I'll post a lot of my longform writing here now that Cohost is going away, and archiving a lot of the long posts I made there!...
When I was 7 years old, I rented The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask from our local video rental store in southern Connecticut. Being a stupid kid, I wasn’t able to figure out how to get out of Clock Town on the first cycle, so I wandered aimlessly, speaking with every resident to see if anyone had an idea of how to stop the world’s imminent doom. Seeing the different trauma responses of everyone…
It's frustrating being a fan of dating sims in the west. There is a pervasive mentality that the genre is illegitimate at best, and a joke at worst. Every April Fool's Day, you see other game developers treat one of your favorite types of game as a punchline, and no one questions whether that's warranted. It certainly doesn't help that dating sims have largely never left Japan, so even if western…
I’ve been thinking a lot about Shin Megami Tensei’s alignment system lately, and not for reasons I am comfortable with. Art hands us a mirror with which to reflect our world from any number of angles, and understand it better through those perspectives. We may not always like what we see, but those perspectives never leave us. They reside in the back of your mind and we catch glimpses of them in…
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY MADE ON COHOST AND HAS BEEN ARCHIVED HERE Mario Artist: Polygon Studio was released for the Nintendo 64DD in late 2000, and its best feature is often overlooked by people browsing through random roms. This "baby's first Maya" 3D creation tool also includes a fully 3D open-world vehicle-building exploration game, all done in an otherworldly, unnerving, almost indie style.…
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY MADE ON COHOST AND HAS BEEN ARCHIVED HERE Everyone's talking about the wonderful Pizza Tower lately since it's such a well-designed Wario Land-style game with boatloads of personality, but I think people have been overlooking another great similar game that came out recently: Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils! It's a GBC-style platformer starring a circus acrobat…
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY MADE ON COHOST AND HAS BEEN ARCHIVED HERE I never thought I'd ever see a game show up over 3 decades after its home console's launch to become the best game on that system, but life can be funny sometimes, I guess. Rikki & Vikki is a shockingly well-made puzzle platformer released in 2018 for the... checks notes Atari 7800. Atari homebrew developers have always been…
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY MADE ON COHOST AND HAS BEEN ARCHIVED HERE I'm playing through Nostalgia no Kaze , one of RED Company's late-era DS RPGs. At first I expected to not get very far into it after dropping it for something else, but I'm surprised how much it ended up clicking with me. There's nothing super groundbreaking here, it's traditional turn-based combat with a battle queue system. But…
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY MADE ON COHOST AND HAS BEEN ARCHIVED HERE I randomly decided to try the recent translation for Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer, and oh wow am I glad I did, this is exactly the kind of shooter I can get into. I’m not very good at hardcore SHMUPs with limited lives or continues, which is a shame because some of the coolest and most interesting games in the genre are also…