Real ones
Games I adore.
108 Games
It truly is Marvelous. Instantly my new favourite Zelda game. Forgoes dungeons & combat, and instead focuses on exploration, puzzles and Warioware adjacent minigames. Manages to be wholly unrepetitive through a focus on introducing new scenarios and rewarding experimentation. Boggles the absolute fucking mind that this wasn't localised officially, immoral of Nintendo to keep such a secret. Grab the fan translation!
holy fuck
Every single line of dialogue in this game fills me with pure unbridled joy.
There isn't a miss.
There isn't a miss.
more games like this please I fucking beg you
Reach out and touch your computer monitor. It's warm, like flesh. But it is not flesh. Not yet.
The story behind the development of this game is rather cute, much of which is outlined in the wonderful design document it comes packaged with. Development started in 1993 for the MSX as a hobbyist undertaking and reached a presentable state around 1997, where it was intended to be shown off at Comiket. Sadly, Ikushi Togo's disk drive crashed, causing a dramatic loss of the machine language source code and other data. After a lull of many years where Tarotica Voo Doo would lay dormant, an old demo rom was eventually showcased at Comiket in 2014 and received such tremendous support and praise, the developer realised he had to see the game through. Rather than taking the comparatively easy route and developing the game with more modern tools, they instead stuck to their guns and rewrote the game completely from scratch, once again for the MSX.
A self-imposed challenge that paid dividends - Tarotica Voo Doo operates under its hardware restrictions with such clear clarity of intent, filled with design quirks rare and unseen in games old and new. Where the visual style is indeed crude; being the product of mouse-drawn pixel art, it complements the uniquely tactile control scheme to the point where it feels like flicking through charming flipbook animations - watching the mansion map fill out in the same vein as a growing doodle on a bored schoolkid’s workbook margin. The developer has expressed that they find games less interesting when actions are automated, and Tarotica Voo Doo’s puzzling and combat incorporates an utterly fascinating control scheme that demands deliberate movement and interaction. It’s no surprise to me that the developer has their eyes on getting a project to the Playmate system.
I wanted to be a little vague, this is a 2-hour game that deserves to be played and appreciated. I swear to god I think this mansion has left an imprint on me.
A self-imposed challenge that paid dividends - Tarotica Voo Doo operates under its hardware restrictions with such clear clarity of intent, filled with design quirks rare and unseen in games old and new. Where the visual style is indeed crude; being the product of mouse-drawn pixel art, it complements the uniquely tactile control scheme to the point where it feels like flicking through charming flipbook animations - watching the mansion map fill out in the same vein as a growing doodle on a bored schoolkid’s workbook margin. The developer has expressed that they find games less interesting when actions are automated, and Tarotica Voo Doo’s puzzling and combat incorporates an utterly fascinating control scheme that demands deliberate movement and interaction. It’s no surprise to me that the developer has their eyes on getting a project to the Playmate system.
I wanted to be a little vague, this is a 2-hour game that deserves to be played and appreciated. I swear to god I think this mansion has left an imprint on me.
The word "scoundrel" clings to you like a dying lover. Slave to a thousand metas - power, to you, is not a means but an end. People talk about you behind your back, but what is the gossip of worms to an Eagle?
The one thing Qix truly needed was prisoners of war. This is a childhood fav I return to every so often - a simple premise done stylishly! If you don't find slicing airships apart with a large pair of scissors cathartic I don't even want to know you.
3 Comments
I'm u
Thanks for writing detailed reasons for the entries in this list. Always appreciate it when people do that in their "my fav games" lists.
Fernabo
7 months ago