Clearing my games backlog by playing a random title for one hour before reviewing it. Full challenge rules Current backlog: 19 games
Games sorted: 262 (Fin: 178 / Bin: 84) Tumblr - Bluesky - Steam - Tip Jar (Ko-Fi) Wanna join in? Let me know!
Love Nikki was (is? Hang on, lemme check... wow, it is still active, that's surprising) a charming little mobile dress-up gacha game where our girl Nikki finds herself whisked away to a magical land where conflict is resolved in dress-up contests. Its story is utterly bonkers, with dangerous characters being introduced as fashion assassins, and then someone gets murdered (like, not fashion-murdered, actual-murdered. with a sword) and the only way to stop the bad guy is to dress more fashionably than him- look, you had to be there.
As you might expect the outfits were fricken gorgeous and there was a huge variety of ways to dress Nikki up, from standard fare to fantastical outfits wrought with magic and laserbeams. Being a gacha there were random drops of various items from stages, a random lottery to draw from using in-game currency, and of course complete outfit packs costing real-world money that were time-limited and rotated out before you could save up for them. I bought a few of these because they were stunning, and that was also the downfall of the game as I realised the beautiful dress I'd just spent $30 on was mechanically inferior to the random incidental crap you picked up as you went which individually scored higher in a given category than the equivalent piece in that complete set.
Such is the curse of gacha. If memory serves there were also a couple of PVP modes where constructing a real outfit was necessary, but of course no one was going to vote for the pre-made buyable fits and so they became relegated to the museum. Constructing outfits was fun but the gacha format meant you had to spend your energy rapidly so as not to waste it, thus earning pulls of the slot machine more efficiently, and it sadly became a chore, though I still have fond memories of it.
Nikki's now taking her first bold steps into the open world, rendered lovingly in all three dimensions. Goodness gracious isn't she pretty? Got me acting like an utter fool over here. Anyway,
I really didn't expect they would be able to maintain such high quality output having to create all the resplendent clothes in 3D and give them animations and physics to boot, but they've pulled it off- the game is, true to form, fricken gorgeous, and what I've seen of the outfits so far has been exceptional.
During the playable-cutscene-slash-tutorial of this very gentle dress-up game, I successfully managed to get myself killed, which I am very proud of. Once that was complete it was into the world proper and after some exploration and mild platforming I reached the point in the game where it said "ok! now here is LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE ALL AT ONCE", and a huge menu of countless options and icons and buttons was thrust before me, absolutely fit to burst with '!'s urging me to look at the new stuff hidden beneath them. It was thoroughly overwhelming and I decided I would save that for later, and closed the game down for the time being. I haven't opened it back up yet.
Fin or Bin:
Man, I don't know. Better not to fall into the gacha trap in the first place, right? But I know there's a quality game in there under all the monetisation nonsense. A game like this can't really work without the gacha but it doesn't really work with the gacha either, and I'm a little stuck.
But Nikki is pretty so it's a Fin, 10/10, game of the year,
Good news! The operation to restore our boy Dante's personality after he lost 90% of it in a tragic sequelisation incident was a complete success, and he even gained a little extra. DMC3's Dante is the cocksure bell-end we all love and cherish, and he absolutely carries this game.
"A little extra" is a pretty good description of pretty much every aspect of DMC3's presentation, hearkening back to the first game's love of bombast. Right from the opening cutscene where he juggles a pizza while battling various gribblies who disagree with his stance on pineapple as a topping, DMC3 pushes the boundaries of disbelief so far it comes right back around to being awesome and I spend every cutscene laughing myself silly at just how little interest it has in being serious. Smashing up a pool table and shooting the cueball while it is still airborne such that it smacks into the other balls and each one strikes a different enemy? Awesome. Vergil deflecting a barrage of bullets with his sword and scooping them up with a swing of his blade fast enough to fire them back? Awesome. Grappling a motorbike out of the air with nunchucks and using it as a melee weapon while also riding it? Awesome.
Swinging the camera around trying to figure out where you're headed only for it to snap to a different position that perfectly hides both the room's exit and all of the enemies contained within so you get smacked by an offscreen attack? Awes- no, wait, that sucks. Unfortunately nothing's really changed since DMC1's janky camera, and three titles in it's far less charming. You can at least move it around a little now in certain environments, but it's still going to flip around on you if you stray a pixel too far and Dante's going to run straight into a wall, the big silly that he is.
Fin or Bin:
My poor arthritic thumbs can't keep up with the mashing required to shoot the guns rapid-fire- thankfully my joypad has an autofire function. Is that cheating? Yeah, maybe... I honestly don't really care. I'm not here for the challenging gameplay, I'm here to watch Dante tell his shadowy doppelganger that actually he's awesome enough already and doesn't need to do any self-reflection. Easy Mode unlocked itself pretty quickly which- hey!- but honestly it's been the way to go for me. I'm having a lot of low-stress fun with the new old Dante and I'm glad the original trilogy Finished on such a high note.
I was worried, when porting over popular recurring BBLC character Golf Balls into the world of DXM, that it might be too silly. A few hours in, I'm now worried it's not silly enough.
I really do not know how I feel about this one and I'm hopeful an answer will reveal itself to me as I write this entry. Technically my first hour (and then my second hour) was spent in the decently robust character creator making a number of beasts and creatures before settling on Mr Balls, but it's hard to write a decent BBLC entry based only on that so I let myself play some more. Now I've five hours in the actual game under my belt and I'm still not really any the wiser.
Missions are over so quickly I'm not sure if the game expects me to be far worse at it, or (more likely) it just doesn't really matter how good you are. I hop in my giant robot suit, hold down the Shoot Things With Your Guns buttons, and then a minute or two later I'm told the mission is complete. Meanwhile cutscenes and in-mission dialogue keep happening and not a word of it sinks in because it's a load of old tosh. There are seven thousand characters who each get exactly one personality trait, and they spout meaningless anime non-sequiturs at each other while Golf Balls stands in the background looking softly baffled (me too buddy). I'm putting my bet down now that the man who communicates only through overwrought flowery metaphor and whose robot is entirely made of swords is the ultimate villain of the piece.
So, it's naff, but is it fun? Well... I don't know! I keep coming back to it so something about it compels me but then I complete another mission without really meaning to and I wonder if the game even really needs me here. Ostensibly there are upgrades and stats to worry about but I'm still using my beginner rifle and it's doing fine? I feel nothing for the story and barely seem to be involved in the gameplay at all, but I'm still playing it! What's going on?
Fin or Bin?
