Kung-Fu UFO— a new SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis game — is launching on Indiegogo next month. It’s an original title for the SEGA console and will be released physically on cartridge next year.
Kung-Fu UFO – Mega Drive
It’s the ’90s, you are a humble boy from a small country who never knew his father. One night an alien reaches out to you through your old ZX Spectrum computer to give you a mysterious message.
Yes, Kung-Fu UFO is a story-driven adventure heavily inspired by sci-fi, martial arts films and video games from the ’80s and ’90s.
Inspiration appears from some obvious places too: Streets of Rage, Battletoads, Prince of Persia, and Mortal Kombat. That’s including retro and obscure games such as The Way of the Exploding Fist and The Way of the Tiger on the C64 and ZX Spectrum.
The game intends to follow the steps of previous crowdfunding success cases, such as Tanglewood and Xeno Crisis. The team intends to give new life to an old, but beloved console.
Key Features
Some key features of the game include the following:
A 16-bit cartridge – It’s playable on the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis consoles and compatible clones (PAL, NTSC-US, NTSC-J)
16-bit pixel art – Features handcrafted and animated graphics and cutscenes.
16-bit chiptune – A rocking soundtrack with a variety of songs and sound effects.
Story-driven gameplay – Mixes different genres: platformer, beat’ em up.
Vehicles to drive and boss fights to win – Because running around all the time isn’t that fun, you’ll also be able to drive a motorbike, a plane, more.
Different stages – Not only graphically, but also in terms of gameplay mechanics.
A wide variety of enemies – Keeping the gameplay and the game’s progression diverse in every chapter, from beginning to end.
Difficulty levels – Everyone can enjoy and finish the game.
Password system – Bringing back the almost forgotten, yet thrilling experience of getting a pen and a piece of paper and writing down a code…
Kung-Fu UFO materialises from developers Retro Nerve. Who said your Mega Drive collection was complete anyway?
The Switch library of old-school turn-based RPGs just got a little heavier with the recent release of Fernz Gate from developers Exe-Create.
Dive into a fantasy world as Alex, an ordinary high-school student dumped into an unordinary situation in the once-peaceful world of Fernland.
Check out the Switch reveal trailer for Fernz Gate below:
Fernz Gate Switch – The Vibrant World Of Fernland
Here are a few key notes about the recently released vintage-style RPG game, Fernz Gate:
Players will take on the role of Alex as he drifts away into an unknown world filled with conflict and dangerous foes. After teaming up with Lita – a stranger from a peaceful world similar to Alex’s – they embark on a journey like no other to discover the truths about Fernland.
The classic turn-based combat system is simple enough for any RPG newcomer to tackle vigorous enemy battles with confidence and ease.
Like most RPG games of this nature, players will discover and recruit new friends and allies to help grow in strength and numbers.
Players can use party members not participating in battle scenarios to discover new secrets, as well as upgrade weapons and achieve new skills to open up combat.
Recently only available on mobile platforms, Fernz Gate is now accessible on the Nintendo Switch to help satiate the urge to play on home televisions and, of course, the handheld mode on the Switch.
You can find Fernz Gate at the eShop for Switch purchases, as well as iTunes, Google Play and coming soon to Steam.
I was confused when I first loaded up Victor Vran. Not because I didn’t know what I was doing, more that I didn’t know what I was playing. The reason? Titular monster-hunter come demon-slayer Victor Vran is voiced by Doug Cockle who many will instantly recognise as the voice behind iconic Witcher, Geralt.
Now if you told me I was playing a spin-off of the Witcher series, I would have believed you. Let’s look at that facts; the game is set in an alternate past where monsters, demons and other nasties have started running riot and it’s your job to pursue and end them. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s what I thought, hence the confusion.
Haemimont Games, having worked on past titles such as the Tropico series, bring Victor Vran in its complete form to the Switch – full to the brim with extra content. More on that later, first of all, let’s take a look at what Victor Vran is in more detail.
