8-Bit Adventure Anthology (Volume One): The Throwback With Bounce Ability

Posted on October 12, 2017 by geelw

Adventure game fans of old will really appreciate this one, a triple threat of classics set to be re-released by Absolution Games in the form of 8-Bit Adventure Anthology (Volume One), coming October 31 to Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. No fancy updated visuals here (other than what looks like sharper cover art) for the three titles included.

So, what’s in that set, you’re asking? Well, let’s WALK up to the DOOR and take a PEEK inside:

The 8-Bit Adventure Anthology (Volume One) includes these classic games:

Shadowgate™: The wind whistles through the silent halls as you step through the stone threshold. You’ve just entered Shadowgate, a once shining castle, now an evil, dark moldering ruin. Swallow your fear and take up your torch. You are the ‘Seed of Prophecy’ and in your hands lies the fate of the world itself.

The Uninvited™: The last thing you remember was a figure appearing in the middle of the road and the sound of your sister’s screams over the screeching tires. When you come to, you discover two horrifying things: your sister is missing and the mansion that now looms before you seems to be calling your name…

Déjà Vu™: It’s 1942 and you wake up in a seedy bathroom with no idea how you got here or, for that matter, who you are. You grab a .38 hanging on the door, stumble up the stairs and find some stiff slumped over a desk with three bullet holes in him. You check your gun. Three bullets are missing. This is gonna be a bad day.

Yep, I can hear your brains all clicking into place now (well, those of you who recall playing these on PC or the NES back in the day). How about some screenshots to get you grinning? Okay, LOOK:

Pricing hasn’t been set yet, but I’m betting a few of you will be ignoring those Trick or Treaters just so you can camp out at home with the lights down low as you click away at solving and surviving the mysteries and assorted deathtraps that await. Well, that’s my plan and I’m sticking to it. While it won’t be a HIT with the kids ringing my doorbell, I’ll feel better knowing I’m not responsible for any cavities in the not to distant future.

-GW

Review: NeverEnd (PS Vita)

Posted on October 10, 2017 by geelw

Indie developer/publisher Sometimes You also ports and distributes some interestingly nostalgic budget indie games for PC and consoles that aren’t perfect, but provide a bit of fun and challenge at a decent price point. Developed by Duck Devs, NeverEnd is a decent, simple looking top-down rogue-like/lite 3D pixel single player dungeon crawler (say that three times fast!) that’s influenced a tiny bit by The Legend of Zelda (without the overworld sections) with a tricky combat system that relies not only on weapon usage, but blocking and avoiding enemy attacks. While controls seem initially very clunky and off-putting, once you get the game’s mechanics and can deal with permadeath, things get much better. Granted, the game probably won’t win a ton of industry awards come the end of the year, but for $2.99 you’re getting your money’s worth and then some.

Continue reading →

Raiden V: Director’s Cut Blasts Onto PS4, PC

Posted on October 10, 2017 by geelw

Holy Cats – bullet hell pioneer Raiden is a quarter of a century old. Actually, it’s 27 if you go by purely chronological order, but I believe the series took a tiny bit of time off between installments and developer changes. Anyway, UFO Interactive and developer MOSS are finally jetting out the PS4 and Steam versions with added content (it seems Xbox One owners who got this last year are missing out) as Raiden V: Director’s Cut .

If you’re a longtime fan, well you know the drill in this arcade shmup: earth gets invaded by a fleet of alien ships and it’s up to you (solo play) and a partner (if you go co-op) to take out the trash before it blows all over the globe. Actually, those aliens end up invading a few global spaces, so it’s up to your fast reflexes and non-blinking eyes to get the job done.

Game Modes:

•Story Mode – All new story full of twists and turns! The story alters depending on your performance!
•Boss Mission – Defeat bosses under special conditions and compete in the leaderboards!
•Gallery – Dozens of character, concept, and game art waiting to be unearthed!

Features:

Tag in a friend and unleash devastation on your enemies!

Extreme Graphics – Full 1080P support to bring every explosion, missile attack, and Boss Kills to earth-shattering realism on HDTVs and monitors!