A technicality saves me here, since I've played more than one hour and it is therefore a Fin by default. If I had to place it manually I really have no clue which way I'd swing. Maybe after another 20 hours I'll Finish the campaign and can decide at that point if I want to finish it or not.
Despite an atrociously generic title, the first Defender's Quest game was bloody fantastic. The story was interesting and the music was great, but the gameplay was second-to-none. It is ostensibly one of those interminable tower defence games we all got sick of after playing seven thousand of them on Newgrounds instead of doing our college work (just me?), but something about the recipe was Just Right. Marrying RPG progression and multiple difficulties for each mission, there was always something else to do whenever you got roadblocked by a particularly hard stage which would power your army up in some way to help you overcome it.
What made it special was the characters, who performed double-duty as your towers in game. Each one had unique skills to bring to the table that suited their character- barbarian Slak had a big meaty sword and could take a lot of hits, while archer Ketta could cover multiple enemy routes but couldn't do anything close up. Each class of character could be recruited up to six times, though only the first one would show up in the story, and to highlight their special status the game also featured 'Hero Mode' which forbade recruiting anyone who didn't have cutscene privileges. With only one of each 'tower' available, Hero Mode was in my opinion THE way to play DQ1, and set it apart from anything Newgrounds had to offer.
The devs clearly agreed with me, as DQ2 goes all-in on Hero Mode, which is now the only available means by which to play; there's only one Ketter Star. The stages become more like individual puzzles this way, as you can't simply spam your way out of a bind- if you didn't place your pieces optimally, it's back to the map screen with you.
I realise I am guilty of this, but by far DQ2's biggest failing is that it is presented as a sequel; I have been comparing it to its predecessor since line one of this review, which is a great disservice to the game. Being a sequel, it is inevitably going to invite the question: "is it better than the first game?". And... no, it isn't.
Fin or Bin:
There's a pervasive expectation to constantly be making something bigger and better and stronger and shinier and more fragrant than what came before, and I really think that's a shame. DQ2 is excellent, but the only reception it's getting in reviews is negative because it isn't as excellent as the first game. If it had been released without any ties to what came before I'm certain it would only be getting good press. It had a challenging development cycle and in some ways it's a miracle it came out at all, so for it to be the second-best tower defence game I've ever played is certainly worthy of praise. Story-wise it's entirely separate from DQ1, so there's no danger of spoilers if you want to play them in reverse order; whichever way you go about it, I strongly suggest anyone with a lapsed interest in TD games to cast a weary eye over their way and see if your passion might yet be relit.
The sleepy island town of Moonbury needed a chemist to come cure the long-term illness of the mayor's daughter after the local witch-doctor was unable to treat it, and ever eager to please those in positions of power I immediately answered the call. I was given a home in the most ramshackle creaky old house they had available, right next to the world's rattiest clinic whose beds are permanently soiled and torn, and I knew this was where I was meant to be; I was really going to make a difference to this place, far beyond only saving the life of my future wife (mayorhood is dynastic, right?).
Before I could get to work or even visit the patient, I was instructed to meet with the town's chief of police. Unfortunately I'm an early riser and he wasn't awake yet when I was ready, but ever the go-getter I simply broke into his house and watched him sleep for two hours until he woke up. Having ingratiated myself, it was time to diagnose Rue's sickness, a process involving playing Dance Dance Revolution on her with some oddly violent-sounding hit sounds; I can only imagine diagnosis involved smacking her about with the massive sledgehammer I carry everywhere.
Fully tenderised, Rue was transferred from her comfortable bed at the witch-doctor's house into the flea-ridden urine-soaked beds my clinic offered so she could recover, while I ran home to create a serum from poisonous sludge and a chunk of iron ore to treat the newly-identified illness. The serum was to be applied directly to her neck and I did so with gusto, very firmly, really digging my thumbs in and not letting go until her complaints stopped, while the mayor watched and applauded. Treatment successful, I sat motionless watching her sleep for six hours whereupon I passed out.
All in all a promising start to my tenure here in Moonbury, though for some reason a lot of the residents seem to find my presence unnerving.
Fin or Bin:
It's funny, cozy games of this breed are usually overwhelming at the beginning with entirely too many things that need doing in a day and not enough hours to do them in, but Potion Permit has almost the opposite problem- I can only treat people when they're sick and I'm otherwise left to just mill about and fight bears. Perhaps I can brew up a special 'potion' I can drop in the well and encourage some extra business.
Celeste is a game about climbing a mountain, and that's pretty much it.
For no particular reason I've been a lot of self-reflection lately. I have always loved the output of the indie dev, warts and all. I grew up with the bedroom coders of the Amiga and became who I am now through the indie scene of the late 2000s, and I always dreamed of making a game like that. Something that plays well but more importantly has an emotional impact; something personal that could only have come from the solo developer who helmed the project. Games like Cave Story, Iji, AnUntitledStory (same developer as Celeste!), and Touhou, and also later games that retained that spirit like Undertale, Stardew Valley, and- yes- Celeste.
We all have that little guy in our heads who tells us "you can't do it", "it's pointless to do it", "you'll just waste your time if you try", and while some can ignore or silence that voice for others it is debilitating. The end result is, naturally, that voice is proven right, because the only way it gets done is doing it. It is both incredibly obvious and also the hardest lesson in the world to learn.
I find myself in the final stretch of this Backlog Challenge, and also the final stretch of the novel I have been writing for five years now, and also in the final stretch of Celeste. All three are things that only happened because I started doing them, and all have been successful in some measure. Now I find myself wondering what happens next after I conquer those particular summits, and I think the answer is clear. When that little voice starts to say "you can't", maybe there's something to be gained from taking it by the hand and saying, "but what if we can?"
Fin or Bin:
But none of that really has anything at all to do with Celeste, which is just a game about climbing a mountain.
Well now, this is nostalgic. To preclude any doubt, I'll open with the fact this is very good and also very free, and this review is a Fin. I love to see this sort of thing and want to encourage its existence, even when it works out less successfully than WWW did.
It's altogether a very authentic project and feels distinctly like old touhou; if you find yourself missing the nebulous 'something' that newer games in the series lack, WWW will have you nodding and pointing and saying 'yeah, that's what it is!' without any better ability to articulate what, exactly, 'it' is.
Where many touhou fangames can feel like an STG that happens to be touhou themed, WWW feels like a touhou game. That's not really any clearer than the paragraph above and I apologise for that, but it's one of those things that you'll only get if you get it. Energetic danmaku and every spell feels unique, each one a new micropuzzle to be solved (or bombed through, of course).
