The trend of repackaging old games for folks to discover (or re-discover) on modern platforms has been around as long as console hardware iteration has been, and it’s not going away any time soon. It’s an effective, if not always elegant, solution to the problem of game preservation—a way of …
The original Super Mario 3D World was one of the most acclaimed games on Wii U, and with good reason. It’s easily one of the high points of the whole Mario series, drawing inspiration from both its 2D and 3D incarnations to create something wholly unique and wonderful to play. …
Glyph is one of the more unique approaches I’ve seen when it comes to 3D platformers. While it hits all the genre’s familiar notes—running and jumping between platforms, avoiding obstacles and collecting treasures—it’s got one little change that makes a big impact: you’re a ball, with the ball-like physics that …
For Thomas Olsson of Skeleton Crew Studio, Olija is a very personal project. It’s a game about being a foreigner in a strange land, drawing from his own experiences as a foreigner living in Japan—an experience that can be exciting and awe-inspiring, but also lonely. Olija may take a swashbuckling …
With its two screens, touchscreen (in a time before smartphones made them commonplace), and stylus, the Nintendo DS presented a novel way of interacting with games that plenty of developers put to great use. Drawn to Life was one such game, a platformer built around players drawing their own characters, …
Super Meat Boy didn’t invent the masocore platformer, but it certainly helped popularise it. A bloody chunk of meat makes for a surprisingly charming hero, it turns out, while its precise controls, inventive level design, and instant respawns made a captivating experience out of what might otherwise have been a …
It’s hard to imagine what the videogame landscape would look like without 3D Mario. Super Mario 64, especially, influenced the entire direction of 3D games, and the likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy made big impacts of their own. Such historically significant games need to be preserved …
A new Drawn to Life game has just launched, more than a decade since the series last entry in Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter. Developed by Digital Continue (the folks behind Next Up Hero, among other games) and published by 505 Games, Drawn to Life: Two Realms is now …
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time mostly lives up to its goal of recapturing what made the original Crash trilogy so beloved, but some of that magic gets lost in a misguided approach to difficulty. Crash Bandicoot has been through a lot. Once an iconic mascot for PlayStation and a …
In my first few hours with it, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin felt like it was shaping up to be something truly special. A couple of dozen hours later, and it’s one of my favourite games of the year. Here’s why. Sakuna is about as spoilt as any goddess can …