Victor Vran: Overkill Edition Review Switch
Like I mentioned, you play as Vran and it is your job to liberate the cursed city of Zagoravia from all manner of evil. Set as a top-down RPG, you begin to understand that this isn’t your average top-down adventure game. You choose how you want to play with outfits giving you different abilities, weapons granting different advantages and disadvantages and a levelling system that doesn’t force you down one particular route.
For instance, you can wield a shotgun running around like a crazy medieval Duke Nukem (which I did) or you can wield a sword or hammer and get up close and personal to your foes. Added to which a sharp fedora-topped outfit allows your demon powers to recharge slowly over time or a hunters outfit will charge your powers whenever you get hit. Using your demon powers on a large group of monsters is also very satisfying, especially splatting a swarm of spiders with a meteor shower! To top it off, each new level allows you to boost a given attribute such as ranged damage, health points or to get a loot chest – of which the content is random.
It’s little things like this that allow you to tailor the game around how you like to play and tackle each mission differently. Each level/area will also have challenges for you to complete which will grant bonus experience points, gold or other boosts to help you on your way.
Now whilst Victor Vran won’t set the genre alight, more likely sit amongst other great top-down titles, it does prove a massive point. That being that these sort of games can work and thrive on the Switch, which it does. Throughout testing, I played in handheld mode and the whole thing ran smoothly and rather quickly. Navigation wasn’t hard, nor was controlling Vran or the camera which made it so easy to play that I just kept going. One area would lead to another and I easily found myself losing a couple of hours at a time taking out skeletons, spiders and other ghostly beings.
The combat is quite intense too and doesn’t allow you to pause for breath for very long. If you stay stationary for too long you can quickly find yourself surrounded so staying mobile is always advisable, finding a brief respite where you can. This is one of the things which will keep you going as each fight is unique, requiring a different tactic each time.
Victor Vran: Overkill Edition Review Switch
In this, the Overkill Edition, Victor Vran comes with a host of extra content for you to tackle. Upon starting out you are given the choice of playing the base campaign, a campaign which is inspired by and revolves around the band Motorhead (paying tribute to the late metal legend, Lemmy) and finally the Fractured Worlds mode where everything takes an even more chaotic turn. Considering that the game can also be played online, there are many different things to play and ways in which to do so making this a great outing and addition to the Switch’s ever-expanding list of titles.
My only worry is over the pricing as this sits at £34.99 meaning it’s competing with the bigger and stronger titles out there, including Nintendo’s own strong first-party outings. Would people buy it at this price? It’s unlikely. Would I recommend buying it at this price? I don’t think so, maybe if it was more like half of that, which is a shame, as it may get overlooked until a price drop further down the line. If that does happen, however, I would recommend playing Victor Vran as I’m sure you’ll enjoy this charming adventure through Zagoravia.
The award for the most unexpected announcement of the month has to go to what we’re now calling Streets of Rage 4. A game that most – at this late point – would only expect as an April Fool’s joke is really happening.
Announced earlier today, Streets of Rage 4, (a sequel 24 years after the last title), is being developed by Lizardcube and Guard Crush Games and promises hand-drawn visuals, new mechanics, and a plot that hopefully features Mr. X once again controlling the city.
It’s unlikely the game will see the return of Yuzo Koshiro, the man behind the truly awesome soundtracks of the first three SEGA masterpieces – but we live in hope.
Streets Of Rage 4
Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding will return at a yet unspecified date, on a list of unspecified platforms…
Advertised as “the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of the year,” I went into Graveyard Keeper expecting to find something weird, funny, and moderately inappropriate. What I found was something… very close to it.
Graveyard Keeper is indeed a resource management game made by Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild, who are also the creators behind the fighter management game Punch Club.
You are thrown right into the game, witnessing our protagonist’s rather unfortunate fate, which leads him into a curious conversation with Death himself. Suddenly, we are being teleported back in time (year 204 to be exact) and are assigned the role as a graveyard keeper. You receive in your possession an old, abandoned house on a hill, with an even older and rustic graveyard next to it.
