Tag Archives: gaming

Final Fantasy Marathon: Climb Every Mountain – Final Fantasy III #3

The adventure continues, and now everyone has a capital-J Job!

Yes, having defeated the dread djinn in the previous episode and proven themselves as worthy Warrior of Light candidates, our group of four plucky heroes sets out on their journey proper. Along the way, they have plenty of things to deal with: a big rock, a crying woman, a mountain full of scary beasties… and a big ol’ dragon!

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

Atari A to Z Flashback: Frog Pond

A fair few titles in the early days of gaming were shameless clones of other companies’ work.

Atari’s Frog Pond, a game that ended up not being released because Atari wasn’t willing to spring for a monster 8K cartridge for a “children’s game”, was a clone of Mattel’s Frog Bog for Intellivision (which ended up being ported to 2600 as Frogs and Flies), which in turn was a clone of Sega’s arcade title Frogs.

And they say originality is dead. Well, yes. It appears to have been dead for a very long time indeed! Don’t let that stop you checking out this video, though — and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

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Around the Network

Hello everyone! Hope you’re all having as pleasant a weekend as can be expected under the current circumstances.

It’s gone warm and summery here, but to be honest this is my least favourite kind of weather because I do not deal well with being too hot. It’s time to get all the windows open and get the fans blowing, I guess.

Anyway, enough of that very British babbling on about the weather; let’s take a look at what you might have missed in the last week.

Continue reading Around the Network

Final Fantasy Marathon: High-Intensity Stat Training – Final Fantasy II #21

Sometimes, you know you’re just not up to the job. And you know that you have two choices at that point: give up, or work hard to overcome the obstacles in your path.

Minwu and company decide to take the latter path. Interestingly enough, they manage to take down Ultima Weapon with relatively little difficulty, but as soon as they set foot in the strange inverted form of Pandaemonium, they get their arses kicked again.

Clearly some training is in order. And in Final Fantasy II land, I’m sure you know what that means. Let’s get it over with!

short;Play – Lonely Mountains: Downhill

I really like Lonely Mountains: Downhill, as you’ll know if you’ve read my writeup on it.

It’s a wonderfully chilled game in its early stages, but also offers some stiff dexterity challenges for those who want to push themselves on its later courses. The whole thing is held together with a delicious low-poly/papercraft-style aesthetic and some of the best ambient sounds I’ve ever heard.

If you wanted to see how it actually plays, well, I’ve got the video just for you right here! Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 38 – ATTACK MAGIC ITEM BURST

As my house gradually returns to normal from the building site it has been turned into, we find some time between the noise of sanding and angle grinding to record a new episode of the podcast — as always, featuring both myself and Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels!

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!

Or you can just hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer.

Continue reading The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 38 – ATTACK MAGIC ITEM BURST

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon – Enhanced Nostalgia

Part of my intention behind my Delving Into series focusing on Castlevania was to get a solid understanding of the classic franchise before jumping into Koji Igarashi’s Kickstarter-funded Bloodstained project.

While I’m not all the way through the classic games at the time of writing, I do feel like I’m at an adequate point where I can start looking at the two Bloodstained games and be able to analyse their similarities and differences from classic-formula Castlevania.

So let’s begin today with a look at Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, a spinoff title developed by Inti Creates, designed more in the mould of Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse than the more recent, post-Symphony of the Night open-structure 2D platformer incarnations.

Continue reading Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon – Enhanced Nostalgia

Atari ST A to Z: Gremlins 2

Something something don’t feed them after midnight, get them wet or whatever.

Yep, Gremlins was a big ol’ thing back in the 8- and 16-bit days, and there were a fair few video game adaptations across different platforms. I think my personal favourite is the Atari 8-bit game, but that’s one of the few remaining games out there that doesn’t seem to play nice with emulation, so I’ve held off making a video on it for now.

Elite’s adaptation of Gremlins 2: The New Batch for Atari ST, meanwhile was… well, it’s not bad, but it is monstrously difficult, so good luck seeing any more than the first few screens, as I discovered while filming this!

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Waifu Wednesday: Iris Fortner

Fun fact: in contrast to the rest of the Atelier series, Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm is the only game in the Iris trilogy in which the title character is playable.

In Atelier Iris: Eternal ManaIris is a mysterious figure from the past. In Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of DestinyIris is a mysterious small child who may or may not be the same Iris who was a mysterious figure from the past in Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. But in Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm, Iris is not only right there from the outset, but she’s actually the one who runs the atelier itself.

Okay, she’s not the lead protagonist in terms of who you control on the game’s field screens, but she is the most important person in the narrative. She’s also thoroughly lovely, so let’s explore her character further!

Continue reading Waifu Wednesday: Iris Fortner

Why I Don’t “Review” Games

I have a few things lined up to write about, but I saw an interesting discussion online earlier today, so I thought it would be something worth talking about.

It’s a discussion that seems to have continued in perpetuity ever since the earliest days of gaming media, so regardless of whether you’re reading this at the time of writing or a few years down the line, I suspect it will remain relevant.

I’d like to talk about why I don’t consider myself to “review” games in the traditional manner — and why, from the very beginning here at MoeGamer, I have not made use of any sort of summative system such as percentage scores or star ratings. Let’s talk about that!

Continue reading Why I Don’t “Review” Games