Waifu Wednesday

Waifu Wednesday: Takanashi Kiara

3 Comments

Since their debut in September of 2020, the girls of Hololive English have well and truly settled into their roles as virtual entertainers, bringing joy to hundreds of thousands of people every day.

Back when HoloEN first launched, we took a specific look at Amelia Watson and Ninomae Ina’nis, but there are still several three more delightful characters in the lineup well worth celebrating. And with the unfortunate (and apparently accidental) banning of Takanashi Kiara’s channel earlier today — a mistake which YouTube-kun has since rectified after implied murderous threats from a certain rapping reaper — I figured it was well worth giving everyone’s favourite phoenix a bit of time in the spotlight.

You can’t keep a good phoenix down, after all — although Final Fantasy might have you believe otherwise — so get your bargain bucket ready and let’s give that bird some love. That came out with potentially filthy implications, but they honestly weren’t intentional. Please disregard.

Continue reading Waifu Wednesday: Takanashi Kiara →

short;Play, Videos

short;Play: TimeSplitters 2

1 Comment

You asked for it, and I… was going to do it anyway, but here it is! TimeSplitters 2, one of the finest console first-person shooters ever created — and indeed one of my favourite games of all time.

TimeSplitters 2 took everything that was good about the first game and provided more. Much, much more. We have a story mode that is much closer to what its spiritual predecessors GoldenEye and Perfect Dark provided on the Nintendo 64. We have a more structured single-player experience for the “arcade” mode. We have a wide variety of weird and wonderful challenges. And we have many, many, many characters to collect.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

Evercade, SNES, Technōs Collection 1

Super Double Dragon: An Unfinished Symphony

2 Comments

Despite being the franchise that pretty much defined a whole genre, the Double Dragon series has had its share of troubles over the years.

One particularly troubled installment was 1992’s fourth game in the series, known as Super Double Dragon in the West, and Return of Double Dragon in its slightly enhanced Japanese release. This Super NES-exclusive title suffered from an all-too-common problem in the games industry that we still see to this day: the developers being forced to rush the game out before it was completely finished.

Even the enhanced Japanese release was missing some of the material that was originally supposed to be in the game, but for now it remains the definitive version of the game. Lucky that we now have easy access to this version thanks to the Technos Collection 1 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system, then, isn’t it?

Continue reading Super Double Dragon: An Unfinished Symphony →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Questron

2 Comments

When I was a kid, I was kind of scared of trying out RPGs because they looked too complicated. Returning to them today, however, makes me feel like I would probably have been fine!

Here’s Questron from Strategic Simulations Inc, who at the time were better known for their wargaming software. This was their first RPG release and proved to be a big success for them. The company would later go on to be extremely well-known for their excellent array of licensed Dungeons & Dragons computer RPGs, so this was the just the beginning of something wonderful for them!

Enjoy the game in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

header-4165360

Podcast

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 45 – One Hell of a Year

1 Comment

Welcome to the obligatory podcast-format end-of-the-year roundup! I’m joined for this exploration of a year we’ll all remember for quite some time by, as always, Chris Caskie of CCaskieArt.

The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos (including the Atari A to Z retro gaming series); you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes and listen on Spotify. Please do at least one of these if you can; it really helps us out!

Enjoy the podcast in video and audio formats below:

And hit the jump for show notes!

Continue reading The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 45 – One Hell of a Year →

Announcements, Community

Around the Network

3 Comments

Good evening! I’ve spent most of the day editing a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, so you can expect that tomorrow.

I’m not doing a full series of The MoeGamer Awards for the whole month this year — I might do some “[x] of the year” towards the end of December though — so the upcoming episode is very much a “best of 2020” sort of deal. And in our usual manner, most of the stuff we’ve picked is stuff you won’t hear the mainstream talking a great deal about!

Please, as they say, look forward to it. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of what you might have missed in the last week.

Continue reading Around the Network →

Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: RealSports Baseball

Leave a comment

We’re back once again with the RealSports series, and this time we’re looking at RealSports Baseball for the Atari 5200.

While the Atari 2600 version of RealSports Baseball really struggled to provide a convincing game, particularly when played against a computer-controlled opponent, the Atari 5200 fares much better in this regard, offering the potential for a much more complex and interesting game without sacrificing accessibility and immediacy. Plus there’s digitised speech! Who’d have thought it?

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

header-4165360

Atelier Arland

Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland – A Trilogy of Four

3 Comments

cropped-atelier-megafeature-header-1-8868334This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
< Prev. | Contents | Next >

Up until this point in the Atelier MegaFeature as a whole, we’ve explored the games in release order.

They were released in clear “sets”, after all — we had the Atelier Iris trilogy, then the Mana Khemia duology and then the three Arland games. And while the stories don’t always follow on directly from one another — most notably in the Atelier Iris series — each game in each series, at the very least, feels like it has a number of stylistic and thematic elements in common with its contemporaries. But in 2018, something interesting happened; after three Dusk games and three Mysterious games, Gust issued the surprise announcement that the twentieth game in the mainline Atelier series would not kick off a new trilogy; instead, it would return to Arland for (probably) one last time.

So with that in mind, we’re skipping forward from 2011’s thirteenth Atelier game Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland to check out 2019’s twentieth installment Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland. Then we’ll go back and look at all the ones in between. Sound good? Good. Let’s get cracking — beginning with an overview of what this game is all about and how it fits in with its predecessors.

Continue reading Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland – A Trilogy of Four →

Evercade A to Z, Videos

Evercade A to Z: Tanglewood

1 Comment

The Evercade isn’t just about old games — it’s also about new games developed for old platforms. Tanglewood, one half of the eleventh cartridge in the system’s library, is a great example.

Developed in 2018 making a specific effort to use authentically ’90s-style techniques and tools that Mega Drive programmers would have used back in the day, Tanglewood is a charming puzzle platformer with a clear artistic vision and some enjoyable gameplay to back it up.

Check it out in the video below, read my writeup to find out more, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube when you’re done!

Evercade, Piko Interactive Collection 1, Racers, SNES

Top Racer: Definitely-Not-Lotus Turbo Challenge

2 Comments

Racing games used to be very different to how we know them today — primarily due to the limitations of the hardware on which they were running.

Instead of unfolding in lovingly rendered, minutely detailed 3D polygonal worlds as most of today’s racers are, they took what we now call a “vanishing point” approach, where the road was drawn using two converging lines to simulate a sense of perspective, and sprites drawn at various sizes were placed along the sides of the track to assist with the illusion of movement and speed.

Of all the racers designed in this way — and there are many, including some developed quite recently! — Kemco’s Top Racer, also known as Top Gear, is one of the finest out there. This is a game that still gets regular play from a lot of racing enthusiasts today — plus now you can enjoy it as part of the Piko Interactive Collection 1 cartridge for Blaze’s Evercade retro gaming system. So let’s take a closer look!

Continue reading Top Racer: Definitely-Not-Lotus Turbo Challenge →

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