It's not a perfect product and the dialogue especially misses the mark, veering from passable into awful at times. It reminds me of early-2000s webcomic style dialogue- "I am going to murder you", "everyone just shut up", and other weird shifts in character and tone that adequately set up a violent punchline for a final panel that will be hastily retconned on the next page, but feel discordant here. It's memetic more than it is genuine and would have passed with less scrutiny in a more chaotic and wacky game, but the authenticity apparent in other aspects makes it more notable.
Fin or Bin:
Don't let that put you off, and don't let the immediate difficulty put you off either; the whole game is set to a Stage 6 level of difficulty which means things start out intense, but they stay at that level for the duration and the typical difficulty curve is not present here. The music is great, and sounds like touhou infused with Mega Drive era FM synth, which is amusing given ZUN's history. If STGs are your thing, this is a good STG, and if touhou is your thing, you'll get even more out of it.
Seven million years ago in 2019, I played backlog game Project CARS. It wasn't my cup of tea, but I did have a lot of fun playing it in ways that the game perhaps wasn't intended to deal with, and afterwards I felt it would have made for a very entertaining stream. For reasons I don't remember I found myself with a lot of spare time in the following year and decided to pursue that notion, transforming BB's Backlog Challenge into a weekly twitch stream.
In doing so I added many games to my backlog that otherwise would never have made their way there; games I felt would make for an entertaining hour for someone watching my shenanigans but were not expected to be Fins. I'd missed the boat on Project CARS, but F1 2019 would doubtless provide a similar spectacle.
Now, many years later, I'm on the home stretch of BBLC (not a deliberate pun but a fun one) with only 14 games remaining, and my streaming career has failed; how strange it is to pull this game and once again miss the boat on sharing my mischief in a straight-laced and serious business racing simulator.
I'm not the kind of driver who likes to slow down- I might be convinced to coast off the accelerator for a moment when strictly necessary but that brake button is never getting pressed. So when I tell you F1 2019 is a Bin, it's not a condemnation of the game itself, rather a compatibility issue; we simply want different things.
There was one key moment during my hour where I knew the game did not anticipate, or at least did not accommodate for, my unique approach to the racing sim genre. When I spun my car around and drove full-tilt into oncoming traffic, the action replay camera had absolutely no idea what to do and froze in place as I disappeared off screen, the only evidence of my actions the sudden scattering of car parts flying into view like confetti.
Fin or Bin:
I got disqualified for driving along the course the wrong way, but genius that I am I realised that per the airbud clause, technically it's not against the rules to flip the car around 180 degrees and go around the course in reverse gear. Indeed, my pitcrew were unable to say a word against me, and in triumph I spammed them incessantly with orders to prepare the pit for my imminent entrance only to drive right past them and wind up disqualified for cutting corners. McLaren were so impressed with my skills they immediately offered me a contract, but performing a PIT manoeuvre on my teammate at the start of the race is apparently 'poor sportsmanship' and my career ended before it had chance to begin. Feels appropriate.
Previous Zeboyd Games releases 'Cthulhu Saves The World' and related-in-spirit 'Breath Of Death VII' left a very positive impression on me way back in the dark ages before this blog existed. They are absolutely rife with 'oh, that's actually a really good idea' touches that elevate a very simple top-down turn-based RPG formula into something just a little bit more involved. They remain possibly the only RPGs I have ever played where I actually bothered to use status effects, which should tell you a lot if you're familiar with the genre. Without hyperbole, I strongly encourage anyone with dreams of one day making an RPG of their very own to play through both titles and really consider the little things they do to improve the player's quality of life.
Fresh from saving the world, our boy Cthulhu naturally expects to find himself on the Nice List, and is rightfully aggrieved when the present he receives from Santa robs him of all of his power. Turns out the BMOC himself has been christnapped by various festive ne'er-do-wells and only Cthulhu can bring an end to their schemes.
The humour is a little dated, of the 'haha video games' variety, but you surely weren't expecting much more from a game titled 'Cthulhu Saves Christmas'. It's entirely serviceable, and fun if you let it be. Battles are more impressive, with each character able to equip four abilities and receiving an additional three each battle, chosen at random from those not equipped. You can only use an ability one time each battle before spending a turn to refresh your palette, so even in the random trash encounters you need to engage the brain a little.
Fin or Bin:
Reviews promise a 5-hour RPG that doesn't outstay its welcome, perfect for (the month following) the holidays. There's a lot of Good Ideas on display here that I wish had more prominence in the industry at large; many a dry RPG would benefit. Zeboyd actually have a serious-business RPG available titled Cosmic Star Heroine, and I'll definitely be giving it a once-over when I'm Finished with Cthulhu.
Phew, 2025 sure happened didn't it, but let's not talk about All Of That. 68 games played this year, one too few and one too many to make a very funny numbers-related joke. I got to see a friend realise his lifelong dream and made some serious headway into realising my own, with 75,211 words written towards my novel which HOPEFULLY will be finished in 2026. Around September I got a bee in my bonnet and decided to start looking into game development, another lifelong dream never realised. An idea for a game landed in my brain fully-formed while driving and do you know what, just sitting there thinking about such things never made them real, so I decided to try something different. Looking into Godot led me to CS50, a very rewarding and pretty taxing free online course offered by Harvard University, which I completed in november alongside its Python-focused stablemate, and now I'm following a Godot development course. Maybe, just maybe, I might have a game of my own on next year's Games Of, which I am tentatively titling 'Games Of 2026'. But that's next year! Video games!
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Darkwing Duck
It was over pretty quickly, but I had a good time with Duckling Duck. It's essentially a less-punishing version of Mega Man. I doubt I'll come back here, but a single run is a nice way to spend an afternoon.
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Race The Sun
There were quite a few games this year that were Bins, but I never wrote an entry for them for various reasons. Especially for indie and indie-adjacent games I don't like to spend a lot of time dunking on them, but also because it's not entertaining to read 500+ words of "I didn't enjoy it but that's not because it's bad" and I rarely had more to say than that. Suffice it to say- Race The Sun is a neat into-the-screen endless runner that feels more suited to mobile gaming than PC, which didn't push any of my buttons but may be worth a look if that sounds like your kind of thing.
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Super Time Force
If you can ignore the painfully dated humour (we all thought this kind of thing was funny once, don't try to deny your past), there's a cool run-n-gun platformer with a timebending twist- when you die, you can travel back in time a certain amount and save your past self's life, who will then fight alongside you. It got a little too brainbending for me since encounters are balanced around there being a hundred of you attacking and that's not my speed, but it's another 'not for me but check it out' entry.
