stone-style...
Review Thomas Was Alone - An Ageing Indie Hit That Still Has Something To Say
Be there or be one of several different rectangles
More than 10 years after its inception as a Flash game, Thomas Was Alone is now so much more than the puzzley, story-driven platformer it appears to be. It is an artefact of an interesting time in the progress of indie games; a time when lo-fi, hi-concept darlings made Twitter swoon week-to-week...
Feature The Dark Secrets Of Animal Crossing: New Horizons' Stalk Market
What kind of turnip trader are you?
If you’re anything like millions of other global-pandemic-lockdown Switch gamers, you’re on a vicarious head-in-sand holiday in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Strolling the beach, shopping windows, listening to chirping insects and lapping waves… you’ve seen this “Stalk Market” thing – interesting,...
Feature 6 Things My Three-Year-Old Taught Me About Video Games, Via Animal Crossing
Moo.
When a cutie-bunny-hedgehog-kitty game comes out alongside Doom Eternal and Doom 64, it’s a test of self-confidence for a grown man to take it to the shop counter. Failing that test despicably, I invented the weak and unnecessary excuse that I could play Animal Crossing: New Horizons with my little boy. Working at home during the UK's...
Mini Review Songbird Symphony - Platforming And Music Take Flight Together
Cheep thrills
We recently asked if there were any Switch games we'd missed which you thought were worthy of a review. Songbird Symphony was one of the most-requested games. Songbird Symphony is an indie rhythm-action platformer by three-person team Joysteak Studios. You play as Birb, an adopted chick in search of its birth paren
Feature I Think My Game Boy Predicts The Future
“What evil might this forbidden technology unleash?”
The Game Boy turned 30 last month – to the shock of those of us realising we are therefore well over 30. Where did the past go? I think it went into a nook at the end of my bookshelf – at least that’s where I found my old DMG-01, the original Game Boy. Like many reading this, I’m sure,...
Review Root Letter: Last Answer - A Clumsy, Laughable Stab At A Visual Novel
The Last Answer to a question no one asked
Do you have a niggling doubt about something you experienced as a child? Something unresolved or unexplained? Perhaps we all have a faint memory that haunts us; a gentle denial that we think we’ll never have to face up to. Have you a tingle in your spine? A skeleton in your closet, a secret sin you’ve...
Review Umihara Kawase Fresh! - An Appealing Platformer That Makes Itself Hard To Love
Something fishy
There’s something strange about Umihara Kawase Fresh! It’s not the fish with human legs; it’s not the tadpole that lays frogs. It’s not even the pork pizza you serve to a pig. What’s strange is that it can’t seem to decide how difficult it is. Assuming you are not familiar with the Umihara Kawase series, the opening of...
Review The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors - A Masterclass In SNES Revival
Ninja Warriors 3.0
The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors is not so much the third game in a series as the third attempt at the same game. The first go was in 1987 when Taito looked at its revolutionary Darius arcade cabinet – which used three monitors and two mirrors to fake a triple-wide screen – and decided it needed some ninjas. It...
Review Caladrius Blaze - A Mechanically Competent Shmup With Gratuitous Presentation
Behold the power of the "Shame Break"
Caladrius Blaze is new to the Switch, but didn’t just pop up overnight. The top-down shooter launched as plain old Caladrius on Xbox 360 in Japan in 2013, before progressing through arcade, PS3, PS4 and Windows on the way to Switch. Looking further back, it’s descended from 1990s Japanese arcade favourite...
Review World End Syndrome - A High School Summer Holiday Murder Mystery Love-In
The world ends with you
Ah, young love! Fixing eyes in freshman class… Inventing excuses to meet your crush… Daring to hope they like you back… Collecting and cataloguing candid photos of every girl you know… World End Syndrome successfully bottles the bristling potential of the summers of youth: before school’s back, perhaps you’ll...
Review VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action - One Large Cutscene With A Gameplay Chaser
Blade Runner, Akira and Cocktail collide in this visual novel
VA-11 HALL-A from Sukeban Games features a future UseNet group on which games by Sukeban are criticised for lacking any gameplay. So you can’t say they didn’t realise, but can that self-awareness excuse a near-absence of interactivity? Even by visual novel standards, this is light...
Review Wonder Boy Returns Remix - A Remake That Really Does Go Back To The Beginning
Will wonders never cease?
The history of Wonder Boy could hardly be more convoluted. It began as a platformer in Japanese arcades in 1986, moved to consoles, became an RPG, co-existed with identical but differently-named games from alternative publishers, and spawned sequels in a mystifying numbering sequence. All of which meant that when it was...
Feature Five Lessons From The Tokyo Game Show 2018
Take note
2018’s Tokyo Game Show wrapped up last weekend, and we were lucky enough to be in attendance. While PAX, E3, Gamescom and EGX have their own flavour, none of them quite match TGS for sheer uniqueness; perhaps that's a cultural thing - the Japanese do things very differently to the west - or maybe it's because the TGS lacks any kind of...
Feature Diving Down The Rabbit Hole With Japan's Arcade-Based Trading Card Games
It's in the cards
Tourists dropping in on Japan’s arcades are often surprised. Western arcades have stuck to a familiar trajectory, running last-decade machines form last-century franchises: OutRun 2, After Burner Climax, Time Crisis 4…. The games we’re used to are easygoing, fun and friendly, with a warm welcome and a wave goodbye. It’s not...
Feature Exploring Japan's Undying Love For Arcade 'Candy' Cabinets
Sweet stuff
Arcades may have all but died out in the west, but in Japan they remain big business. I write a website about arcades in Tokyo, and sometimes forget it’s not normal to live in an arcade daydream. I‘m prone to using obscure arcade terminology and I neglect readers who don’t click joysticks in the noise so often. I’m frequently...
