August2022
Review Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 - An RPG Classic That Time Hasn't Been Too Kind To
Old, but gold?
Back in the early 2000’s, the Dark Alliance subseries of the Baldur’s Gate franchise was created as a means of bringing the Baldur’s Gate experience to console players. Either due to hardware limitations or a simple lack of audience interest at the time, the computer RPG design of traditional Baldur’s Gate wouldn’t work for...
June2021
Review Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance - A Punishing But Pleasurable Vintage Dungeon Crawler
Baldur? Well, it has been twenty years...
It's been twenty long, long years since this Gamecube classic thrilled us all with its quasi top-down hack-and-slash dungeon crawling action. And time has not been kind... to us. This game is really hard! Have we been spoiled by much friendlier, less aggressive takes on the genre that have proliferated in...
September2013
Review J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings - Volume I (Super Nintendo)
Middle Earth is doomed
Before Peter Jackson came along and turned The Lord of the Rings into one of the most popular cinematic experiences of all time, the video game licence to J.R.R. Tolkien's literary epic was held by the now-defunct Interplay. The company pumped out related games for the Commodore Amiga computer and PC CD-ROM — the latter of...
January2012
Review Stonekeep: Bones of the Ancestors (WiiWare)
Rock-solid or balderdash?
Stonekeep: Bones of the Ancestors, a remake of Interplay's mid-90's first-person dungeon crawler, sounds pretty good on paper. The Wii is a bit short on quality RPGs — especially on WiiWare — and Stonekeep was a decent-looking, competent RPG back in its day. But pre-rendered 2D environments and FMV characters are no...
May2011
Maniacal. Deadly. Killer.
If we had to sum up Interplay's MDK2 in one word, we would choose "old-school." With a silly sense of humour, unforgiving difficulty and enough bullets to take down a small country — or in this case, alien invasion — MDK2 is a "game for gamers" through and through. And while it shows its age a...
August2010
Review Another World (Super Nintendo)
Simply out of this world
Poor old Lester Knight Chaykin (Les to his mates), an unwitting physicist, innocently went to put in some overtime in the lab during a thunderstorm one night. Who’d have thought that playing with a particle accelerator could magically teleport him to a strange alien planet when his lab gets struck by lightning? In the...
June2010
Review Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble (DSiWare)
An archaeopter-mixed bag
To play Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble is to take your emotions for a ride. When you first see its great graphics and hear the fantastic sound design accompanied by a lighthearted sense of humour; when you play the first level and realise that you've learnt its somewhat complicated framework in an easy and enjoyable fashion;...
February2010
Review Prehistorik Man (DSiWare)
A real dinosaur
Originally released for DOS as Prehistorik 2, Prehistorik Man has seen ports to the Game Boy, SNES, and GBA already, and it seems the GBA version has been ported to DSiWare this time around. In each version, the story is the same — hungry dinosaurs have snuck into a prehistoric village in the dead of night and eaten all the...
December2009
Review Rock n' Roll Racing (Super Nintendo)
Are you ready to rock?
While Rock & Roll Racing began life as a direct sequel to their original RPM Racing release on the Super Nintendo console, the guys at Silicon & Synapse decided to amp things up a bit for their new racing title. They added in a classic hard rock soundtrack, some unique race announcing from Larry "Supermouth" Huffman,...
Review Earthworm Jim 2 (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
Groovy!
After creating the excellent Earthworm Jim videogame and subsequently making an awesome cartoon based on it, it was quite logical that Interplay would not give up on the franchise just yet. Not too long after the cartoon, they released Earthworm Jim 2, which was intended to be even better than the original game. As Queen Slug-for-a-Butt was...
February2009
ClayFighter is a 2D fighting game in which the characters, as the name suggests, are made completely out of clay.
When Clayfighter was first released on the 16-bit consoles in 1993, claymation had never before been used in video gaming. While television shows and motion pictures had experimented with the technology to varying degrees of success, it...
November2008
Review Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
While investigating Professor Stinkbaum's lab, Boogerman stumbles upon a strange machine that opens a portal to another dimension.
Almost everybody knows Earthworm Jim - But Boogerman, which was created inbetween the first two Jim games, is much less familiar. This is a bit unjust, as it's every bit as quirky and fun as the aforementioned series...
October2008
Review Earthworm Jim (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
A crow is chasing a worm named Jim, while in outer space, Psy-Crow is chasing a renegade ship.
If you were at all interested in videogames or cartoons in the early 90's you were no doubt a fan of Earthworm Jim. Originally appearing in this game, the unusual hero went on to star in his own cartoon and a number of sequels to the videogame. Earthworm...