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Super Puzzled Cat
I really considered for a long time whether I really wanted to name this my game of the year, conscious of how disingenuous it would seem given my history with the developer. How strange, to be dishonest in order to appear more honest. In truth, the game that kept me engaged the most this year, that provided surprises and joy, that bolstered my driving playlist, that saw me through the dark winter months, and that should be my game of the year, is Super Puzzled Cat. You may believe me or not, but it's the truth. SPC is wonderful from start to finish, and an inspiring story on a personal level. Didn't quite achieve my promise of getting my book finished in 2025, but I'm getting close.
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Perimeter
I didn’t play much more beyond my post, so I think I’ll let that stand.
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Football Manager 2020
It was a Bin, but this is probably my favourite of all the posts I’ve ever written for this blog, so I wanted to link it again.
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Timelie
Sorta like Super Time Force except a completely different genre of game- I guess I have a weak spot when it comes to time travel in games. I looked up story spoilers and I wasn’t jazzed about where it was headed so I bailed out.
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Endless Legend
My first game went super badly just down to bad luck with map generation so I started a new game and dominated with the dragon guys who get to see where everyone is in the world. Feels like I met two extremes and need to play again to see what a ‘normal’ game is like, but a 4X game is a large time commitment I’d rather spend elsewhere for now. I’ll be back here some day in the near future.
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Twisted Metal Black
There may have been a problem with my Very Genuine PS2 when I tried to play this, but I found it almost unplayably frenetic in a way that didn't feel intentional and nothing I did seemed to achieve anything in the game. The alternative explanation is I'm too old for this sort of thing any more... and that can't be right, can it?
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Links Awakening DX HD
The Nintendo lawninja quickly put the kibosh on this one but it’s still around if you know where to look. Very interesting to see the world of Koholint from a zoomed-out perspective and see how the map all fits together. It somehow makes it feel a lot smaller when you can see the prairie from the beach, and how close the lost woods are to the sea. I was wondering the whole time how they would handle the maze inside the Wind Fish’s Egg and I found their solution really cool- I won’t spoil it. If you know the original well this is a great way to experience it again.
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Ghostrunner
It was sooooooo close, to the point I didn't want to write an entry for this one just because I didn't know what to do with it, but ultimately I had to Bin it. It's so fast and fluid and cool and the aesthetic is extremely My Bag, and when it's going well it feels fantastic to play, BUT. Requiring absolutely perfect play tanks it it my opinion, blah blah skill issue whatever it's not fun to have to replay the same section a hundred times because one stray random bullet clipped you on the way out. Give me three hits or even better, a health bar that recharges with successful parries the same way Furi (see below) does it so mistakes aren't punished and can be made up for with skilled play. Absolutely gutted to walk away from this one.
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Neocab
I didn't feel like I had much control over the emotions matrix and that, in turn, led to moments where I didn't feel I had much control over the responses I could give (some of which would be locked if feeling a certain way). That's fine, though- this is a story game first and foremost and if the game needs to take control to make certain story beats happen that's a worthwhile price to pay, even if occasionally frustrating. I do also wish we had more time to spend with the various customers without requiring multiple plays- my guess is you're expected to get the bad ending on your first X attempts and make subsequent runs with different people, but I won my first game and didn't feel inclined to win more. It's a neat story though with some fun characters, and it comes recommended if you like this sort of thing.
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Mario Wondah
I finished the whole thing! Including those super-hard challenges in the special world that I'm certain are degrees of magnitude harder than anything Mario's done before. The Special World in SMW was tough but I beat that when I was six, I can't believe I would have had the patience to do the ultimate badge challenge as a kid. This game is an absolute cracker though and comes highly recommended especially to anyone who fell off during Mario's 'New' era.
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Furi
Seriously cool. It's in S tier this year for sure (should I start tiering these?). The health recovery system is honestly perfect- it won't save you if you're not good enough at the fight, but also you can make a generous amount of mistakes without losing the entire fight so long as you otherwise play well. The result is a game that is very, very hard, but never feels punishing, and gives ample room to learn and develop. Smashing stuff.
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Mass Effect Two
An improvement on the first title overall I would say. Combat is a lot more satisfying this time around. Most of the fun I had was just from being a petulant space-bastard, honestly.
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Devil May Cry
It's still fun, despite seriously showing its age. It feels like games just don't get made like this any more; the sheer amount of stuff that just happens like an improv troupe and a soap opera combined into one would instead have a load of logbooks and audiologs and a huge article on the fanwiki detailing all the lore no one cares about. The evil castle has a giant rotating floor littered with spike traps because It Just Does, Okay!
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Samorost 2
I beat it pretty quickly- it doesn't last long. It's very pleasant though and I might even say it went on a few puzzles longer than it needed to.
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Wind Waker
Hmm. I would say this is a ‘you had to be there’ game, but I was there and I hated it lol so I guess it technically has improved with age. This was a weird play for me; it’s very prototypical of BOTW in a lot of ways, chief among them the puzzles are not aggregated in dungeons but are very standalone (islands being analogous to shrines). Unfortunately a lot of the puzzles had just awful rewards that felt like a huge waste of time. Clearing out a hidden underground dungeon to receive a whopping 50 rupees (which I don’t have the wallet capacity for and is thus lost) is pants. And ugh having to change the wind all the time and especially having to play the same… song… over… and… over… to control the other character in THREE dungeons (out of five, only five!) was rough. I dunno, I’m probably not coming back here, but I didn’t hate it, it just didn’t work for me.
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Sweet Lily Dreams
Unfortunately had to bail on this one. A choppy frame rate combined with some odd smearing effect between frames made me feel quite unwell after a while, especially whenever the camera moved diagonally. It's hard to describe in words but it felt like I couldn't focus my eyes on anything. A shame, there seems to be an interesting story here and some very impressive use of the RPG Maker engine.
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Tomb Raider 1
The very original, I had to drop this one for similar reasons- the camera seems to be attached to a specific part of Lara rather than just following her generally, resulting in a constant bobbing motion when she walks. I swear this sort of thing never used to bother me, or perhaps it's something you get used to over time and I used to have more patience for it? Either way, I don't fancy spending my leisure time feeling seasick. Sorry Lara.
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Retrowave
Aesthetic endless runner (or driver, I guess) that I felt I had seen all of after 30 minutes. Great OST and vibes but not very interesting to play. I wish it was a screensaver or something.
