Essentials

PSP Essentials: Dungeon Explorer

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I enjoy beating games, particularly when they have a good story and especially when they have a dramatic finale.

But sometimes it’s nice to have a game on hand that you can just dip in and out of pretty much indefinitely. Arcade-style games fill this niche pretty nicely, but it’s also cool when you find something with a bit more in the way of “persistence” — something that you can continue playing over time and continue to discover new things about.

Recently, I fired up Dungeon Explorer by Hudson for the PSP, a spiritual successor (and, technically, prequel) to the company’s 1989 PC Engine/Turbografx classic of the same name. And… I think I’m going to be playing this game for a long time.

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Blue Reflection, Cover Games

Blue Reflection: Everyday Life with Magical Girls

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cropped-header2-1232508This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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Blue Reflection is an unusual game in terms of its overall tone and how it “feels” to play, and a big part of this is due to its mechanics and structure.

If you had to pigeon-hole it into a specific mechanical genre, most people would describe it as a “JRPG”. But in many ways this isn’t a particularly accurate description, since although it features a number of common elements of the genre, it draws just as many influences from other types of game such as adventures and visual novels.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s certainly a pretty intriguing game from a mechanical and structural perspective. So that’s what we’ll be focusing on today.

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Hundred Honeys, Waifu Wednesday

Waifu Wednesday: The Hundred Honeys Project

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With how much I’ve been enjoying the recent release of Honey Select Unlimited, I thought I’d do something a bit different for today’s Waifu Wednesday.

It’s a bit of a creative project, if you will, but also an opportunity to gradually, over time, test out what Honey Select Unlimited and its companion application Honey Unlimited Studio is actually capable of. I intend to create as many virtual women as I can and squeeze as many as possible into a single scene.

So far I’ve managed eight and my computer hasn’t exploded yet. Want to meet them? Thought so.

Mild lewd warning for after the jump.

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Essentials

PS2 Essentials: Under the Skin

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One aspect of gaming we’ve lost sight of a bit over the course of the last couple of console generations is the idea of a game that is “nothing but fun”.

I’m talking about mechanics-centric games where the aim is to just have a good time and challenge yourself; games that aren’t trying to “say something”; games that aren’t trying to be artistic in a narrative sense.

This kind of game hasn’t died out completely, of course, but at the time of writing they remain primarily confined to the independently developed, digital-only sector. Capcom’s Under the Skin for PS2, meanwhile, reminds us of a time not so long ago (2004) when this type of experience would get a full retail release and no-one would bat an eyelid.

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One-Shots

Honey Select Unlimited: Let’s Talk About Sex

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Despite the fact that as you are reading this, someone somewhere is almost certainly enjoying an intimate moment of some description right now, sex remains the ultimate taboo in video games.

This is one of many reasons why I find it so endlessly fascinating that Japan, a nation whose society is not stereotypically known for being particularly open about such things, leads the way in terms of sexually explicit entertainment, be it interactive games or non-interactive formats such as anime and manga.

Up until now, our exposure to Japan’s thriving “sex game” industry in an officially licensed capacity has primarily been through eroge and nukige visual novels. But with Western hentai localiser and publisher Fakku’s partnership with Illusion, now everyone can get their hands on one of the most world-renowned “sex sims” out there: Honey Select Unlimited. It’d be rude not to take a peek, right?

NSFW warning: This article discusses strong sexual themes and features explicit imagery after the jump. If you read it at work and get caught, I accept no responsibility whatsoever!

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Essentials

Namco Essentials: Pac-Man Championship Edition 2

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Poor old Pac-Man’s been put through the wringer since his first appearance in 1980.

He’s gone on adventures, been platforming, attempted to educate the masses and even kicked the snot out of his fellow video game icons. But somehow it always comes back to doing what he does best: munching his way through mazes while attempting not to, in turn, get noshed off by ghosts. (Although some people are into that.)

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is Namco’s latest attempt to put an interesting twist on the original Pac-Man formula. And it’s a ton of fun.

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Blue Reflection, Cover Games

Blue Reflection: Introduction, and a Brief History of Magical Girls

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cropped-header2-1232508This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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This month’s Cover Game is a Gust title I’ve been intrigued about ever since it was first announced: Blue Reflection.

Featuring a combination of Mel Kishida’s wonderfully soft-edged artwork translated beautifully into 3D polygonal graphics, a highly stylised soundtrack by Hayato Asano and an intriguing story about empathy and emotion, I always knew this was going to be an experience that was right up my alley.

So let’s begin our exploration with an overview of what the game is all about, and a look back at the “magical girl” genre that inspired it.

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Waifu Wednesday

Waifu Wednesday: Jeanne Alter

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I thought I’d taunt the Fate/Grand Order players a bit with today’s Waifu Wednesday.

The joke’s on me, of course; having not played the game for a while and come back to it just in time for a drop rate up on the extremely popular Jeanne Alter, I burned 90+ Saint Quartz on summons only to receive more Boudicas than I know what to do with and not even a whiff of Jeanne. Serves me right for pulling Gilgamesh on my first draw back when his event ran shortly after the game launched in the West.

Anyway, let’s take a look at Jeanne Alter today, and why she might be so popular among the fanbase, particularly those under the thrall of the gacha!

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Essentials, N64

N64 Essentials: Pilotwings 64

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I grew up with flight simulators, primarily due to my father being both a proper propellerhead and a writer for a computing magazine — in other words, we got a lot of review copies of such games.

One thing that struck me about the genre was that it was rather rare to see games based around just flying; instead, prolific developers such as MicroProse tended to emphasise the military angle, simulating exciting aircraft such as the F-16 “Fighting Falcon”, the F-15 “Strike Eagle” and the somewhat-less-exciting-but-appeared-in-a-movie A-6 Intruder.

There was Microsoft Flight Simulator, of course — or subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator as it was known in the early days — but that was slow-paced, rather complicated and, according to my father “not a game”. Clearly there was room for something in between the two extremes.

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One-Shots

Re;Lord 1: It’s All a Matter of Perspective

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It’s always a pleasure when a game comes along out of nowhere and gives you a delightful surprise by being “good” in some way.

Re;Lord 1 ~The witch of Herfort and stuffed animals ~ (just Re;Lord hereafter for the sake of everyone’s sanity), a game developed by Escu:de and recently released in both all-ages and 18+ English versions by Sekai Project and Denpasoft, is the most recent example of this happening to me.

Not only is it an interesting, unusual and enjoyable game from a mechanical perspective, but it’s also pretty fascinating to contemplate from a narrative perspective, too. And it has some lovely art! So let’s take a closer look.

Continue reading Re;Lord 1: It’s All a Matter of Perspective →

The best of overlooked and underappreciated computer and video games, from yesterday and today.