All posts by Pete Davison

Former games journo (GamePro, USgamer) and expert on all those Japanese games and visual novels the mainstream press likes to go "ew, pretty girls" at. I write things at great length.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+: Falcom’s forgotten gem

Falcom make some absolutely fantastic games, but speak to a self-professed “Falcom fan” and they’ll almost certainly only want to talk about the Trails series — or, more likely, “Kiseki”, because as we all know, referring to something with its original Japanese title rather than a widely accepted localised version makes you a Better Fan Of The Thing.

That’s a real pity, because while Trails is an amazing series — and one I’m fully intending to binge at some point, right from Trails in the Sky through to Trails Through Daybreak and beyond — Falcom is far from a one-trick pony. There’s the Ys series, for starters, which we’ve already talked about at length on this here site, and then there’s “everything else”.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+, of course, falls into this latter category. It’s technically part of the Xanadu series, but Falcom’s intentions for this game mean that it might as well be considered as its own self-contained thing, and as such can be enjoyed completely on its own merits. So let’s take a closer look!

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Princess Peach Showtime: a short run on stage, destined to be forgotten

I finished Princess Peach Showtime last night, and I came away with a resounding feeling of “that was all right”.

It was decent. It was fine. It was okay. I enjoyed it well enough. But it didn’t set my world alight. At the same time, it wasn’t bad. I didn’t hate it. I don’t feel the need to rant and rave about things it may or may not do “wrong”. It was just… fine.

That’s a bit of a shame, though, given that this was the first time Peach had taken the starring role in a game since 2005’s Super Princess Peach on Nintendo DS. I’m not entirely surprised that Princess Peach Showtime ended up being how it is, particularly after playing the demo, but I do feel like there could have been a bit more to it. So let’s talk about that!

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The Good Life: SWERY’s Lake District holiday

Hidetaka Suehiro, better known as SWERY or SWERY65, is one of the few people in game development that one can honestly call an “auteur”.

His work is immediately recognisable and well worth exploring — and like all good works of art, it doubtless has a different impact on different people, ranging from enthusiastic adoration to outright disgust. While his most famous work to date remains the wonderful Deadly Premonition, the title which made him a (sort of) household name in gaming, his other work is just as intriguing.

Which, of course, brings us to The Good Life, a 2021 release for Windows PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. It’s a game that actually has a fair bit in common with Deadly Premonition, so if you enjoyed that you may well dig this — but it’s also very much its own beast. So let’s delve right into this goddamn hellhole.

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Some final thoughts on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

I finally beat Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! It took me a grand total of 101 hours, and while I didn’t do absolutely everything in the game, I did a significant proportion of all the available stuff.

I enjoyed it a lot, overall. It’s a well-crafted game that pays nice homage to the original while doing a lot of new things that are distinctively its own. And while I won’t spoil the ending in this introduction, it was an intriguing and thought-provoking conclusion that we’ll talk a little more about later in this piece in a clearly spoiler-demarcated section.

So let’s have a look back over the game as a whole, and see what’s what, shall we?

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Alone in the Dark 2024: a return to form for classic survival horror

Poor old Alone in the Dark has been through the wringer over the years.

First released on MS-DOS PC in 1992, it garnered critical acclaim for its innovative gameplay, presentation and wonderful atmosphere, and remains an essential play for anyone interested in the history of the survival horror genre. Without the original Alone in the Dark, we may not have had the Resident Evil series — at least not in the form it took in its early years.

Subsequent entries struggled to live up to the legacy of their predecessor, however… particularly when various companies attempted to “reboot” the franchise on several occasions in the intervening decades. But now Alone in the Dark is very much back on track, thanks to yet another reboot, this time developed by Pieces Interactive and published by THQ Nordic. Let’s take a closer look.

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The history of computing is told through video games

A while back, I paid a visit to The Cave and Arcade Archive, a pair of wonderful interactive retro tech museums run by YouTubers Neil Thomas, Alex Crowley and a gaggle of volunteers and assistants.

Between the two museums, you can get your hands on a variety of old computers, consoles and arcade games, pretty much all of which are in full working order, and have a tinker with them, as well as browsing an extensive library of old magazines, admiring the ambience of a lovingly recreated retro game “shop” (where you can even scan the barcodes on the boxes and play the games on a MiSTer) and investigating some lovely rarities.

One thing struck me as I was wandering around: although The Cave specifically positions itself as a museum of classic computers and consoles, the focus is very much on games. And there’s a very good reason for that. Let’s ponder exactly why.

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The400 Mini: A great entry point to exploring a range of underappreciated computers

When The400 Mini was first announced, reactions could be divided into roughly two distinct camps: the “OMG finally the Atari 8-bit is getting the recognition it deserves” crew, and the “WTF is an Atari 400” brigade. Those of you who know me well will already know which camp I fall into.

For the sake of the latter group, the Atari 400 (and, by extension, the entire Atari 8-bit line) is well worth exploring, because although in the long term it lost out to platforms such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in terms of popularity, it was a pioneer in the home computing space and, in fact, the birthplace of a variety of widely beloved games.

The400 Mini is a great place to start exploring exactly where Atari home computers fit into the grand history of home computers and video games. There are a couple of things that, at launch, could do with a bit of tweaking — but there are also a few things you can do with it that you might not expect. So today we’re going to talk about all of those things!

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The enshittification of the video games press

This is, as many of you know, a subject near and dear to my heart, so it breaks my heart every time I have to write something like this. But it seems that what we think of as “the traditional video games press”, at least in the profitable, commercial sector, is circling the drain.

The latest site to “fall” is Kotaku, a publication which most certainly has had its ups and downs in terms of reputation with different groups over the years, and one which I’m definitely not surprised to see affected by the growing trend for enshittifying everything.

While I had very little time for Kotaku itself, particularly over the course of the last decade or so, it’s still saddening to see once-prominent institutions in the games press landscape gradually sinking into the mire of slop that a significant portion of the Web has been becoming for years now. Let’s ponder the reasons for that a little further.

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Gruds in Space: an early take on the graphic adventure

Back in the early days of adventure games, there was a hard divide between people who liked text-only adventures — today typically referred to as “interactive fiction”, though if we’re getting technical about it, there are some differences between interactive fiction and text adventures — and those who appreciated games with graphics.

There was a sort of unspoken (well, actually, sometimes spoken) assumption that text-only games were more “grown-up” and for more “intelligent” people, because they specifically required the use of your imagination, just like a good book. And there’s some merit to that argument.

But there were some interesting experiments going on concerning exactly what to do with the graphical capabilities of early ’80s home computers. And Gruds in Space from Sirius Software is a great example.

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Did Final Fantasy VII Rebirth need to be a humongous, obscenely long open-world game?

I’m not going to bury the lede here: yes, I firmly believe that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did need to be humongous, obscenely long open-world game. So let’s spend a bit of time talking about that.

It’s become fashionable to bash open-world games in the last few years, at least partly because for a good long while now, big-budget developers and publishers have been using them as something of a crutch. Rather than providing a carefully structured, well-paced experience, a lot of developers seem to believe that offering the player what they consider “true freedom” (which in practice is rarely anything of the sort) will make up for the game’s shortcomings in other areas.

While there are a lot of companies out there who are very much guilty of that, when Square Enix has made an open-world game — particularly, but not exclusively, one in the Final Fantasy series –it has usually come out rather well. And Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the best to date. Let’s take a closer look.

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