Daniel Keast

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.

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.

I’d seen multiple people online saying that this is one of the best games ever made. I bought it in a sale, and started it multiple times but held off playing it properly. I quickly got the impression 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.

This came as a part of a bundle when I bought my Switch 2 in June. In this version all of the tracks in the game are part of one giant map, and there is a free roam mode where you can drive around and find secrets. It also has a new mode called Grand Tour where you race from one end of the map to another going through six tracks along the way. As you reach the end of each of these sections players below a certain position are out of the race. By the end there are only four people left, and the person in first at the end is the winner. I particularly enjoy this mode online. It is absolutely hectic, especially at the start.

I’d been waiting for this game for 18 years. I love the Metroid series, and the first Prime game is one of my favourites. This game seems to have had a very troubled development, it took eight years and they changed developer halfway through from Bandai Namco to the developer of the original trilogy, Retro.