I like "small" games. With them, every bit has to work perfectly, rather than hiding the shortcomings under all the bells and whistles. And Switch'n'Shoot (Matt Glanville) is definitely a "small" game... and a very pleasant surprise fo...

Ever thought of building a ship in a bottle? I happened to take a look at the Wikipedia page for "impossible bottles", which include ships in a bottle. There seems to be two main ways to accomplish that: either actually build the ship ...

Taito's original Bubble Bobble (1986) was and still is a very highly regarded classic arcade title, probably on many other platforms as well (I've played it on NES, C64 and PC), as it was widely ported to many systems. It was an early ...

Monolift Soft developed two games for Wii: Xenoblade Chronicles (2010) and Disaster: Day of Crisis (2008). It's pretty well known that the North American release of Xenoblade Chronicles was helped by the Operation Rainfall. Disaster, h...

Time for another off-kilter pick for a game: a licensed game based on a Finnish movie from the 1980s. Numbskull Emptybrook is apparently an English name for Uuno Turhapuro, and the name I'll use in this blog. He featured in 19 Finnish ...

Mucky Foot was a Guildford-based developer from 1997 to 2003. If you know of Guildford in relation to video games, it's maybe because that town was the home of Bullfrog, Lionhead and presently Media Molecule and 22Cans. Mucky Foot fits...

The MSXdev'18 competition to develop new games for the MSX computers finished on February 14th, 2019. Or rather, that was the deadline for the entries. The actual results will be out on April 11th, 2019, but I wrote this blog independe...

In January 2019, I ordered a hardcopy of Konami's MSX Legacy - The Unofficial Story by Wim Dewijngaert. This isn't, as far as I can tell, a crowdfunded book project but more or less the work of one person on their own time with help fr...

Blending management and dungeon crawling has been done successfully before, and I don't even need to look at recent titles. Recettear (EasyGameStation, 2007) (shop management + dungeon crawling) and Rune Factory Frontier (Neverland/Mar...

Content creation is something I'm not really interested in. In several cases, I've been more interested in writing the game's code first and only then haphazardly thrown together something resembling content, or just giving up halfway ...

Like I said in my previous blog on Bumper Ship Racing, my future blogs on that game won't focus on a single topic. This time, we have two topics: an unnecessarily fancy reuse of data for little practical purpose and how the AI in the g...

My Bumper Ship Racing is practically done, but I finally decided to try adding thruster flames to it. This blog is the story of one overengineered feature, in exceedingly great detail. The details are, I think, still reasonably easy to...

2048 * 7 is... ? I haven't finished Fairy Tale Puzzles ~Magic Objects~ (Adore Co./Office5656) on Switch. I don't think I will either, since I'm not very good at this type of games. But I'm pretty confident I've seen what the game ...

In late July, I got frustrated with the nonprogress of the overly ambitious retro game I had worked on previously. Instead, I chose a new, simpler concept: single-screen racing games in the vein of Super Sprint (Atari, 1986), Ivan "Iro...

Super Cobra cannot really be discussed without mentioning Scramble. In the arcades, Super Cobra (Konami, 1981) was a sequel to Scramble (Konami, 1981). Thankfully, I've already written a part of a blog on Scramble, but here's...

Even in 2010s, games are being made for the gaming platforms, be them microcomputers or consoles, of the 1980s. No harm in looking at a few, right?  All screenshots taken in BlueMSX emulator. Ninja Savior (Relevo Videogames, 2015)...

I'll go get me coat. October 31, 1999 saw the release of Nocturne (Terminal Reality/Gathering of Developers, 1999) on PC. Chances are you knew the Shin Megami Tensei game better than this, in which case I'd ask if you noticed the small...

I originally started this blog by saying that it doesn't involve Journey (thatgamecompany/Sony, 2012). But that might have been so very wrong of me to say. Some months ago, Chris Moyse's comment on how he feels on the ending of a game ...

Ever wanted to be a giant baby? Wait, let me rephrase that. Ever thought you were a giant slimy alien baby? No, not the baby Metroid. I Was An Atomic Mutant (Canopy Games/ValuSoft, 2003) on PC has you covered. It also lets the player b...

For a game I talk about, 1993 is a pretty recent release year. SimCity Enhanced Edition (Maxis/Interplay, 1993) is an example of what adding sprinkles over a dish does. Unsurprisingly, the effect is negligible. SimCity EE hit...

If there ever was a true love it/hate it game, No Thing (Evil Indie Games, 2016) would be a top contender for the title. I'm talking now about the Switch version. The game is a first-person autorunner: there's no stopping the player an...

In 2017, Switch was a new system with few games. One of the October 2017 releases on Switch, the visuals of Yono and the Celestial Elephants (Neckbolt/Plug In Digital, 2017) game drew some interest... at least on IGN's Nintendo Voice C...

Or, one-and-done versus permadeath with a positive bias for the latter. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) gave an interesting presentation on the shape of stories. I'll borrow his toolbox a bit. Unlike him, I'll focus on character power p...

I wouldn't be surprised if the devs of GRIDD:: Retroenhanced (Antab Studio/Kongregate, 2017) mentioned in a few months how the Switch release sold more than the other platforms combined. Hand up if you knew the game released on PC in M...

I apologize: despite saying that I won't write more blogs for now, I felt the need to let out my opinion on L.F.O. -Lost Future Omega- (mebius., 2017 or 2018) on Switch. Maybe on Steam as well, but it possibly never got past Greenlight...

Welcome to the forest. The sun is high in the sky. The trees -- bushes, more accurately -- surround you. They're not that tall, but you are even shorter. They don't even leave a shadow in which to rest. The tunic you're wearing is get...

Game genres evolve, recombine and effectively die out as the time progresses. This is a "brief" look into one or three or four of those genres, one that I haven't seen many new titles in recently: flying games where gravity is an eleme...

You may call printed manuals treekillers. I'll make a claim that printed manuals were, at a time, part of the game. For instance, this guy here. You know him, don't you? Let me draw him in greater detail. What, you don't think that's him?...

Rogue Aces (Infinite State Games/Curve Digital, 2018) Grounded Luftrausers? (PS4, PS Vita, Switch) Twenty years ago, me and two others frequently crowded around one keyboard to play the local multiplayer in Triplane Turmoil (Dodekaedro...

In 2017, a game called The Mooseman (Vladimir Beletsky, Mikhail Shvachko, 2017) was released on Steam. For me, the peculiar thing is that it is based on Finno-Ugric mythology, of which Finnish mythology is but a small piece. Given...