Category Archives: Features

Atari Collection 2, Evercade

Solaris: The 2600’s Finest Hour

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The humble Atari 2600 had an astonishingly long lifespan, being officially produced between 1977 and 1992. As you might expect, this means there’s an equally astonishing difference between the very first games for it and those which came out later in its lifespan.

Solaris by Doug Neubauer came out in 1986, putting it towards the latter end of that lifespan. To date it remains one of the very finest games on the Atari 2600 from technological, gameplay and design standpoints — although not one that gets talked about all that much. And all this makes it a title well worth checking out even if you don’t normally “do” Atari games.

Thankfully, it’s now easier than ever to try it for yourself, since it appears on the Atari Collection 2 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system. So let’s take a closer look!

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Evercade, Interplay Collection 1

Earthworm Jim: Shiny, Groovy People

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Earthworm Jim is, for many people, a defining game of the 16-bit home console era. Perhaps not in quite the same way as titles like Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog, but it’s definitely a title people look back on fondly.

Probably the main reason for its enduring appeal is its incredible animation, which combines traditional hand-drawn techniques with digital pixel art to create something with a very distinctive and memorable aesthetic.

To my shame, I never played it back in the day. Thankfully, I can now correct that gap in my knowledge and experience thanks to the Mega Drive version being included on the Interplay Collection 1 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system. So let’s dive in and see what I’ve been missing!

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Magicami DX

Magicami DX: Candy-Coloured Darkness

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Following on from last week’s look at big-budget free-to-play city pop magical girls eroge Magicami DX, I’ve been spending a bit more time with the game.

At the time of writing, I’m over halfway through the current main story content (on the game’s Normal difficulty), so it’s that side of things I’d like to talk about today — with particular regard to how the 18+ version of the game handles things.

With that in mind, there will likely be mild spoilers ahead, along with NSFW images and graphic descriptions and depictions of sexual violence. You have been warned!

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Data East Collection 1, Evercade

Midnight Resistance: Under Lock and Key

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Throughout the 8- and 16-bit home computer and console eras, we saw numerous developers “paying homage” to one another’s work — and often developing their own interesting twists on the formula in the process.

One cannot look at Data East’s 1989 release Midnight Resistance and not think of Konami’s Contra from two years prior, for example, but in practice the two games play quite differently, developing their own distinct identities in the process.

These days, Contra is by far the better known game, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore Midnight Resistance for yourself. And, as luck would have it, Midnight Resistance can be found in its Mega Drive incarnation on the Data East Collection 1 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system — so let’s take a closer look!

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Magicami DX

Magicami DX: Magical Girls Go Punk

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Critics of popular Asian free-to-play games often joke that those who invest money into their hobbies are “paying money for JPEGs of their favourite characters”.

While obviously a somewhat mean-spirited exaggeration, the truth of the matter is that, barring a few notable exceptions, free-to-play mobile games do tend to eschew flashy technical prowess in favour of a constant barrage of new playable storylines, special events and collaborations with popular franchises. And their players don’t seem to mind this relative lack of “wow factor”; the immensely popular and long-running Granblue Fantasy, for example, is little more than a collection of sluggishly loading HTML pages playing some low bitrate audio in the background, but it shows no sign of slowing down.

With all this in mind, though, wouldn’t it be nice to find a free-to-play game that combined the things people enjoy about this sort of experience with rather higher production values than usual? Well, enter Magicami DX, a game which came out in 2019 back home in Japan, and which has now found itself localised for the browsers and mobile devices of English speakers thanks to adult gaming specialists Nutaku, who you may recall I had a nice chat with a little while back.

Let’s take a first look!

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My Time With Dee Dee

My Time With Dee Dee, Vol. 4: First Look

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If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ll know that friend of the site and big bossman of DigitallyDownloaded.net Matt Sainsbury has been beavering away at a series of visual novels of late.

Collectively known as My Time With Dee Dee, each “volume” of the series focuses on a particular aspect of literature and explores it in depth from a practical perspective, both through the volume’s own narrative and a bonus academic-style explanation of the genre or school of thought.

To date, we’ve taken on the erotic thriller in the first volume, the concept of the male gaze in the second, and existentialism in the third. Now, with the upcoming fourth volume, Sainsbury has set himself a challenging goal: to explore, challenge and confront the ideas of the Marquis de Sade. To that end, he sent me an early version of the new game to take a look at and see what I thought. So let’s do just that!

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Evercade, Namco Museum Collection 1, NES

Mappy: Your Move, Cat

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Mappy is perhaps not one of Namco’s most well-known arcade games from the early days — here in the West, anyway — but it’s still one that the company frequently acknowledges and pays tribute to.

Many of the cars in the Ridge Racer series feature “sponsorship” by the series, for example, and the first Mappy title, which we’re concerned with today, was successful enough to spawn several sequels. There was even an animated series made in 2013 as part of Namco’s ShiftyLook initiative, but sadly this is no longer officially available.

Whether you’re a longstanding fan of the series or a newcomer, you can now enjoy the original Mappy’s NES port as part of the Namco Museum Collection 1 for the Evercade retro gaming platform. So let’s take a closer look!

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Atari Collection 1, Evercade

Ninja Golf: Hitting the Links (And Everyone Who Stands in Your Way)

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One of the things I’ve always been rather fond of from the ’80s and early ’90s is how literal a lot of video game titles were, particularly on Atari consoles.

In Casino, you play casino games. In Race, you race. In Canyon Bomber, you bomb a canyon. And in Ninja Golf, you are a ninja who plays golf.

No, I’m not making that last one up. Indeed, for many people this 1990 release from BlueSky Software (who would later go on to develop Shadowrun and the two Vectorman games for Sega Mega Drive) is one of the crown jewels of the underappreciated Atari 7800’s library. And now you, too, can experience its highly entertaining gameplay thanks to the Evercade retro gaming system and its Atari Collection 1 cartridge!

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Nurse Love Addiction

Nurse Love Addiction: Learning to Love is Learning to Trust

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And so, we come to the conclusion of our look at Kogado Studio’s fascinating visual novel Nurse Love Addiction with Kaede Ohara’s route — a path through the narrative that can quite reasonably be regarded as the most “normal” one.

Once you’ve played through Nurse Love Addiction once or twice, it will be clear that Kaede’s path is somewhat separated from the others, since there’s a very obvious “branch point” in the common route that either steers protagonist Asuka towards the three paths that deal with her past, or allows her to sidestep it in favour of Kaede’s story.

Will our heroine be able to get through this experience physically and mentally unscathed? Read on, and let’s explore further. Spoilers ahead, as always.

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Nurse Love Addiction

Nurse Love Addiction: The Power of Love

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So far in our exploration of Kogado Studio’s visual novel Nurse Love Addiction, protagonist Asuka Osachi has had a lot to deal with.

The interesting thing about this visual novel is that while it might initially appear to be a fairly straightforward yuri romance, as you progress through each of the routes it becomes much more of a mystery narrative, with each character’s unique story path providing a little more of the complete picture.

So far we’ve taken a deep dive into the stories that Asuka’s sister Nao and the mysterious, enigmatic Itsuki have to share. Today, it’s the turn of the game’s resident princess, Sakuya Takeda. Major spoilers ahead, as ever!

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