Tag Archives: 3D platformer

One-Shots

Tasomachi: Behind the Twilight – The Joy of Exploration

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The Steam Game Festival is underway at the time of writing. This is an event where developers show off their upcoming games by releasing exclusive time-limited demos — and there are some real belters out there this year.

Over on Rice Digital, I picked out five of my favourite demos from this year’s Festival that are well worth your time. I kind of want to talk more about all of them, but I’ll take them one at a time — starting with probably the one I found the most striking.

Tasomachi: Behind the Twilight, also known as Tasogare ni nemuru machi (A City Sleeping in Twilight), is a 3D platformer with a gorgeous soft-edged visual style and some intriguing exploration-based gameplay. And I love what I’ve seen so far.

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One-Shots, Switch

A Hat in Time: Hat the Nipper

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Despite what anyone who has ever worked in the teaching profession (including myself) might tell you, children are not inherently evil.

They’re not inherently good either, mind you, and that’s what potentially makes them interesting as characters. Particularly characters in some form of interactive media where you get to explore the consequences of “good” and “bad” behaviour in various contexts.

Among other things, A Hat in Time is a joyful exploration of what it means to be a child. A child who has their own spaceship and is clearly a lot more 1) intelligent and 2) affluent than they might let on, but a child nonetheless. Let’s explore this strange and wonderful world through the eyes of the one and only Hat Kid.

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Cover Games, Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog: A New Twist

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Sonic Generations rather ably demonstrated how the Sonic series’ gameplay had evolved over the years… but where could it go from there?

Certain members of Sonic Team were already contemplating this by the time Sonic Colours had completed development and work on Generations was underway. The concept grew from experimental attempts to make use of the Nintendo 3DS’ unique features, and the subsequent announcement of the Wii U console and the interesting possibilities it offered prompted Sega to focus the new game’s development on Nintendo platforms.

The result was Sonic Lost World; an unusual, highly creative and vastly underappreciated installment in the series, and one that would prove to be an ideal fit for Nintendo platforms. (As always, today we’ll be focusing on the home console version for Wii U rather than Dimps’ handheld incarnation.)

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Cover Games, Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog: Erinaceidae of Colour

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After 2008’s entertaining but divisive Sonic Unleashed, it would be another two years before we’d see the next mainline Sonic the Hedgehog game.

There were two versions of Sonic Colours developed, both of which remembered to put the “U” in for the European version: a Wii-exclusive version that combined 2D and 3D gameplay in the way we’d come to know from “modern Sonic“, and a side-scrolling Nintendo DS version developed by Dimps that was closer in execution to the original Mega Drive games.

Today we’ll be focusing on the Wii version, though anyone who has played a Dimps-developed Sonic game will know the DS version will also be well worth your time. I’ll leave that for you to explore yourself for now, however… we’ve got one hell of a vacation to go on!

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Cover Games, Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog: The Age of Adventure

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Sonic’s earliest forays into 3D are, today, popularly regarded as where things started going “wrong” for the blue blur.

But this is one of those viewpoints that has become so ingrained in popular gaming culture that many people simply take it for granted without actually checking the games out for themselves to determine whether those claims have any veracity to them.

That, as you know, is not what we’re all about here on MoeGamer, so let us make that jump into the third dimension and see exactly what’s up.

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