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Ace Combat 7
Having thought about it, I really think shooting down the Arsenal Bird should have been the final mission. I know they wanted the tunnel run, and I know they wanted the space elevator ascent, and I get it- those are both really cool set pieces... but the emotional peak of finally, finally shooting down the Arsenal Bird, that one opponent that has been a menace since the very start of the game, as everyone from both Strider AND Sol squadrons comes together to cheer Trigger on while Avril and Cossette work to disable its shields from the lighthouse as the music swells, and landing that one-in-a-million shot on its core as drones buzz all around... nothing that comes afterwards tops that. (Also, fun detail- an earlier mission establishes only Count and Trigger have radios in their cockpits, so when Count is bluffing about disabling the shields with his mind, no one except Trigger knows what actually happened! That's why Huxian is all "????????????" when it appears to work.) It's great, I want more, not sure where to go from here. There are three DLC missions that are pretty expensive but I might grab one during the winter sale and see if they are worth the cost.
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Stratosphere
It only sort-of works on modern hardware and on most of my attempts to play it, it simply refuses to work at all. I think there’s a pretty cool concept buried here so I want to keep trying it but it has not survived the test of time.
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Ys Celceta
Plays very similarly to Lacrimosa Of Dana which was (one of) my GsOTY last year but I wasn’t anywhere near as taken by Celceta’s cast of characters. Ys games are always great but Dana had that extra special secret sauce that made it a joy emotionally as well as mechanically. You don’t play these games for the story of course and the action is just as excellent as the series is known for.
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Ike Emblem
I was very impressed with the writing overall, but I wonder if they learned a sequel had been greenlit during development because there's a lot of gaping holes left unexplained. The Black Knight's identity doesn't get revealed at all and is barely even hinted at, Sephiran is just kinda lurking around in the background for most of the game, and Ashnard's descent into madness came BEFORE he touched the medallion so that's not really explained either. Nice to live in the future where these questions have already been answered by its sequel. The game was great fun- I spent six hours of a saturday headbutting the game until it let me add Leanne to my party which was genuinely a great experience, if a questionable use of time.
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Worms Armageddon
As a kid I played this game as basically a big explosive toybox, just throwing a load of player-controlled teams onto a given map and blowing them all up in creative ways. I don’t really play in that manner these days so I took instead to the single player and completed a full Deathmatch run for the first time, having found it too frustrating as a kid. It’s interesting to experience a game in essentially two entirely different ways given the passage of time.
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Neopets
Still chugging along, as beaten up and broken down as it is. The plot went offline for a very long time to address several issues players were having, and then it returned with approximately none of those issues fixed, and now it's on hiatus again until the new year. Luxinia makes me looney-tunes awoooga though so I'll happily wait.
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Project Wingman DLC
What a lovely injection of new content for one of my favourite games of all time. That tunnel mission made me so tense my arms literally went numb. The final boss is a bit of a letdown- it would be improved significantly if you didn't have to deal with two mini-squadrons before she showed up, because they're kind of a boring slog to get through if you're getting shot down a lot. It's a full 1-2 minutes of completely normal dogfighting you have to endure before you can get to the main event and I don't really know why it's there other than just to pad out time.
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Steam VR Environments
I don't know if this really counts as a 'game', but it was a fun first foray into the world of VR. Import user-created worlds and hang out in them. It was nice to explore Twilight Town from Kingdom Hearts, and the Spirit Temple from Ocarina Of Time, 'in person'. midgi tried this out too and spent some time in the Bobs Burgers kitchen making a right mess of their condiments.
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Pokemon TCG Pocket
Shortly into the new year I realised I was having a negative amount of fun here and pulled the ripcord. Gacha sucks, coinflip balancing sucks, and the package is so dry as a whole- empty white voids the Apple Store would be jealous of with no characters to the random CPU battles at all. In theory I could have fun here but mobile gaming has ruined everything.
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Ambition Of Caesar
A turn-based strategy game on the SNES, this one might have been fun... if it wasn't entirely in Japanese and also entirely menu-based. lol
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Baby’s Day Out
I thought this was roundly terrible, and it turns out it never actually got released which is probably for the best.
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Ocarina of Time Randomiser
Ocarina is far more resilient against randomising than LttP is, given the game is pretty strictly divided into two halves. That, coupled with the honestly awful grottos that even in the base game I've always felt were kinda pants, it wasn't quite as significant a shake-up as the LttP randomisers were in my opinion. Nonetheless, it's a great way to breathe new life into a game everyone has played a thousand times over and the options are so granular you can really customise the game to be exactly how you want it. The bottom of the well is a miserably dire experience no matter how you play it, but with a lucky seed you might not need to go down there at all!
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Khimera Puzzle Island
Following on from last year where I successfully bullied an indie developer into changing his game according to my whims, I of course played the heck out of it this year, through to completion. I still have a couple of mosaic puzzles to wrap up. This is a great Deck game with a very cool Sonic-CD-esque soundtrack which is also well worth a listen to. Khimera 2 is coming out soon!
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RoboRumble
GoG had a sale shortly after I went on a nostalgic bent, and so I bought some good old games. Robo Rumble is a game I'd played from a magazine demodisk at its time of release and liked it a lot but not enough to badger mum to buy it for me. It's kinda-sorta RTS, you can produce an army up to a certain credit value making choices between quantity and quality, and then you throw your robots at the other guy's robots and break em and start all over. There's some guff about martian superweapons going on too but who cares. It's aged quite badly and in several ways is just broken on modern hardware, but remains a neat curiosity.
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Theme Park
This'un meanwhile was my very first sim game on the humble Amiga 600, a corrupted pirate copy my brother owned where all the graphics would glitch out entirely after the first year. Turns out the game is plenty broken even without piracy and will crash so spectacularly it's sort-of still running in the background after it falls apart. Almost impossible to recommend any more, especially in a world where Rollercoaster Tycoon can be bought for tuppence off Steam, it is instead a serious nostalgia itch scratcher that I'll probably still keep coming back to.
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Total Annihilation: Kingdoms
Oh dear. Total Annihilation is a great oldskool RTS set in SPAAAAAAACE, which was very advanced for its time (units are actual 3d models!!!). I remember being very curious at the time when I learned they had made a sidequel of sorts in the Age Of Empires vein. Unfortunately this game sucks ass, slow and jerky and barely any unit variety at all. It somehow feels significantly more primitive than TA did despite coming much later. Don't bother, stick with Age of Kings.
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Huniepop
The storepage describes it as 'abrasive western style writing' and wowie zowie they aren't kidding. I'll just say it's not to my taste and leave it at that. The match-3 is probably the best of its class, which is very funny. I was expecting it to be more of a dating-sim VN style of game, but once you've played enough match-3 to get a girl in bed (a mating ritual as old as time) there's really no reason to ever interact with her again, which is bizarre to me. I'm well aware I'm missing the point, but I don't really care about the horny stuff and was expecting more from the characters.
