This is a very pretty Metroidvania. You play a small forest spirit, exploring and fighting monsters. Your parental figure dies near the start, which causes you to head off into the world and try to restore the forest to how it used to be.
I made a Pico 8 cart which produces a SNES Mode 7 style floor. The trick is in the function tline, which draws a line between two points, sampling from the map data along the way. You give it the map position to start from, as well as dx and dy values it should use as an increment after each pixel. The other main thing is setting a depth value per scanline, the closer to the bottom of the screen the nearer to the player’s view. The rest is just trigonometry, applying angles to vectors using sin and cos.
In this story a new virus has infected large portions of the human race. The virus causes some people to have locked in syndrome, where they are aware and conscious but cannot move in any way. Technology has developed to allow these people to take control of robots, which then effectively become their bodies. There is also another group of people who were infected, but did not become locked in. These people can become “integrators”, which means that they can allow sufferers to take control of their body. This allows the sufferers to have a more direct experience.
This is a platformer for the Mega Drive from the early 90s. I’m pretty sure I got this as a Christmas present the year that it came out in the UK. It’s a hard game though, I never completed it back then. I think maybe I got about halfway.
I’ve been playing around with Pico 8, making small games and experimenting to amuse myself. It’s a lovely little program which they call a “fantasy console”. This means the games for it look quite similar to something like the Game Boy Advance, they are low resolution, with low fidelity sound and are generally quite compact experiences. It’s actually a program which you run on your computer, with a full development environment built in. It includes a code editor, a sprite designer, a map layout tool as well as sound and music creation tools. Each one is very constrained, but in a way that makes it interesting to use. It forces you to not overcomplicate things. You have to focus on the core idea.
I have no idea how many times I have read this book. I certainly read it when I was in primary school, after one of my teachers read parts to the class at the end of each day. It is a wonderful adventure story, and feels absolutely timeless.
I bought the Virtual Boy accessory for the Nintendo Switch so that I could play the games that they have added to the Nintendo Switch Online service. I’ve never played a Virtual Boy before, though I did nearly buy one in 1996. It is the only time I have ever been to the United States, and I saw one in the shopping mall. The machine was such a flop that I think it had already been cancelled by that point, and it ended up never getting released in the UK. I bought a Game Boy Pocket instead, which was a much more sensible purchase. Though I guess a much less interesting one.
This is the game I bought my PlayStation for. I originally bought one with my brother at launch with Ridge Racer, but completed that very quickly and didn’t see much else interesting. We sold that one, and when this game was released I used the money I had from that sale to buy my own. Initially I couldn’t afford a memory card, and so had to start from scratch every time. As such I remember large parts of this game very well thirty years later.
The real name of the main character of this book is never revealed, he is referred to as Theo throughout the story. Theo is the name of his friend at University who lived in the room next door. That friend was murdered in a duel with a rich sociopath also attending the University. This happened over an argument over how said sociopath was treating a woman at a house party. After the murder the main character adopts his friends name and life, since he has no real future otherwise and Theo’s parents and family are effectively estranged.
This is a Switch remake of a Game Boy Advance game. I never played the original, but I did intend to. It’s a sequel to the Game Boy Donkey Kong game, which I replayed in September 2024 and have always loved.
This is the game that convinced me to buy a Switch 2, I actually got the console at launch with Mario Kart World but the announcement of this game is what made me want one. It was clear from the original videos that this was made by the team that made Super Mario Odyssey, which was just fantastic.
This is a GameCube game that I played on the Switch 2. I actually bought the official GameCube controller from the Nintendo store to play it, since it’s such an odd controller that mappings can be pretty cumbersome.
I’m not actually sure when I bought this game, but it’s in my Steam library. It was probably in a Humble Bundle. I saw it being mentioned online as an excellent Metroidvania, so I thought I’d give it a go.
This book takes place in an alternate history, set in the UK. There are three twin boys in what appears to be some kind of orphanage, they are being cared for by three women that are taking shifts and are called Mother. For instance the woman that wakes them at the start of the day is Mother Morning, she notes each of their dreams down in a large book.
I’d seen multiple people online saying that this is one of the best games ever made. I held off playing it, feeling that I needed to give it proper attention. It’s not really a game to dip in and out of. I’m glad I did, the game is genuinely fantastic, with excellent writing and a fascinating world. It felt like the game truly responded to each decision I made along the way, with the narrative unfolding in a way that seemed unique to me. I think at some point I’ll need to play this again, and make very different choices to see what happens.