Tag: Gaming
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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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Bully Review – The Broadest Possible Strokes
To label something as a product of its time can feel like a non-statement, but for both better and worse, that is exactly what Rockstar’s open-world juvenile delinquent simulator Bully (or Canis Canem Edit in PAL territories) is. Released worldwide in 2006, players take control of fifteen-year-old troublemaker, James ‘Jimmy’ Hopkins, as he navigates the cliquey social strata…
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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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Sin and Punishment Review – At the Top of the Treasure Chest
Due to my recent acquisition of an RGB modded Nintendo 64 and an EverDrive-64 X7, I was able to indulge in something I’ve wanted to do for a long time — play Sin and Punishment on original hardware. Often considered the ‘one that got away’, Treasure’s rollercoaster third-person rail shooter was a popular choice for import gamers…
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Five of the Best Video Game Books
An obsession with video game-related books may strike you at any time but, from personal experience, it usually occurs post your first ‘gaming shelf’ and just before you start listening exclusively to SNES OSTs. There are few things finer in life than finishing a damn good game and diving into a well-researched tome dedicated to the…
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‘How Can You Be Friends With a Monster?’ – Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Review
If you’re anything like me, the title Guardians of the Galaxy immediately conjures mixed feelings. The initial charm of James Gunn’s 2014 action-comedy superhero flick has worn somewhat thin over the years, a phenomenon doubtless intensified by having to hear the phrase ‘I am Groot’ parroted ad-nauseam at countless comic-cons and on numerous message boards.…
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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…
Gamer! Beware! 