Daniel Keast

This is the fourth Dizzy adventure, and the first that wasn’t created by the original developers, The Oliver Twins. This one introduces a health bar, you no longer die instantly when touching hazards. The coins from the previous games have been replaced by diamonds, and they restore some of your health when you collect them. Other than that this game is very similar to the previous one. Perhaps it is because of the hand-off to a new developer, maybe they didn’t feel like they could take any large risks. Maybe it’s just that the series had found its footing in the previous game and there were no major issues to fix like the snorkel in 2, or the backtracking in the original.

This is the third adventure game in the Dizzy series, and one of my favourite games growing up. I loved the feel of this adventure, of exploring what felt like a huge world filled with dragons and trolls.

The second Dizzy adventure game is themed around Treasure Island. In this one you start on an island with hidden treasure everywhere, and must solve puzzles including giving several pieces of this treasure to a shopkeeper to obtain a boat which you can use to leave.

This is a SNES RPG by Square from 1995, although it didn’t actually get a release here in the UK. I used to read Super Play magazine each month, and that had regular sections about import games as well as RPGs. I didn’t even know what they were at the time, but the images in the magazine, and the way they talked about them captivated me. I don’t think this game was released here until it was ported to the Nintendo DS in 2009, but I had already completed it by then. This was because around the turn of the millennium I discovered emulation, and played through many of the games I was never able to buy while sitting at the family PC. Despite playing this with a keyboard I absolutely loved it.

This is a game I played a lot as a child. I had several of the main Dizzy games on the spectrum, and loved every one of them. I played Wonderful Dizzy four years ago and ended up creating a screenshot walkthrough of the whole game. I won’t be doing that for the rest of the series. That was a lot of work and this site has become more about my thoughts on completion of things.

This is the first 2D Super Mario Bros. game for a very long time, the last one being New Super Mario Bros. U on the Wii U from 2012. I can’t believe it’s been 14 years since that game was released. I felt that series lacked a lot of the character of the originals. The artwork felt quite flat, and each game looked very similar to the last one. At first I thought this one looked very similar again, but actually, as I played it, lots of little details stood out in the animation. I think the way Mario looks and moves in this one is actually very reminiscent of the artwork from the 1980s. He looks quite a lot like he did on the old game and watch games.

When I played Yakuza Kiwami 2 I said “I’m definitely not going to leave it as long to play Yakuza 3”. That was a year and three months ago! It’s technically true though, I did try to play Yakuza 3 remastered quite a while ago but found it a real slog. The games I had played leading up to this one were the “Kiwami” remakes in a new engine. Yakuza 3 was the first game I played in its original form. The fighting was very frustrating, lacking the depth of the previous games in the series. All the enemies seemed to block every attack without much opportunity to do anything about it as well. Recently Sega released this version, a proper ground-up remake of 3.

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.

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 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.

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.