John    Stylistically, I’m not as smitten with Deathsmiles as I am with Akai Katana. What can I say, I’m just not into sexualized preteens and teenage girls Honestly though, across the dozen or so unique half-hour playthroughs, there were only one or two skeezy scenes, but hey, one is too many, right?...

John    As a kid of the 1990s, games like those included in the Raiden Fighters Aces compilation are what come to mind when I think of shoot em ups. The three games included display an adherence to 2D pixel graphics, when in the mid to late 1990s, at the time of their release, 3D polygonal visuals &...

John    We’ve all done things we’re not proud of. We’re human, after all. For achievement and trophy hunters, there are plenty of temptations. Nowadays, games whose rewards are not hard-earned are bountiful. Take Pacific Wings, for instance. It’s a shameless clone of Capcom’s 1942, developed Sprakelsoft, a...

John    Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. An indie developer gets their start making and publishing digital games for the Wii U. Yeah, I never heard that one either, but apparently that’s just what happened with Petite Games, the maker of Super Destronaut DX and Super Destronaut: Land Wars. Clearly...

John    You know that feeling when you’ve just finished a movie or book and feel like you had some grasp of what happened, but know another round would benefit you’re comprehension immensely? Well, Nier: Automata sure as hell produced that feeling in me I’d heard this game lauded for its story and...

John    As someone who browses the video game section nearly every time I enter a Walmart or Target (sorry honey), I know from experience that the former never really puts games on clearance. Heck, in the year of our lord 2021, the closest Walmart to me STILL has a few licensed PlayStation 2 games. And...

John    Looking back, it’s been approximately eight years since I played the Resistance games. Like most games, I missed their time in the spotlight, but hey, they were still worth playing. The trilogy of Insomniac developed first-person shooters marked a tone shift from the developer best known at that...

John    It’s amazing what comes into your mind when you just stop and think, huh? For instance, just a few nights ago I was thinking about Akai Katana, the bullet hell shoot em up I’d been playing on the Xbox 360. I first dabbled with it back in September, after thrilling sessions with Mars Matrix caused...

John    Although my playthrough of Phantasy Star II sputtered to an end well before that game’s completion, my appetite for an older JRPG hadn’t been satiated. There was no shortage of such game on the Sega Genesis Classics compilation I was playing, and with most of them still new to me, I decided to...

John    I won’t lie. After more than forty hours with Picross: Lord of the Nazarick, I still have no idea what’s up with Overlord, the game’s underlying source material. In fairness, I’ve been slowly whittling away the more than 500 picture crossword puzzles for over a year, so of course the brief text...