Nurse Love Addiction: Living in the Here and Nao

We’re going to spend a few articles exploring and dissecting the visual novel Nurse Love Addiction by Kogado Studio. There will, of course, be major spoilers ahead.

You might think you know what you’re getting with a pastel-coloured visual novel called Nurse Love Addiction that depicts five pretty nurses getting along swimmingly with one another on its cover art. And you might even be partially right; this is a visual novel with an all-female cast of (trainee) nurses and multiple narrative routes, promising potential romantic entanglements with all of the main heroines.

It’s so much more than that, though. And that’s what we’re going to delve into from today.

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Atari ST A to Z: Shufflepuck Cafe

Hitting a thing back and forth across a playfield in an attempt to get it past your opponent is a fundamental of gaming — after all, Pong is one of the original video games!

It’s interesting to see the numerous twists that there have been on the formula over the years, though. One of the most beautifully presented is Broderbund’s Shufflepuck Café, a game that sees you descending the smoky stairs into a sci-fi cantina in the hopes of reaching a telephone. But between you and that phone are some of the meanest Shufflepuckers in the galaxy — and they want to play.

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

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Waifu Wednesday: Whim

Who doesn’t love a good maid? Everyone loves a good maid. And the only thing that can make a good maid even better is if she’s 1) a bit cheeky and 2) a manifestation of spiritual, elemental energy in service of the resident ojou-sama.

Well, okay, there are other things that can make a good maid even better, but if we get into that we’ll be here all day. So for the sake of today’s celebration of awesome female characters in gaming, let’s assume all of the above is true, and let me introduce you to Whim.

Whim is an water-attuned Mana who serves Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy’s resident lovestruck princess, Lilianne “Lily” Valendorf, and forms part of the main cast of playable characters in male protagonist Raze’s route. Let’s take a closer look!

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short;Play: Test Drive Unlimited

I latched on to the Test Drive series pretty early in my life, because it allowed child-Pete the opportunity to pretend that he was driving a real car. This is something that child-Pete was very excited about.

The series has experimented with a variety of different structures and formats over the years, but it finally became what child-Pete (and adult-Pete) always wanted it to be with the advent of 2006’s Test Drive Unlimited, released for PlayStation 2, Xbox 360 and PSP.

Check out the Xbox 360 version in action in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

The Immortal: How To Kill Your Wizard

If you are a glutton for punishment, or just feel that modern video games are a touch on the easy and/or fair side for you, it’s high time you checked out Will Harvey’s classic 1990 title, The Immortal.

As it happens, at the time of writing it’s just become easily accessible in not one, but two different places: you can now play the NES version as part of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and the Mega Drive version appears as part of the Piko Interactive Collection 1 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system.

It’s the latter version we’ll be focusing on today, but expect similar amounts of death in both. Roll up your sleeves, and let’s get mortal.

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Atari A to Z: Yogi’s Great Escape

Yogi Bear is, it is said, smarter than the average bear. He was certainly smart enough to find himself in several licensed games for a variety of home computer platforms in the early ’90s.

Here’s the Atari 8-bit version of Yogi’s Great Escape, a platform game that we’ve previously seen on the Atari ST A to Z series already. While technically inferior, the 8-bit version actually plays quite a bit better, with tight controls and clear mechanics that make it surprisingly enjoyable to play.

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

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Around the Network

Hello friends, and welcome to another week of battling off the Deadly Virus by sitting around at home playing video games.

I’m a little late on this again, I know, but I had a busy weekend — Saturday was taken up with socialisation (well, to a mild degree — my wife had some friends over and I occasionally slipped out to say hello and eat barbecue between Castlevania sessions) and Sunday was all video-making. It’s all done and dusted now, though, leaving me free to 1) finish Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy and 2) write!

So, with that in mind, let’s take a moment to see what you might have missed in the last week or so.

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Super Painter: Simpler Times

The platform game genre has been around for many years at this point, and, like most other types of games, it has gradually increased in complexity as time has passed.

That hasn’t always been for the better, however. While the shift to 3D with titles such as Super Mario 64 was praised as a huge leap forwards for gaming as a medium, as time continued to tick onwards, a lot of developers felt the need to continually increase the things a player had to think about while they were playing. Eventually we ended up with Rare’s Donkey Kong 64, a game that, while not bad as such, had diluted the simple pleasures of the genre so much with its myriad collectibles that a lot of people bounced right off it.

So sometimes it’s nice to return to simpler times. Times when platform games unfolded on a single screen at a time, and required you to do nothing more than reach a particular point, collect all the things on screen or, perhaps, paint every inch of the level in a particular colour. Enter Super Painter from Retro Souls, part of the Mega Cat Studios Collection cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming platform.

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Atari A to Z Flashback: International Soccer

It’s time for another sports game! Hooray, hoorah, hooroo!

This time around, we’re looking at International Soccer for Atari 2600, which is one of Mattel’s numerous M Network cartridges. If you’ve not come across these before, these were ports of games from Mattel’s Intellivision console, often scaled down a little bit to fit the limited hardware of the Atari 2600.

International Soccer is based on the officially licensed NASL Soccer for Intellivision, and it’s a game for the very patient retro gamer. Find out more in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy – Doing New Game Plus Right

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Once you beat Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy once, you could quite feasibly leave it behind and feel like you’ve had a good experience. You’ll have enjoyed a 40-50 hour RPG, and you’ll have seen the story wrap up in a satisfactory manner.

It doesn’t have to end there, though. There’s a second protagonist to play through as, and while that protagonist passes through the same dungeons as the first over the course of the game, their core narrative is completely different and they have a whole other supporting cast — and, this being an Atelier game, they have their own unique items to craft, too.

For some people, being asked to play through a whole RPG again is a hard sell, though — even if said replay offers mostly new experiences. How can you convince people to keep playing after the credits have rolled for the first time? Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy provides a great example of how a good New Game Plus mode can keep players engaged in the long term without feeling like you’re retreading old ground.

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