19 reviews liked by KanjiCRT


Been wanting to play this for years, albeit more as a fan of the PS1 title Overblood (which was made by the same folks behind this) than someone delving into the history of 90s survival horror games. It's also my first time playing a 3DO game, and hopefully I'll be doing more of that in the future now that I've got the 4DO emulator.

This game's quite cool, though it's funny how short it is. I always assumed people were sorta exaggerating when talking about its length, but no, it's a really brisk game you can beat in an hour. Admittedly, that's also something of a feather in its cap since you don't have to invest so much time into it, whether on your first go or upon replays.

It's got a variety of neat tactile puzzles where you examine the environment and use items you pick up to solve problems; I'm a sucker for those kinds of puzzles in adventure games, which is partially why I gravitate more towards the fully 3D style of 90s adventure gaming where this sort of thing was fairly common.

The only thing I don't really like is that the base framerate is maddeningly slow. I normally don't care about slow framerate, especially in games that are already sedate to begin with. But depending on the room you're in, the game can chug so hard that it makes trying to turn or move around an absolute arseache. I had to resort to overclocking the CPU after a few minutes just so I wasn't getting frustrated at the slog.

On a more positive note, playing this helped me to appreciate how Overblood basically carried over a lot of what this game was doing (even down to the different camera types you can switch between to better navigate places), and expanded on those ideas with the dual-character setup, a more in-depth plot, scenarios where you have to respond in time, and combat encounters.

It's a cool little adventure game, and one I'm chuffed to have finally gotten round to. : )

You had to be there (mid 2000s)

as a long time salaried office worker, it's almost perverse how much catharsis i gained from lifting and moving crates. i imagine this is the same appeal as a dude ranch had to people 30 years my senior.

the scope of shenmue is unreasonable - it knows it, and i love it for it.

extravagent spritework, boppin ost, huge variety of single and multiplayer modes only serve to reinforce what i have finally accepted to be the truth:

i fuckin suck at bomberman

Really fun game all the way through. Creative puzzles and charming dialogue, great graphics and catchy soundtrack. Nintendo did not milk it into becoming a 35 year long franchise, and that's a good thing, but it should have gotten a release everywhere! The game deserves it.

A barebones WWII third/first person shooter that seems to be going for something tactical but I think the draw distance gets in the way. It's a very short distance to the all encompassing fog and most enemy encounters are you staring at the fog waiting for the silhouette of an enemy to appear. It's very possible that I did not understand how to play the game though, as I had to turn it down to easy to make any progress.

This game is fucking insane, it just keeps going deeper and deeper, I don't even think I hit the bottom of the rabbit hole but I'm satisfied saying I "finished" the game at the point I've hit.

A neat little Game boy shmup that lets you jump between two layers. If you press select on the title screen, you can choose between three playable ships. This just alters where your powered up shots go though. I like that it uses a health bar instead of lives because you can take different amounts of damage, and recover health from one of the powerups. It does run into the sprite limits on the game boy though, and occasionally something important might turn invisible. It also features two anime girls so this is a must play.

Alan wake repeatedly does a bunch of errands for several women until the errands do themselves. You cannot drive a car.

I have never played the TCG despite having tons of the cards as a kid, so I learned how to play through this game. I wasn't all that impressed with it. I don't really understand the obsession with using coin flips for almost every move. It seems like the pace is often dictated by your opening hand. The outcome of a fight was either an easy win or quick loss, and most of the time it sided on the easy win. There was just one close fight I had near the end of the game that was pretty fun. The presentation was good, but no world to explore left it feeling like a small game compared to other pokemon games.