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Supreme Commander
I remember when this was called 'Total Annihilation 2' by the PC mags, and was very excited for it, and then just never played it until now. I think I need to give it another chance as it didn't make much of an impression on me, but I played it during a winter depression so that’s not necessarily a fair assessment. It's a little bit ick how one of the parties is pretty clearly supposed to be the good guys, unlike TA where both parties kinda sucked (ARM forever!). It wasn't a BBLC game but I think it's in the recycle bin for now.
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TAG The Power Of Paint
This is the lil indie jam game that inspired the coloured gels in Portal 2 (if memory serves the developers were hired by Valve to work on it). It's a cool prototype of a game that is worth spending an hour with if you want to see the origins of a historically significant game.
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Fantastic Danmaku Festival Part 3
Only the demo version for now, the long awaited sequel to one of the greatest Touhou fangames ever doesn't quite live up to its predecessor. It's very bombastic and spectacular, a real treat to watch, but the gameplay takes a backseat as a result and it's very very easy. Nothing wrong with an easy game of course, but in STGs the difficulty is sort of the point. This may have been changed for the full version, and I still intend to buy it, but I'm a little lukewarm on it now.
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Freecell / Solitaire
Kubuntu comes with a really great version of Solitare with like 20 different variants in it, and just on a whim I decided to finally learn how to play Freecell having been baffled by it since I first got a windows PC in 1998. Turns out freecell is awesome and I'm super addicted to it now. It's replaced Klondike (the game often called 'solitaire' and the one you likely picture when you think of solitaire) as my go-to 'I'm bored at work and need a five minute distraction' game.
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Total Annihilation
I installed this on the laptop I take to work for something to do during working hours that isn't just more Solitaire, and to my surprise it actually ran very well. I literally found my laptop in a dumpster so it's always a pleasant surprise when something runs on it. Unfortunately it's a little too frenetic of a game to play at work, if I get distracted by having to actually do my job things get hairy quick. The AI is incredibly weak in this game which is a shame because I'll probably keep coming back to it every so often for the rest of my life.
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Touhou 15
Super Puzzled Cat has a couple of shooter stages in it (no surprise given its pedigree) and coupled with SPC's saved-state mechanics they play a lot like Th15's Pointdevice mode. Some of the patterns kinda suck honestly, which is sort of the point- you have infinite lives and retries on each spell so you can figure out the little cracks and exploit them eventually even if it takes a hundred tries, but it wears thin a lot quicker than other games in the series. GREAT final boss theme though.
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Team Fortress 2
I only played a very small amount of the halloween update this year! Every time I felt like I ought to be playing a few more contracts I just found something else I wanted to do instead. In a way it feels like I missed out and that's a disappointing feeling, but rationally I know I wouldn't have had any fun if I'd done it.
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G-Zero
It is only a tech demo at this point- a conversion of Mode-7 SNES classic F-Zero to the Genesis which did NOT have mode-7 capabilities. Pretty impressive stuff. I don't know if it was just a proof of concept or if a full conversion is someday planned. That genesis FM-synth version of Port Town, though, damn!
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Faerie Fragments
Neopets flavoured match-3 mobile game. It's basically fine as far as such things go. Only played it for main-site rewards and to ogle Luxinia a bit.
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Decap Attack
Between this and Dynamite Headdy I mused that it was odd how many megadrive games involve pulling your head off and throwing it as a projectile weapon, but I was later informed that the head thrown in this game is not actually the player character's own head, so I guess disregard that.
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Roy Emblem
A rough start for the GBA entries, Fire Emblem 6 stars everyone's favourite 'who?' from Smash Bros. Apparently Roy himself is typically an awful unit but mine actually turned out alright so I struggled less than most people. Phew they did not do a good job of balancing this one. Special shoutout to Chapter 8x where in the best case scenario the boss had a 1/3 chance to just instantly delete any of my units because of his absurd crit chance.
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Fire Emblem Three Houses (Girls Only)
I'm sure I'll finish this some day.
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Touhou 20
We’re back, baby! I enjoyed the heck out of this year’s new release, and scored my first-ever new game Hard Mode clear. I also got most of the way through Extra but took a completely nonsense hit right at the start of the final spell and never found my way back. I love Nina and seeing Yorihime was a wonderful surprise. It’s a welcome return to form after Th18 was Fine and Th19 was Bad.
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Half Life 2 (VR)
As a lifelong Half Life fan (hmm ungainly phrasing) I was initially aghast that Alyx was a VR exclusive title, reasoning I'd never be able to afford a headset... which now is no longer an issue thanks to a certain Mr Claus. My second issue is holy smokes having a big heavy thing strapped to your face really tires out the neck very quickly which for me means headaches and nausea. Rather than try to adjust with a game I'd want to play lots of, I started my VR journey with a game I am familiar with and could microdose until my neck was stronger. Then I kept forgetting about it and letting too much time pass. Anyway probably into the new year I'm going to pick this back up and FINALLY play Alyx. Probably.
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Fire Emblem Engage
A second bite of the cherry and I still wasn’t super into it. I think my problem is I’m too stingy with the toys it gives me that it’s expecting me to use abundantly so it gets frustrating. It’s still a Fire Emblem game so it’s still enjoyable but it’s one of my lesser faves. I also watched midgi play through 97% of it and she stopped right before the final boss! Maybe she too will finish this in the new year!
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Kid Chameleon
A bizarre megadrive platformer that somehow kept drifting in and out of our possession when I was a kid, I never finished it back in the day but I always felt like I must have got close- it is rife with warp points and there's no save files or passwords so it can only be so long before it's absurd. Turns out, never even got past the first quarter of the game and it is in fact absurdly long. I lost patience with it but in the age of save states and suspend features it's a far more palatable game than it once was, and those with a curiosity for a more unusual platformer experience ought to have a look.
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FF5 FJF
Samurai Dancer Freelancer Thief. I will never ever again play with a Dancer in my team, even if ribbons are nice to have and sword dance/chicken knife is broken. The random chance is so aggravating it's not worth it. Samurai and Thief are a little dull too, so this team was largely unexciting. Still got my triple crown though!
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Desert Strike
I played this a lot back in the day without really understanding that there were mission objectives to complete, rather treating it as a 'fly a helicopter around and blow things up'-em-up. Coming back to it now and actually bothering to read any of the text, holy crap this game is ridiculously hard! Fuel runs out so fast you don't have time to get anything done and some swine will bullseye you from off-screen with a missile that takes you down in two hits. It's neat but come ready for a hard time.
