Tag Archives: PC

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Delving Into...

Delving Into Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown – #1

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I’ve been playing a lot of Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown since it released the other day. And I wanted to talk about it a bit!

I’ve elected to use the “Delving Into” format, because that also provides a suitable framework for me to explore (and revisit) the rest of the series along the way, too. For the unfamiliar, my “Delving Into” pieces are more immediate, personal reactions to games or series I want to explore over the long term, but which don’t really fit into the Cover Game structure.

Each article will focus on a particular aspect of the overall experience, or something that I’ve found otherwise noteworthy. Let’s kick off today with my impressions of the game’s overall sense of style, based on my playthrough of the single-player campaign up to mission 17 so far.

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Atelier Arland Trilogy, Cover Games

Atelier Totori: Arland’s Middle Child

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cropped-atelier-header-3938584This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland, the second installment in Atelier’s Arland trilogy, is in that unenviable position that all “middle children” end up in — perhaps more so than most.

Originally offering considerable improvements over Atelier Rorona’s first incarnation — particularly in the graphical and mechanical departments — Gust’s tendency to put out “Plus” versions for its Atelier games means that Totori has ended up, in some respects, now being the most dated of the Arland trilogy even once it, in turn, got its own “Plus” and “DX” rereleases, the most recent of which is on PlayStation 4, Switch and PC.

This isn’t to say Totori is a bad game, mind you — far from it. Just… don’t take anything for granted! Let’s have a closer look.

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Split/Second, Sunday Driving, Videos

Sunday Driving: Rigged to Blow – Split/Second #1

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I fancied a bit of a change from OutRun this week, so I present to you one of my all-time favourite arcade racers: Split/Second, developed by Black Rock and published by Disney.

Split/Second is a tragic tale, really; it was a spectacularly good game that came out at a bad time, had no marketing whatsoever and consequently flopped so badly that Black Rock had to close down and Disney stopped doing anything interesting like unusual cinematic arcade racers ever again. Booo.

Still, at least Split/Second still exists, and we can still enjoy it for ourselves, so let’s do just that!

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OutRun 2006, Sunday Driving, Videos

Sunday Driving: Sega Blue Skies – OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast #1

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It’s time to start our engines and kick off a new series of Sunday Driving.

This time around, we’ll be exploring Sega and Sumo Digital’s wonderful OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, which you may recall is a game that I am a big fan of.

This is a classic racer that I’ve been meaning to revisit for quite some time now, so what better time than the present to jump back into an officially licensed Ferrari (from before Sega lost the license) and set course for the distant horizon?

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Essentials, Puzzlers, Shmups

Shmup Essentials: Murasaki

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As we’ve discussed on numerous previous occasions, the shoot ’em up genre is a lot more diverse than you might think.

Over the years, we’ve seen this initially straightforward genre blossom into something that encompasses a wide variety of distinct mechanics: the precise navigation of danmaku games, the pattern recognition and twitch reflexes of twin-stick shooters, the emphasis on memorisation and “risk versus reward” of Gradius-style games and plenty more besides.

One of the most interesting ways in which developers have experimented with the genre as a whole is through combining it with other genres. To date we’ve seen attempts to blend it with fighting games (such as the Suguri series), platform games (such as Rabi-Ribi) and even puzzle games. Murasaki, a 2014 release from Japanese doujin circle Katatema, falls into the latter category.

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Cover Games, Evenicle

Evenicle: Introduction and First Impressions

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cropped-evenicle-header-2828638This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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Alicesoft was a developer that wasn’t really on my radar before I played the English releases of Rance 5D and Rance VI, and chances are if you haven’t explored eroge in any great detail you may not be overly familiar with them either.

However, between the Rance games and my experiences with Evenicle so far, I’m very comfortable with saying that they are an excellent developer that any fans of high-quality enjoyable RPGs with interesting mechanics, solid narratives and extremely memorable characters would do well to check out. Particularly if you’re keen for your games to actually treat you like an adult — and I’m not just talking about sexual content here.

So what is Evenicle? Let’s take a closer look.

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Sunday Driving, Videos

Sunday Driving: Blur – Powered-Up Racing

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Following some discussion on the podcast recently, I decided to revisit some old favourite arcade racers, including Bizarre Creations’ swansong Blur.

For the uninitiated, this “powered up racer” features a delightful blend of real-world cars and locales with purely fantastic, neon-coloured power-ups. This makes the racing enormously aggressive and a huge amount of fun, and it’s a crying shame that Activision completely failed to market the game effectively.

But, well, the game still exists, so I’m damn well going to play it and enjoy it, and you can join me for the ride! Hit the jump for the first part of this new video series.

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Hundred Honeys, Waifu Wednesday

Waifu Wednesday: Another Hundred Honeys Update

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It’s actually been a little while since I had a play around with the excellent Honey Select Unlimited, so I thought tonight I’d settle down and make some more Honeys.

In case you haven’t stumbled across this idle little project before, my goal here is relatively simple: keep building Honeys and incorporating them into a scene until the included Studio app that comes with Honey Select Unlimited won’t let me add any more. Or my computer catches fire, whichever one comes first.

So far things have been going quite well, and there’s a few more additions to the harem today.

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One-Shots

Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God – A Mysterious and Fragrant Dungeon

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Japan’s most commonly seen take on the popular roguelike RPG subgenre — typically referred to as “Mystery Dungeon” games after the Chunsoft series that cemented the formula — is a little different from how we tackle our dungeon-delving here in the West.

Mystery Dungeon-style games have been developed by a wide variety of companies over the years, and the formula is straightforward and versatile enough that it’s been applied to all manner of franchises ranging from Pokemon to Etrian Odyssey as well as a number of original creations.

Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God from Compile Heart and Idea Factory takes Compile’s venerable Madou Monogatari series — that which ultimately begat the much more well known Puyo Puyo puzzle empire — and reimagines it for the Mystery Dungeon age. The result is an accessible and enjoyable game that is a great introduction to this style of RPG.

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One-Shots

Lily’s Day Off: The Visual Novel, Condensed

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If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve indulged in a visual novel or two in your time. Perhaps they’re even a primary form of entertainment for you.

Those of you who have explored the medium to some extent have doubtless discovered that there isn’t really any such thing as a “typical” visual novel — some, like Dharker Studio’s Negligee, are effectively short stories designed to be enjoyed over the course of no more than a couple of hours, even if they have multiple endings or routes. Others, like the wonderful Grisaia and Fate/stay night, can take a hundred hours or more to see through to completion.

Sometimes, you want the experience of a visual novel’s approach to interactive multimedia storytelling without having to devote a significant proportion of your life to enjoying it. Sometimes you want something that will just entertain you for an evening but still give you the sense that you’ve “completed” something. Sometimes a game like Lily’s Day Off is exactly what the doctor ordered.

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