Recent content in Retro Gaming on Jefklak's Codex
When Thimbleweed Park was announced, it made no attempts to hide its intention to hitchhike on the nostalgic feelings adventure gamers have for a pixelated crosshair and the SCUMM verbs. As soon as you start playing Lucy Dreaming , that same familiar feeling will be reawakened. See what I did there, as Lucy has to dream and awaken and dream some more in order to work through puzzle chains? Took it…
Dread Delusion is a difficult game to correctly describe. A quick peek at some of the many screenshots in this playthrough log will no doubt trigger happy Morrowind memories because of the otherworld giant shroom foliage. Yet the blockier graphics, including the obligatory PS1 texturised distortion effect, give away that the game was part of one of the Haunted PS1 demo discs . Once you start…
It’s hard to believe that Sam has been Serious for twenty-five years now. When I was fifteen, a muscled sunglasses-wearing protagonist screaming AAAHHHHHH Yourself! back at the beheaded suicide bombers impressed me, especially after upping the fun after finding the double barrelled shotgun. Something in the back of my mind might have said “where have we seen this before? I’m all…
In another attempt to support small indie studios, I decided to check out The Aching , a Sierra On-Line style parser-based adventure with a distinct horror theme built by The Lobdegg. The game started out as a game jam submission in the biannual DOS Game Jam hosted by Michael Klamerus on itch.io . It started out as a small prototype but turned into a proper release that even got a bunch of…
How strange is a strange smelly mushroom that has a milky liquid drooping on it? How strange is a sweet flower with thorny stem that makes my eyes tear as I come near it? How strange is a flower enveloped in another one with a wood-like bark growing around it? Welcome to Strange Horticulture , where with the help of your trusty encyclopedia, you, the horticulturist, will shape order out of planty…
Tighten up that string and bust out the yoyo moves, the back of the case declares: It’s time to discover the secrets of the streets (and sewers) in your first-ever yoyovania ! Is this the developers being rightfully cheeky or a too arrogant claim to link the metroidvania genre to their 2D top-down yoyo-venture? Let’s find out. My reason for buying the game isn’t the curious…
It must have been the random ResetERA thread title “ forbidden solitaire is out now! ” that got my attention: a solitaire card game that’s verboten , bring it on! Especially since I covered many classic card games last summer, the Forbidden Dungeon easily lured me in. The fact that Grey Alien Games collaborated with Night Signal Entertainment to coat the solitaire variant with a…
It’s time for more clever deducktions ! In the second episode in the Duck Detective series, The Ghost of Glamping , our favourite feathered investigator arrives at a camp site only to find out the place is being haunted by a creepy ghost. Freddy would shiver and exclaim oh no so scary I’m afraid . Remember Freddy, the too helpful crocodile from the debut episode The Secret Salami ?…
A whimsical trailer about a paper-thin raccoon—or wait, is that a bear?—living inside a happy Nintendo 64-era inspired collect-a-thon 3D environment convinced me to keep close tabs on the upcoming release schedule. That raccoon/bear—in a later cut-scene, his companion does employ the term “bear”—is called Ruffy and lives in the Riverside . The previews…
This little puzzler game proves that Yoshi gobbles down more than red fruit and random enemies. Cookies! Or does it? Yoshi or Mario are not exactly involved in the eating and making go away of the little pastry forms. Instead, they’re banished to the right side of the screen where they have to turn a wheel to make them appear out of thin air. Even Kirby’s Star Stacker has more Kirby…
Ceci n’est pas un crocodile. And it’s not exactly croquant (crispy) either. Croc , Argonaut Software’s 1997 3D platformer debut, makes its way onto the Game Boy Color because… well… the GBC library was riddled with poor ports, swamped with crappy licensed games, and flooded with Pokémon rip-offs, and Croc had to be a part of it? Because that’s what it is: a…
It doesn’t happen often that the same game is recommended to me by three different people. After the last time, a 20% off discount at gog.com pushed me over the edge: it was finally time to get drifting. I knew little going in except that it was a gritty pixelated adventure game with a cool looking trailer. The Drifter delivered the expectations I set based on that trailer with flying…
If anything, Kirby spin-offs are delightfully weird. Pinball, breakout, mini golf, what else can Kirby do? How about a Dr. Mario / Tetris variant? Sure thing, HAL thought, and a year after the release of Kirby’s Block Ball , we’ve got ourselves Kirby’s Star Stacker . Star Stacker is the weird sibling of the other weird spin-offs: it doesn’t highlight the roundness of Kirby…
A year after Kirby’s Pinball adventure , HAL moved on from pinball machines to… breakout? That seems like a weird choice considering the pinball game was a direct result of Revenge of the ‘Gator that looked and felt a hundred times better than Alleyway ; the Game Boy’s attempt at swaying over breakout fans. Alleyway also happens to be Jeremy Parish’s first entry in…
The many Kirby spin-offs prove one thing: Kirby is not just a ball—it’s a mould that you can be knead and shaped into anything you want. If you don’t, the default form just so happens to be a fluffy pink—or, in this case, just like the original Kirby’s Dream Land , white—ball. HAL must have thought “hey, it’s a ball… what else is a…