Tri-View HUD – New levels of frenetic, heart pounding, pulsing action as real-time game status changes, command center data and gameplay simultaneously update you on the action and your performance!

Fully narrated storyline for the first time in the series!

Fight your own path through a branching storyline!

Choose between three different ships to pilot, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and outfit them with nine different weapon types!

In addition to the game currently available on PSN, gog.com and Steam, you can also download some really nice free themed wallpapers for your PC here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get some eyeball exercise with a side of reflex action testing (or, I’m downloading this as we speak, folks).

-GW

ECHO on PS4: To Die For (Over and Over Again)

Posted on October 9, 2017 by geelw

ECHO_Keyart_Cube_Logo

ECHO_Keyart (Custom)

Well, any previous thoughts I had about the PS4 version of ECHO being “lesser” in visual quality from the PC version got a nice kick in the head with those lovely screenshots below arriving in my inbox. The console version drops on October 11 for a very reasonable $24.99 via PSN, but I’m betting collectors out there would snap this up as a limited edition physical version. Eh, we’ll see how this does, but friends I know who bought the PC version seem really pleased with their purchase.

“So, what’s the game about?” you ask? Well, I’ll let talented indie developer Ultra Ultra’s Game Director Martin Emborg tell you himself here. Me, I’ve got bigger fish to poach. No, seriously – I’m poaching fish for dinner tonight and I just stopped to post this before I got to my cooking. Back in a bit.

-GW

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen – The 4th Time’s The Charm (Hopefully!)

Posted on October 3, 2017 by geelw

With the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen now available (go buy it, I say), I’m trying to figure out how to get the most out of this version of the game before something else weird happens in terms of stuff going haywire on the tech front here. It seems my luck is pretty damned rotten when it comes to seeing everything the land of Gransys has to offer despite my spending something around 200+ hours with the game across every platform it’s previously been released on.

I initially started the game on the Xbox 360 and got about 3/4 through, but both the systems here died (Red Ring of Death!). Then I snapped up the PS3 version of the original and later, the Dark Arisen expansion and got through most of the game on the PS3 (acquiring one of the not so good endings) until that system expired (Yellow Light of Death!) and was stolen by the guy I sent it to for repair. After it launched, I ended up buying the enhanced Steam version only to have my laptop die before I got much time into that one and now I have a copy of the PS4 version on the way, so “what the heck is going to happen now?” has been a mantra of sorts whenever I’ve watched a trailer or other video content Capcom has posted about it.

If I didn’t have a few medical appointments coming up this month, I’d stay at home quietly holed up with the game until I completed it. But yeah, that stuff needs to be tackled so I can indeed get to work enjoying my purchase without worrying so much. Not that I’m prone to paranoia or anything, but it does make me walk a lot more carefully when I’m out and about.

Back in a bit.

-GW

The Bard’s Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled (PS4/Vita): Not A Review (Yet)

Posted on October 2, 2017 by geelw

A few years back, when I liked certain games I tended to go mildly berserk and buy a few versions of it (if it made it to multiple platforms). Hey, don’t look at me like that! I’m far from the only one who dis/does this (although I’ve cut down on that significantly over time thanks to me not exactly rolling in dough these days). Anyway, InXile Entertainment‘s The Bard’s Tale from 2004 was one of those games I snapped up on anything it appeared on thanks to its use of Snowblind Studios’ wonderful game engine and often hilarious parodying of RPG tropes including subtle nods to the original game.

Flash forward to late last month when The Bard’s Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled appeared without fanfare as a digital-only release on PSN. Ten bucks for a cross-platform HD remaster (PS4 and Vita) with a cross-buy/cross-play feature that allowed players to take the game on the road and use cloud saves to continue at home? SOLD. I didn’t hesitate at all or bother to even bug InXile about a review code. This was certainly going to be the best version of the game to date and yep, the ability to play anywhere and go home to continue was going to keep me grinning long into the wee hours. What could possibly go wrong?

