MoeGamer Awards 2019

The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: The “I’m Definitely Going to Get Around to This in 2020” Award

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The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards I’ve devised in collaboration with the community to celebrate the sorts of things that never get celebrated in end-of-year roundups! Find out more here — and feel free to leave a suggestion on that post if you have any good ideas! We’re fast running out of time for this year, but leave a suggestion anyway and I might use it next year!

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To quote a now sadly defunct group of gamers of which I used to be a member: “Games of Shame. You know you have them. They sit in your closet, collecting dust: little jewels that you always tell yourself you are going to play, but never get around to.”

Part of the reason MoeGamer is a thing at all is a continuation of what this group, known as the Squadron of Shame, was known for: deliberately delving into the overlooked and underappreciated games from both yesterday and today, and playing the crap out of them until we could talk about them in detail.

As someone with an absolutely enormous… backlog, I have quite a few games that I’m absolutely dying to write about. But one in particular keeps mocking me from my shelf… and by golly, I’m going to make 2020 the year in which I actually knuckle down and crack on with it!

And the winner is…

Continue reading The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: The “I’m Definitely Going to Get Around to This in 2020” Award →

Videos, Warriors All-Stars, Warriors Wednesday

Warriors Wednesday: Hungry Hungry Horo – Warriors All-Stars #10

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Darius is hungry, and the only cure for that is, of course, the cooking of a local village that has recently been raided by bandits.

Naturally, they want their food retrieving first, so the Warriors gladly agree to help out, secure in the knowledge that doing so will allow them to add another thousand or two kills to their respective counts… but they didn’t count on the presence of a mysterious and very hungry young woman.

Horo, of Toukiden fame, is ready for action… and dinner. Can our heroes keep up with her?

Announcements, Community

A Very Merry Christmas (2019 Edition)

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It’s Christmas! And with that in mind, there’s nothing too substantial coming up on the site today — there is an episode of Warriors Wednesday currently rendering, though, so please look forward to that.

It’s been a wonderful year for both MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, and I wanted to take the opportunity to thank each and every one of you reading this, because if you are reading this, chances are that on at least one occasion during the course of the last year, you’ve read something else on this site, watched a video or otherwise helped me out with one of my various creative projects. And for that, I’m massively grateful.

Since it’s obligatory to reflect on the year just passed and the upcoming year when doing this sort of thing, join me after the jump and we’ll do just that.

Continue reading A Very Merry Christmas (2019 Edition) →

MoeGamer Awards 2019

The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: Best Girl 2019

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The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards I’ve devised in collaboration with the community to celebrate the sorts of things that never get celebrated in end-of-year roundups! Find out more here — and feel free to leave a suggestion on that post if you have any good ideas!

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With the visual novels of the decade and the games of the decade out of the way, it’s time to focus on the really important matters: who was the Best Girl of the games I played and covered here on MoeGamer in 2019?

Everyone’s definition of Best Girl is, of course, very different, so I will preface this with the usual disclaimer that this is solely my opinion, and you are free to share your own personal Best Girl 2019 in the comments. In fact, I’d welcome it! I always love to hear why particular characters are important to people; it makes for some great stories.

Anyway, there were definitely a lot of contenders for the title this year, what with the vast majority of the games I explored having predominantly female casts. But by my own self-imposed rules, I have to pick one…

And the winner is…

Continue reading The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: Best Girl 2019 →

Videos

Atari A to Z: Scooter

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We tend to think of the idea of established, recognisable “star developers” in gaming as something of a recent thing, but back in the ’80s there were a bunch of programmers who became pretty well-known, for better or worse!

One such developer was Frank Cohen, a prolific game maker who was quite noteworthy for the fact that his games had a certain amount of “consistency” to them. This was partly due to his fondness for reusing assets such as sprites, but they also had quite a distinctive “feel” to them.

One of Cohen’s more enjoyable games for me personally was Scooter,  a game that initially appears to be little more than an oblique perspective take on Pac-Man, but which gradually reveals itself to have a variety of interesting things going on.

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

MoeGamer Awards 2019

The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: Ten Years, Ten Games

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The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards I’ve devised in collaboration with the community to celebrate the sorts of things that never get celebrated in end-of-year roundups! Find out more here — and feel free to leave a suggestion on that post if you have any good ideas!

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It is, as we’ve already said, the end of a decade. And, as you know, this makes it an ideal time to look back over the last ten years and figure out what experiences were the “best”.

Once again, like the awards for the last decade of visual novels, I’m not interested in the games that were the most critically acclaimed, the ones that sold the most or indeed the ones that are most commonly agreed to be “games of the year” for their respective year of release.

Instead, I’m going to pick out one game for each year of (English language) release that I found personally significant for one reason or another. I’d love to hear your own feelings on this, too, so feel free to share in the comments!

And the winners are…

Continue reading The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: Ten Years, Ten Games →

Announcements, Community

Around the Network

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Good evening everyone! I hope you’ve had a pleasant weekend and have got all your Christmas shopping done.

I got sorted a long time ago thanks to the wonder of Amazon. Ahh, remember the good old days when we had to brave holiday season town centres to pick up presents we weren’t sure people actually wanted? I do, and that is one piece of the past I’m in no particular hurry to return to, as nostalgic as I can be at times!

Anyway. Business continues as usual here on MoeGamer even in the run-up to the holidays, so let’s check out what you might have missed!

Continue reading Around the Network →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Breakout

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Bip! Boop! Bip! Boop! It’s an iconic sound of the late ’70s: a computerised simulation of some sort of bat-and-ball game. And few games of this type are more classic or influential than Breakout.

The Atari 2600 version of Breakout offers a variety of ways to play, including several multiplayer modes. This technically made the home console version a superior experience to the arcade machine… which is a phenomenon we wouldn’t really encounter again until roughly the Dreamcast era.

Anyway, Breakout for 2600 is a good time, particularly if you’ve got some friends to play with. If you’re flying solo, Super Breakout may be a better choice… but that’s a story for another day!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Cover Games, Pokémon Sword and Shield

Pokémon Sword and Shield: The People of Galar

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header-6-2861792This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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One thing that it’s always quite easy to forget about Pokémon is the fact that it not only features tons of the eponymous monsters… it also has people in it, too. And they have plenty of their own stories to tell.

Pokémon Sword and Shield may not appear to be quite as overdramatic in terms of “stakes” as some previous installments in the series — at least, not until the delightfully over-the-top finale — but it definitely has something to say, and its setting is quite relevant to this, too.

Specifically, the games have quite a bit to say about the nature of fame, the cult of celebrity and what a struggle a life in the spotlight can really bring, as desirable as it might seem from an idealised perspective.

Continue reading Pokémon Sword and Shield: The People of Galar →

Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Marathon, Videos

Final Fantasy Marathon: The Labyrinth of Time – Final Fantasy I #25

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The end is in sight… but there’s one more endgame challenge before we can finish this thing: The Labyrinth of Time!

This dungeon was added in the PSP version of Final Fantasy, and suggests that you forget everything you thought you knew about the world. And this is good advice; you’ll be doing things in here that you don’t do anywhere else in the game!

It’s one of the most satisfying challenges in all of Final Fantasy, and while some might argue that the fact it was added in 2007 means it’s not “authentic” to the original, it’s certainly a whole lot of fun! Let’s do this.

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