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Frontier: Elite 2
A bizarre dream one night reminded me of the old rumours- this game was absolutely rife with rumours- of being able to get a ship usually inaccessible to the player if you could reach Betelgeuse within a certain amount of time. The time limit was strictly impossible and reaching Betelgeuse at all was as good as impossible as well, far beyond the reach of a casual player and requiring a dedicated setup and even some decent luck to pull off. In the modern world of course the game has been ripped to shreds and all manner of bugs and glitches are available to the pilot of 2025, and off I went to get my Long Range Cruiser. As expected there was no LRC, but I did get a spectacular view of Betelgeuse when I arrived- a star so huge the game glitches out. Very impressed that it was programmed to be appropriately enormous even though no player could have been expected to actually make it that far. There’s still not really anything out there like this game as far as I know, and it’s a shame it was released unfinished because there’s a great deal of untapped potential.
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Pikmin
The gamecube original, it's sorely missing quality of life features from later games in the series (which I believe it's multifarious remakes have added) but the original still beats out its sequel in my opinion. I'm not sure if I like Pikmin 3 more or not- 1 has an immediacy that the more story-heavy 3 doesn't quite manage (though it is FAR less wearisome than 2!). I probably won't play this version again but I certainly will play a remake.
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Perfect Cherry Blossom 0.01
Quite the curiosity and a rare find until recently, this was the very first demo version put out on CDs among doujin enthusiasts before Touhou became a real phenomenon. PCB is the title I'm most familiar with and probably my favourite of the series, and it was fascinating to observe all the differences large and small. Most jarring for me was the EoSD-style character cut-ins for spell declarations, along with jankier-than-usual early portraits!
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Touhou 10
In the run up to 20's release I caught touhou fever and wanted to shake off some of the rust so I decided to run this game on Hard, being one that I am less familiar with and thus less prone to bad habits. Got mad at video games on a failed attempt where everything went wrong and gave up. Maybe I'll remedy that in 2026.
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Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn
This is a very strange game and I think it might actually be kind of bad. My army keeps changing around and it’s impossible to tell who to train, with half of my units being largely useless and the other half being broken and overpowered, and bridging the gap can be nigh impossible. I respect what they were trying to do here, with multiple POVs in the same story, but it’s kind of a mess. If it was set up a little more like Valentia where you play all armies concurrently it might be a little less wonky. That said- it’s still Fire Emblem, I’m still hooked. I actually made it all the way to the final boss but ran out of time before the year was out, so this will also be the first entry on next year’s Games Of. Micaiah <3
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Metroid Prime 4 Beyond
This is a very strange game and I think it might actually be kind of bad. ...Again. The moment-to-moment gameplay is just as fantastic as you would expect from any Prime game, but it's very clear that the desert was not originally intended to be there until someone high up said "BOTW just came out and we gotta do that!" so they had to do that. There is effectively zero of the traditional metroid backtracking and world expansion, each dungeon is wholly self-contained. Spoilers!!!! Absolutely baffling to me that after all that set-up, Tokabi did NOT turn out to be a future/past version of Sylux, and it's exceptionally odd that Sylux was basically a nonfactor for the entire game. Really weird. I did enjoy my time here but it left me baffled on multiple fronts.
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Pokemon Friends
I wish you could control the difficulty levels of the puzzles, and I dearly wish you could continue to solve the puzzle after the timer runs out, but this is a nice once-a-day distraction perfect for a five minute interval between jobs. I like the idea of a game you only play once per day- it evokes the daily crossword in the newspaper or the quiz show in the morning; just a little something to warm up the grey matter a bit. The plushies are very cute too.
Listen, I cannot be cool and normal about Micaiah and I'm not even going to try.
No, this wasn't planned! Having just spent a long time playing through Ike Emblem and especially enjoying the part where you have to spend six hours hacking the game to add Leanne to your party, I was ready to move onto something new and not Fire Emblem related at all.
The dice had other plans however, and now I find myself deep in the trenches of Micaiah Emblem, a game that does NOT mess around. Holy smokes this game opens hard- a main lord who gets one-shot by an askance glare, a myrmidon who can't double after chapter 2, game over conditions on EVERY playable character... the list goes on.
The story goes that there were some translation shenanigans bringing the Tellius games to the west, where Ike got a new difficulty level called Easy which shuffled the difficulty right, while Micaiah had all her difficulties shifted left- so Hard became Normal, and so forth. Going from Ike, whose Normal difficulty was actually a little too easy for me and I wished I had played Hard instead, to Micaiah, whose Normal was supposed to be called Hard, is like walking out of a steam room into a freezing lake.
I typically don't use my jeigans but Sothe is getting most of the action here, his sole purpose in life to block off one chokepoint while the entire rest of my army handles the other and invariably gets killed anyway.
Fin or Bin:
For the moment at least, I am enjoying the challenge, even when NPC Jill gets herself Jilled on turn two and triggers a game over before I could even have done anything about it. Fire Emblem games typically get easier as they go and hopefully that's the case here too. Even if not, Micaiah is worth the trouble <3 I feel like the impact of seeing characters from PoR would have been more, uh, impactful if I had played both games upon release and I was reuniting with old friends after a significant span of time, but nothing I can do about that. I know Ike comes back at some point- perhaps he can solo me to the Finish again, just like old times.
Ike, meeting a beautiful princess for the first time: k
Ike, when Soren is around: yay! yaaaaay! Soren's here yayyyyy!!!!
Much like Wind Waker before it, this is a missed classic (or should that be Mist, hahahaha) that Nintendo were kind enough to put on their download service so Fire Emblem fans could play it without having to spend a month's rent on an original copy.
I'm a long-in-the-tooth FE guy at this point, but I'm actually still working my way through much of the series. PoR was immediately replaced on the backlog by its sequel Radiant Dawn, and I didn't get around to playing Roy Emblem until January of this year. It's fairly safe to assume they'll all be Fins, despite the variations between games; it's hard to go wrong with moving a bunch of little guys around on a big grid and crunching through battle calculations that become meaningless as soon as your enemy gets a 1% crit.
PoR is the first entry presented in 3d, which I remember being a big deal at the time, though in retrospect it didn't really gain much from such an advancement. Those animated cutscenes are very tasty, but goodness gracious do the battle animations drag. On a macro level however the battles are quite swift, with even footlocked swordboy Ike having a ridiculous base six movement. Coming from the incredibly stingy Engage, where even your promoted fliers are begrudgingly only given six movement, having units who can zoom around the battlefield is a very welcome change.
The writing so far is really good- so good that using the phrase "really good" makes me feel like a bit of a pleb. I've often seen people praising this one as the pinnacle of Fire Emblem storytelling and initial impressions show why that is.