Well… a few things folks. Thankfully, cross-play and cloud saves are flawless, but in terms of other things on the technical front, this version of the game (done by Square 1 Games) needs patching. Badly. I was initially going to write up a full review, but have decided to wait a few days to see if the problems can be fixed as the older console versions were great overall and this remaster needs to be as good or better in terms of consistent performance. Right now, it’s not.

Continue reading →

PS Plus October Surprises Incoming

Posted on September 28, 2017 by geelw

Well, this is nice. Given that I’ve never played Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain or the second game in the horror focused Amnesia Collection, next month’s two big PS4 freebies are making me grin in anticipation (or want to hide under the bed as the first Amnesia game on PC scared the hell out of me) The only problems are deciding what to delete from my current library as I only have a 500GB Slim model and I’m working on completing a few RPGs I don’t want to put on that digital shelf.

The other issue is it takes so long to download larger game files that we’re at the point where some titles allow you to play after they’ve downloaded a certain percentage (which is good). But seeing that “Download complete” notice something like two days later (yaaah!) makes me want nothing but discs. Except that these days, even disc games have updates that automatically queue up and download

Anyway, other FREE PlayStation Plus games this month include:

Monster Jam Battlegrounds, PS3
Hustle Kings, PS3
Hue, PS Vita (Cross Buy with PS4)
Sky Force Anniversary, PS Vita (Cross Buy with PS4 & PS3)

Of course, finding time to play the first two games will be tricky, especially with a bunch of other titles vying for attention (Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is my go-to game of the month already, but we’ll get to that in a different post).

-GW

ECHO: Death Becomes Her (Multiple Times)

Posted on September 26, 2017 by geelw

ECHO logo

ECHO_Tall

While ECHO is out now on PC, I’m really more interested in developer Ultra Ultra‘s upcoming PlayStation 4 version set to be released in October. Partially because I hate the constant upgrading of PC hardware and mostly because I’m really curious to see how the Unreal 4-powered game looks on Sony’s hardware.

Granted, looks aren’t everything in my book. Great gameplay is always going to be far more important than pretty visuals at the end of the day. But it seems the dev team here is striving for both and if that trailers above and screenshot gallery below are any indication, succeeding in their mission.

The game’s story also makes me want to dive in feet first, so I’m avoiding reading anything else about the game until I get to take it for a spin myself. That said, if everything falls into place with this one, En’s big, deadly adventure could be one of the better original IP this year

-GW

Review: The Coma: Recut (PS4)

Posted on September 25, 2017 by geelw

Ah, high school days. The loads of homework, Salisbury “steak” and canned veggies for lunch, getting shoved into lockers by bullies, and that curvy teacher you’ve got a secret crush on transforming into a hideous axe-wielding demon-thing who will try really hard to chop you to pieces after hours…

Wait, what?

Okay, that last bit is why you’ll be way up too late on a school (or work) night and all bleary-eyed and freaked out in the morning if you’re playing The Coma: Recut. This remastered version of the Korean survival-horror cult classic, The Coma: Cutting Class manages to be pretty scary stuff from developer Devespresso Games and publisher Digerati. If you’re a fan of games such as Clock Tower (both the Super Famicom original and its first sequel on the original PlayStation), this one’s well worth snapping up.

Continue reading →

Review: The Solus Project (PS4)

Posted on September 23, 2017 by geelw

Survival/Crafting games are a dime a dozen these days (or cheaper if you poke around at PC game bundle sites, heh), but a game like Teotl Studios and Grip Games’ The Solus Project manages to rise above the digital ton of games that are less “survival” oriented and more about scampering around shooting at assorted organic life with food and water meters acting like gas and oil tanks in an arcade racing game.

What’s here is a also a fine sci-fi adventure game where the environment on planet Gliese-6143-C is possibly your worst enemy, but other things can also do you in if you’re careless in your roaming. Interestingly enough, the game later dips a toe (okay, its entire being) into horror elements and the unsettling sense of dread the early exploration brings turns into moments where you might be too freaked out to take another step. That the game slides through a few genres along the way ends up being a nice touch because it’s completely unexpected.