Category Archives: Features

Famicom Detective Club

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind – a truly compelling mystery

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The Famicom Detective Club games are something that I’d been meaning to get around to for a while, but have only just picked up. Having played through — and adored — first episode The Missing Heir, I was keen to follow that up with its prequel, The Girl Who Stands Behind.

Honestly, I was expecting more of the same, and to a certain extent that’s what you get with The Girl Who Stands Behind, at least in mechanical terms. From a narrative perspective, however, The Girl Who Stands Behind is arguably considerably more ambitious than its predecessor, and makes for a mystery even more compelling to unravel a bit at a time.

So let’s take a closer look at the 2021 remake from Nintendo and Mages, available as part of a double-pack with The Missing Heir — sadly, only digitally in its English language incarnation.

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Famicom Detective Club

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and the Japanese adventure game tradition

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Although Japanese-style adventure games are a bit of an acquired taste for some, I’ve become rather fond of the format over the years.

While the more “pure” visual novel format is considerably more commonplace these days, it does always make me smile when a new game comes out that makes use of those classic Japanese adventure game conventions rather than simply being “click to advance, perhaps with occasional choices”.

As such, I had been meaning to get around to the two Famicom Detective Club titles on Switch for quite some time. And, having played through the first of the duology, subtitled The Missing Heir, I feel compelled to talk about it at some length. So let’s do just that.

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Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation

Date A Live and the comforting familiarity of tropes

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“Tropes” has become a bit of a dirty word over the course of the last decade or so, for a variety of different reasons, but I’m here to present you with the not-terribly hot take that tropes exist for a reason, and that, when handled well, can enhance rather than detract from a creative work.

This particularly came to mind towards the end of last week, when I elected to finally pull down Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation from my shelf and make a start on it as one of my “things I’m playing that are not my current Big Game” titles to enjoy in the week.

As a visual novel, it’s something that can be enjoyed with minimal “effort”, and, as I’ve discussed in a few places before, it’s also ideally suited for things like reading in bed, accompanying mealtime or just generally zoning out in front of.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 7: What have we learned?

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Today, according to my self-imposed schedule of video gaming fun times, was a “free choice”.

I spent most of it playing more Mary Skelter 2, so rather than bang on about that some more for now, I thought I’d reflect a bit on the week that has just gone by.

On the whole, I think this experiment has mostly been a success. I still have some lingering concerns about whether it is practical to apply this model when you’re playing very long games such as Mary Skelter 2, but I’ve managed to squeeze somewhere in the region of 15 hours of that game in this week across three days (one of which was just an evening) so I’m starting to think it might not be a problem.

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Gaming on a Schedule, Switch

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 6: More Mary Skelter 2

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And so, we return to my current “Big Game”: Idea Factory and Compile Heart’s excellent Mary Skelter 2, which I’ve been gradually ploughing through for quite some time now.

I really love dungeon crawlers. Something about the way they work just speaks to my brain. I think it’s the inherent satisfaction of gradually uncovering a map and discovering things.

In a good dungeon crawler, you’re always moving forwards and finding something new, and it’s satisfying to uncover a chunk of map even if all you discover is a complete dead-end.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 5: A spot of retro chopper action

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I must confess, it was tempting to spend my entire “retro” evening playing more Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition because it’s technically not breaking any rules, but after making it through some exhaustingly tough levels, I felt like I needed a bit of a break! And so it was off to the “retro room” upstairs with me, to bust out something on a piece of real hardware.

I quickly settled on LHX Attack Chopper for Sega Mega Drive, a recent acquisition that I’ve long been curious about. There was a surprising number of polygonal flight sims on the Mega Drive — mostly distributed by Electronic Arts through their “EA Air Force” brand — and while I was never expecting them to match up to equivalent sims on home computers, I’ve always wanted to give them a go.

After trying LHX Attack Chopper for a bit this evening, I’m keen to pick up the others if I can find them for a reasonable price.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 4: A fresh start with FFXIV

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I love Final Fantasy XIV. For a good few years, it devoured a significant part of my gaming time. In fact, the reason I stopped playing was primarily because it was taking up too much of my gaming time, and I wanted to be able to devote some time to other titles.

You could say that one of the chief motivators behind this Gaming on a Schedule experiment is the fact that for quite some time now, I’ve wanted to go back to playing Final Fantasy XIV, but in a way where it doesn’t dominate my entire gaming time, and where I can still enjoy other titles.

Other folks don’t seem to struggle with this too much, but I’ve had some difficulty.

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Gaming on a Schedule, Switch

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 3: Making progress with Mary Skelter 2

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I am, if it were not already clear, really enjoying Mary Skelter 2. It’s a really solid dungeon crawler with some great characters, well-designed dungeons and some absolutely magnificent use of the concept of “risk versus reward”.

It is long, as modern dungeon crawlers tend to be, but what I have found with it is that once I sit down and play, time absolutely flies by. It’s not uncommon for me to play what feels like a little bit, only to save my game and discover that several hours have passed.

This is good, because it means that I can make solid progress in it without it feeling like a drag. And this is partly the reason why I wanted to set some specific time aside for it each week.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 2: Adding some structure to Microsoft Flight Simulator

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I really enjoy simulations, which is why I wanted to set aside a day in my schedule to take the time to enjoy them. But I’ve come to something of a conclusion in more recent years: I’m not very good at knowing what to do with a completely free-form sandbox.

I’m not sure I ever was — though I did play a lot of SimCity and SimCity 2000 back in the day, and I played both of those in the sandbox mode rather than diving into the Scenarios — but I feel like this part of my brain has started to have real trouble in more recent years.

To whit, I was super-excited for the (now not particularly) new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator that came out in 2020, but after picking it up, I found that I haven’t actually spent that much time with it in total. Relatively speaking, I mean; I’ve still put 40+ hours into it to date, but compared to dedicated propellerheads that’s nothing.

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Gaming on a Schedule

Gaming on a Schedule, Day 1: Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition

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All right, here we go! It’s Monday, so, according to my experimental schedule, that means it’s time for a “smaller game” of some description. And while it also technically counts as “retro”, Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition’s release today made it an obvious choice.

I love Rise of the Triad. Always have done ever since I played the shareware version The HUNT Begins back in the ’90s. Someone in our group of friends at school acquired the registered version via some illicit means, too, so I also played a bunch of Dark War back in the day, too.

I have since atoned for my sins by purchasing multiple copies of Rise of the Triad whenever it has become available on modern digital distribution platforms.

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