Fin or Bin:
C'mon, it's Fire Emblem. Even the one FE game I had an exclusively bad time with took 40 hours from me and I played it start to finish. It'd have to be egregiously unplayable to fend me off, and the slow battles aren't anywhere near enough to chase me away. Looking forward to meeting Ms Micaiah after I've Finished this one.
It was during the post-TotK depression that I played Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana, a depression so deep I couldn't even muster the energy to write a BBLC entry for it (Fin). It proved to be the salve that would bring me out of the funk and due to the timing of when I started playing it managed to win Game Of The Year two years in a row, which is quite an accolade. The Ys series is a long-time favourite of mine and it never fails to hit all of my sweetspots- hugely frenetic combat where a hundred things happen every second, gigantic bosses that will utterly humble you the first few times you fight them, and all set to a soundtrack so rockin' it could bruise you.
Celceta, is, the... ffffffffourth? game in the series chronology, but that really just doesn't matter at all. Each title is essentially standalone and tells its own disconnected story, rarely alluding to past games at all other than fun easter eggs. Adol's lost his memory this time, which is a nice change of pace from shipwrecking every time he goes somewhere new (though I suppose he might just not remember the wreck) and ends up in the company of Duren, a musclebound guy with blue hair, because he clearly has a type.
Celceta gives us some backstory for Adol in the form of restoring his memories, some of which are pertinent to the story at hand and others which show his boyhood days. Apparently he first set off on his journey at the age of sixteen and is eighteen now, which means he has done a simply astonishing amount of stuff with his college years.
Feena or Beena:
Not much else to say- it's more Ys, which is a good thing. A lot of Lacrimosa's DNA is in here, with the cartography and item trading systems familiar from that title, and it's neat to see the forebears of one of my all-time favourite games. I'm not particularly attached to the characters currently but the intro cutscene has me eyes-emoji in anticipation of someone I haven't met yet. Fynysh!
I'm midway through my second playthrough on a higher difficulty having rolled credits, so writing an entry for this one is purely academic at this point and entirely against the scope of this blog. But it's my blog so I'm going to do it anyway!
Shortly after declaring Project Wingman GOTY of 2024 and one of my favourite games of all time, I went looking for the game that inspired it- and it just so happened that AC7 was on sale for 90% off that very same day. That's fate, right?
Obviously there's no point talking about whether or not I plan to finish it (I guess I'll answer that question for my second run, which is 'yes it's a Fin') but I do have some thoughts to share. First, I greatly enjoyed how the game didn't expect me to come into it with flight experience, my whole squadron besides themselves with excitement upon watching newbie pilot Trigger take down one solitary drone. I, solely, was responsible for ending a war last year; you guys gotta get on my level.
My confident swagger was soon halted as the game ramped up its expectations and thoroughly humbled me multiple times. I don't know that AC is necessarily a harder game than PW in terms of difficulty, but it is far stingier overall, with ammo and health both scarce and flares strictly limited; no longer could I throw myself right into the middle of a furball and blast out the other side with flares trailing every five seconds to throw off the missiles- doing so just ended in a splat on someone's windshield.
I also never got attached to any of my squadmates in AC, partly due to constantly being moved around and given a different team to fly with. After Trigger is sent to The Prison Where By Coincidence Every Inmate Is Also A Fighter Pilot, he enters an actively hostile squadron led by a brutal pitboss... and of course I don't care for any of these people. One of them stays in element for the rest of the game and I guess I was supposed to warm up to him, but he remained an antagonistic glory-hog throughout and I didn't care for him at all. I dunno, I'd follow AWACS Galaxy into the jaws of Hell and fully trust Dip and Mick to be there beside me, but I can't even remember the name of Strider Team's AWACS.
Wingman or Bingman:
Project Wingman is still top ace in my heart, then. If I were accused of only feeling that way because it was my first... yeah, I could see that being a possibility. AC7 is great. I have more frustrations with it than I did PW, but that could just be because it does things differently. That one mission where you have to uncover trucks moving through valleys during a sandstorm, though? Whoever came up with that can go take a one-way trip on the Space Elevator.
Pitchforks ready, lads- I have actually played this one before when it was first released, and I hated it. You see, the very first real thing you do in the game upon leaving Tutorial World is land face-first in an interminably awful stealth section that I just couldn't stomach; it was slow, tedious, and confusing, with no real direction given to where you're actually trying to go, inching around enemies that will see you seemingly at random, and if you are spotted it's all the way back to the start where you have to go through the whole escape process again.
It was miserably frustrating and I soon ripped the little disc out of my precious gamecube and replaced it with the Ocarina Of Time special edition that came with Wind Waker, running my way through the awful stealth section in Zelda's Courtyard without even flinching.
But no one ever talks about it! Ask any passing internet citizen and they'll tell you 'oh, the sailing' is the only major issue Wind Waker had in its original form. Even at the time, no one ever said 'push through the horrendous nonsense at the start' to get to the good stuff. Was I the problem? I mean heck, probably; I was an impatient teenager overflowing with rage at the time.
Twenty years later, and Nintendo have placed it on their NS2 GC service, and I've been in a gamecube sorta mood having been reading through old copies of NGC Magazine. The dice decided it was time to give it another bash with the benefit of experience (and much less rage).
...and I was right! The Forsaken Fortress sucks!!!!
Fin or Bin:
Okay okay, okay. I pushed through it, the whole miserable lot of it, and emerged the other side having slain my demon. Time will tell how much I love the game that remains; I am however already thoroughly charmed by its style- it's gorgeous, in my opinion a better looking game than its own HD re-release, and we've never before or since had such an expressive Link. Otherwise, it just feels like More Zelda (good thing), and it's nice to work my way through dungeons I haven't long-since memorised the layouts of. If nothing else, the promise of seeing one of my favourite Princess Zelda designs in person will spur me to the Finish.
Some scrumping alien swines have come along and nobbled my dog, and armed only with my pyjamas it's now my job to Solid Snake my way into their home to rescue the little blighter. It's a 'click on a thing until a thing happens'-em-up from delightful little indie studio Amanita, who are also responsible for the truly wonderful Machinarium and Botanicula which is very much not for arachnophobes.
They've carved themselves a wonderful niche with these games, their signature hand-painted style infusing the worlds they create with so much character. Just look at that weird wooden rock fish spaceship thing in the screenshot! Samorost's peculiar organic universe is a joy to explore, at least what little of it we get to see.
Fin or Bin:
The whole experience clocks in at about one hour and was Finished before I came to write this entry. A nice way to spend an afternoon or rainy Saturday.
