Tag: Indie

Never Stop Sneakin’ – You Have One Job

I’m finally free from the Amadeus facility. I had been locked in a room for 3 months with nothing but a PS Vita, and forced to write about games I had no interest in. An agent from the Department of Sneakin’ was able to free me by taking the keycard off a guard and coming back to bail me out of this room. Apparently they are building a time machine & need my help. I’m not sure how useful I can be as a videogame reviewer, but Major Milestone was adamant I write about solitaire. I was more than happy to.

After submitting a 285 page writeup on the intricacies of solitaire, I stood there while the boss read it all, occasionally nodding his head. It turns out Major Milestone already knew the ins and outs of Solitaire. This was just a test, and the real game I was tasked to review was Never Stop Sneakin’ on Nintendo Switch. This game existed in an alternate reality in one of Amadeus several timelines, & before reviewing I had to sneak back into his facility to grab the game. The Department of Sneakin’ had declared it too dangerous to sneak in again, so they hooked up the Nintendo Switch digitally to give me control of another agent. The logic was sound, as the top-down view I had was a lot more than anyone could see on the ground. Their life was in my hands now.

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The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa – Impressions

I don’t yet know what to make of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa. Seemingly developed by one guy in Russia, The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa sees you play as a directionless high school thug who is threatened with expulsion from his school, which he hardly attends due to spending all his time getting into gang fights. It’s like a tribute to NES classic River City Ransom or some sorta slice of life anime like Cromartie High School which I’ve never watched but Deguello says is a parody.

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Metagal – Please Nerf

A Mega Man clone for $5? Heck yeah! What could possibly go wrong? Well how about everything. I bought Metagal because of its price and felt a wave of regret almost immediately after seeing the first low quality cutscene art and blurry text. This is an unfinished game that lingered as a Steam green-light title for 3 years with no approval, and has now been dumped on consoles for a few bucks. The very first screen on the Switch version is a blurry Joycon Grip diagram with white background, and it doesn’t really get better in the cutscene. Instead of a full-blown review this is going to be a short impression piece, since I could only stomach playing 4 of the game’s 8 levels. There are zero reviews online listed on Metacritic so I feel a sense of duty to warn people about this game.

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SteamWorld Dig 2 – Going Deeper

It’s been 89 days since Rusty went missing. From the small desert town of Tumbleton I’ve found myself in a brand new mining town, El Machino. This place is huge. It’s quite high up on a hill, full of houses, buildings and machines, has a population in the triple digits (so the sign says), and there’s even a rocket! The people here are quite simple minded and they are all trying to make a living, but still they are quite welcoming. Everyone wants to do business and The Mayor is happy to stand around and brag. The overall feeling is that there’s a lot more going on here than Tumbleton. Even the music is on a new level with a very funky baseline and more elements than I’ve heard before. Wait, what music? Must be in my head. I’ve come a long way to get here.

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Horizon Chase Turbo – Arcade Racing Isn’t Dead

Punk’s not dead and neither is speed. Horizon Chase Turbo delivers colourful thrills at over 300kph and has crashed into the Nintendo eShop at full speed. If you’ve recently found yourself enjoying the 12th port of Outrun and reminiscing the good old days, this could be the game that makes you feel alive again.

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GRIS – Comfortable Discomfort

You’ve lost yourself. Material objects lay scattered under a decorated tree, endless plates of food are spread across a table, but the holiday spirit has drained the life out of you. There’s no reason for any of this when you just want to lie down. You open the eShop in a desperate search for salvation, but it paralyses you further. So many meaningless titles. Pages and pages of sales. Now you are falling perpetually with no landing in sight, as the bottom of the screen never fills. Suddenly one name stands out, GRIS? The gameplay is a bit unclear but it’s a game about loss with some very high quality art. This might just do it. This might fill the emptiness within your soul.

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Chasm – Comfyvania

In the depths of the Nintendo eShop lies a treasure. Navigating through randomly generated sales offers, new releases and upcoming titles, you’ll find this gem buried somewhere a few pages back. Chasm is an ambitious game that takes the modern procedural approach and applies it to the classic handheld Castlevania formula. Groan, another randomly generated game? I know, I know. I am sick of them too, but I picked this game up because I wanted a new GBAvania experience so badly. There’s a lot of action games and loot games in the formula, but nothing based on exploration quite like this. It’s a very specific itch that needed scratching.

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forma.8 – 8.amrof

You might remember forma.8 as one of the Wii U demos in the Nindie promotion from 2015. It was one of the games that impressed me most at the time, and has stayed in my mind ever since. Every time the demo icon showed up on the eShop scrolling puzzle, I wondered when it would come out. The full game was finally released this month, and I have to give the team props for not cancelling the Wii U version like other devs have been doing. I’m glad I finally got to play it before Switch comes out. Before getting deep into this review however, I have to get one thing off my chest.

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Lifespeed – Ups & Downs

Exclusive to New 3DS, Lifespeed is a futuristic racer with a lot of speed, weapon powerups, a story mode, and online leaderboards. It’s the first game by Irish developer Wee Man Studios and a very ambitious concept to start your industry portfolio with. After extensive play I have to admit the game has a lot of flaws, but at its core the racing experience is very enjoyable.

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Citadale – Not Another Castlevania

I faced a moral dilemma when buying this game on my Wii U. It’s a Castlevania clone that directly re-uses assets from Circle of the Moon and the NES games, with the most simple graphics possible. Alright, sounds cheap and dirty, but those games are a lot of fun. Even if this game is a bit of fun, it’ll be a good night. If I didn’t buy it I’d be thinking about it all night, so here we are. Making dreams reality.

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Axiom Verge – 01001110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01001101 01100101 01110100 01110010 01101111 01101001 01100100

BOOM! There goes the lab. As you stand up and gather your wits, the last thing you remember is something being knocked over. You don’t know what was happening in the lab, and memories of your identity are just as vague. It must have been a big explosion. You’ve suddenly appeared in this well-constructed series of rooms with 2D platforms, throbbing enemies, bizarre surfaces and kickass music. What could the experiment have been? To create a Metroid game?

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VRog – I’m a Frog Now

VRog is a first-person frog simulator on the Wii U, and this just might be a world exclusive review. When looking for information on this game I could not find a single writeup, and it has no eShop ratings. There’s only a single Miiverse post of someone saying “RIBBIT!”. After a bit of digging, I found out this was originally made as a VR game for the Oculus Rift, but I guess they needed some extra money because it’s arrived on the Wii U with normal 3D graphics. It’s not the kind of game you’d buy a headset for, but the concept itself was interesting enough for me to take the risk while it was $3.25 AU. I just wanted to be a frog for a night.

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Xtype Plus My Arsehole

Was feeling a bit adventurous tonight and I thought I’d try a new game. I also had a surplus of My Nintendo coins to get rid of. After redeeming a 3DS theme I noticed Xtype Plus was 50% off! The game was now $2, and basically free, right? May as well, right? I like arcade games and it might prove to be an addictive score-chaser. Just a bit of fun to compliment my night.

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