Category: Features
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Retropom – A Post Lockdown Victory Lap
On Friday the 4th of February a friend and I packed our bags and took the Cardiff to London coach to attend the unofficial Final Fantasy fan convention Retropom. This event was organised under the larger umbrella of Kupocon, which has been running in both North America (Canada, USA) and Europe (Scotland, England) since 2016 — each…
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An Overwatch Player’s Lament
Let’s be honest, 2021 was a strange year to start playing Overwatch again. After spending about one hundred hours with Blizzard’s multiplayer team-based FPS at launch (on Playstation 4, no less), I swiftly moved back to less stressful, less demanding games. Overwatch could only keep its hooks in me and my duo queue partner for so long and the entire…
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The Unspoken Melancholy of Terranigma
Quintet’s ‘Soul Blazer Trilogy’, as it is dubbed by fans, contains some of the best-loved, niche JRPGs on the Super Nintendo. While both Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia have their die-hard admirers (if anyone can find someone that feels the same way about PlayStation 1 spiritual successor The Granstream Saga, hit me up, that’s a rarity), Terranigma has always stood as the…
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Weekend at Puggsy’s
Recently, I had the chance to sit down and work my way through Puggsy, a Mega Drive game, near and dear to my heart. I have no plan to talk about the gameplay in detail, but I wanted to write a short piece exploring my personal relationship with the title. As part of my research for…
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Death, Nature & Ihatovo Monogatari for the Super Nintendo
Posthumously famous Japanese writer and poet Kenji Miyazawa wrote a lot about space, but not space as we know it. Instead of the cold, isolating expanse of nothingness that we are familiar with, Miyazawa’s space is a flourishing, vibrant and surreal paradise; it is, quite literally, heaven. Pink flowers bloom on the rivers of the Milky…
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The Gamer! Beware! Very Official 2021 Game Awards (Part 3)
The final stint for the Gamer! Beware! 2021 awards and the crowning of, in my opinion, this year’s best Best Multiplayer Game of 2021 — Valheim 2021, functioning as 2020’s less than stellar expansion pack, was the year of multiplayer. With weekends relegated to the act of sitting indoors, many people flooded to the internet…
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The Gamer! Beware! Very Official 2021 Game Awards (Part 2)
In this continuation of the Gamer! Beware! 2021 Awards I reveal my unabashed love for Final Fantasy and sheer inability to finish a game I don’t like. Best Replay of 2021 — Final Fantasy VIII Reexperiencing video games can be an invaluable time investment and, as much as I try to limit the number of titles I replay,…
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The Gamer! Beware! Very Official 2021 Game Awards (Part 1)
Let’s begin this little piece with the most inoffensive, generalised statement possible; 2021 was a pretty good year for video games. Was it any better or worse than previous years? No, not really — every year is a pretty good year for video games. 2021 saw a lot of Triple-A first-person shooters (as usual), a smattering of…
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The Game Awards 2021 or: How Psychonauts 2 Deserved Better
Taking a cursory glance at the nominees for game of the year at The Game Awards 2021, you may be mistaken in thinking that you’ve stepped back in time about twenty-five years or so. Out of the six nominated video games this year four of them were platformers, and three of them were 3D platformers…
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Learning to Love Dishonored
I first played Arkane’s 2012 ‘immersive sim’ Dishonored about a year after its initial release at the tail end of 2013. I acquired it in a relatively gruesome two-for fifteen pounds deal at the Churchill Square Shopping Centre Game store in Brighton, along with the (frankly terrible) DmC: Devil May Cry. I experienced the first…
Gamer! Beware! 