In case you haven’t noticed yet, this site is half a tribute to the quirky French puzzle adventure series called Gobli(i)(i)ns . Yet for some reason, my dad bought Gobliins 2 and instead of looking back, we then moved on to Goblins Quest 3 . Then I spent months agonising the fact that Gobliiins 4 was as bad as it was. As a result, I somehow never played the original. After throwing in the…
It finally happened. After 34 years and thanks to the success of 2023’s Gobliiins 5 , Pierre Gilhodes released a direct successor to Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon , one of the games that heavily influenced how I think and feel about gaming. Just take a look around at this Codex: its gracefully stolen pixel art mostly stems from Gob2. Needless to say, I was stoked when I finally received my…
Given my obsession with shotguns in shooters, I simply can’t pass up on a game called Shotgun King —even though it’s yet another roguelike that’s not my strong suit. This time, we’re not shooting zombies in the head: instead, we’re firing shells at pawns, rooks, and ultimately, kings! The idea of combining chess with a roguelike game loop felt very novel to me…
Michael’s thoughts on this remastered version made me realise I almost missed another classic nineties Apogee platform re-release. Rigel Gameworks strikes again: after the smooth Duke Nukem I/II remaster shipped in the Evercade DN1 collection, lead developer Lethal Guitar announced their next project would be BioMenace . Eleven months later, I (or rather, Snake Logan) once again blasted my…
Let me start with the bold claim that Rise Of The Triad (or just ROTT) is not a (retro) shooter: it is a puzzle game dressed as a shooter. Lest to avoid disappointment, you should treat it as such, even though its development started as a plain successor to Wolfenstein 3D . Sure, Wolf3D could just as well be called NaziMaze3D , but ROTT dials up the chaos by more than a notch or two. A column…
The year 1993 is quite a lucrative year for Apogee: besides big hitters such as Duke Nukem II , less popular platformers including Alien Carnage also make make an entry. Or should I say Halloween Harry ? The confusing title suggesting a Halloween theme was ditched in favour of Alien Carnage a year later. Apogee probably hoped to increase sales that way and also introduced its well-known shareware…
Wonder Boy is a weird series that never really gained enough traction here in the West. I wonder if many of their releases weren’t on the Sega Master System (SMS) but on Nintendo’s Entertainment System (NES), this would have been an entirely different story. Perhaps then the confusing titles and sequence numbers would make more sense: Wonder Boy? Adventure Island? Wonder Boy IV? Wait…
What do you get when you mix Wolfenstein 3D with Heretic ? Project Warlock ! A valid answer that might have been the only one until Emberheart Games released their Wizordum in 2023, appropriately published by Apogee. We’re talking the same Emberheart that gave us HD remasters of Apogee classics such as Monster Bash and Crystal Caves . This time, they’ve gone original but I’m glad…
It’s your authentic Hoyle Card Games collection you know and love from the PC but for the Game Boy! Take your Hearts, Spades, Crazy Eights, and Gin on the go and battle it out with a friend—locally or using the link cable! That’s how the sales pitch might have went. Sierra said yes, Sandbox Studios said let’s do this, and in 2000, we got the crappiest version of Hoyle ever…
Yet another mediocre Nintendo DS card game, I hear you think! That’s almost right. This time, I have some good news: it’s slightly better than mediocre, go fish—no wait, figure! It’ll be the last one, pinkie swear. Ultimate Card Games from Cosmigo GmbH looks like another bargain bin game, but by the time they got this out in 2011 (after first releasing a version on the…
After revisiting Clubhouse Games on the Nintendo DS to satisfy my craving for (mobile) (digital) classic trick taking games and digging deeper into the Nintendo DS’s huge library, I realized my mistake: I clearly undervalued Clubhouse Games —and perhaps even the PC granddaddy of card gaming Hoyle Card Games . Especially by putting those two games in context of the more obscure DS card…
As part of my digital trick taking craving, after being done with Sierra’s funky opponents in Hoyle Card Games , I suddenly remembered the possibility to play Hearts on the Nintendo DS thanks to 42 All-Time Classics (the name of my PAL copy) or Clubhouse Games (for some reason the name to the rest of the world?). Let’s see how this game collection, this time not limited to just card…
I’ve been craving some good old-fashioned card game action lately—the kind that is best enjoyed with four players around a table and a standard deck of 52 cards. Since that’s not always an option, there’s the computer and a (dumb) AI for you to keep you busy and to learn the ropes of various new trick taking games I wasn’t yet familiar with. One of those collections…
When I picked up the latest and still very recent Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as a pleasant distraction for Wargroove ’s longer and longer slogfests, I did not expect the game—in my head portrayed as yet another boring metroidvania clone —to be that big and that good. In stark contrast, the drama evolved around the game with reported layoffs after “softer than…
Bohnanza is probably my favourite chaotic multiplayer card game by my favourite designer Uwe Rosenberg . Bean planting isn’t the most exciting part—the fierce bidding wars and possibilities to cheat when the opponents aren’t looking is. We’ve had ample Bohnanza sessions devolve into yelling and slamming cards on the table. It’s a classic three player or more game that…