Enjoy your own little bizarre and slightly disturbing utopia by creating a garden, tidying up your graveyard and home. However, to do these things you need to unlock different technologies. As your skills and experience as a graveyard keeper expand, you will also unlock different ways of preserving and taking care of the bodies you receive.
It may seem complicated at first, but as you get into the game, things gradually fall into place.
Research and upgrade your characters’ skills by collecting red, green, and blue «points» – which kinda look like regular ol’ gems. Different gems are required for different techniques:
Red: represents hand-crafting skills.
Green: knowledge about the nature of things and nature itself.
Blue: spiritual knowledge of the immaterial world.
Collecting these points takes quite some time in the beginning, making the game feel very slow-paced. However, once I learned more skills, the game naturally became more interesting.
The fact that almost every single action in the game consumes energy feels like both a blessing and a curse. While this is not necessarily a problem in itself, one might discuss that each action takes too much energy. This becomes a little tedious when you eventually have plenty of tasks to do. A grave situation indeed!
Visually, Graveyard Keeper has a lovely retro style design. With that said, the geographical design of the game feels quite big. It feels like the distance between each relevant quest site is too far, and it takes me forever to get there; maybe an auto-walk button would come in handy. But hey, at least the game has really pleasant music that I can listen to while I walk!
One grave a day will keep the ghosts away… literally.
The voice effects of the characters are funny and reminded me a little bit of the voices in Undertale. The characters want you to do quests for them, and in return, you gradually build a friendly relationship with them. While the dialogue has many good intentions of being funny, I cannot exactly say that it tickled my funny-bone…
Even though the dialogue isn’t top-notch, Graveyard Keeper has a morbid sense of humour. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and that is kinda refreshing. For example, the local tavern is in dire need of meat for their delicious meals. And well, since you have flesh in abundance, you don’t really have to tell them where it comes from, right? … Right?
As you progress further in the game, you will also receive different recipes you can cook, so that you can restore the lost energy. Perhaps you might have some use for the flesh that you’ve been extracting too – if you know what I mean.
Being the graveyard keeper feels like a minor task in the game, compared to the tons of other stuff you can do: keeping a farm, a garden, working as a blacksmith to fix around your home, and doing various quests for the other villagers. The game runs in a day-and-night cycle, with different weather, even though I didn’t get the feeling it affected anything regarding gameplay. The characters’ availability, on the other hand, depends on which day of the week it is, where each day is indicated by its own symbol.
Moreover, Graveyard Keeper can become rather tedious. One example is being able to only pick up one thing at a time when you have to move quite a distance, making each task long and dreary. If I could pick up two things at a time, that would reduce the workload. If these glitches could be fixed, being a graveyard keeper wouldn’t be such a dead-end job…
Though I must say, after I’ve laid my character to sleep to regenerate his energy bar, I kept finding myself automatically playing another day. Looks I’m just dying to play more… Because even though the game definitely has some flaws, it is nevertheless an entertaining game with a lot of potential.
I believe that the game could become excellent if it received more updates. If you like grinding games, Graveyard Keeper will definitely give you many hours of entertaining gameplay to dig into.
P.S: I hope my editor doesn’t give me the graveyard shift after this!
Life is Strange has been embedded in video game history as a piece of – somewhat niche – memorable storytelling that weighs heavily on the player, no matter if you’ve played it once or a dozen times. Dontnod Entertainment is bringing back the highly acclaimed series with their upcoming sequel, Life is Strange 2.
Life is Strange 2
After the surreal events following Max Caulfield and Chloe Price, fans will return to the sobering universe as Sean Diaz, accompanied by his little brother, Daniel. As Devastating events occur involving the brothers, they are forced to outrun the Seattle Police and hitchhike their way to their home of Puerto Lobos, Mexico.
Check out the 19-minute long official gameplay “Seattle” trailer below:
Returning to the Life is Strange universe, fans of the series will be delighted to find the same atmosphere, mysterious powers and musical stylings are returning to the sequel.
Those who have experienced The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit earlier this summer will find that their decisions made in the demo will carry over to Life is Strange 2.
Episode (one) out of five of Life is Strange 2 is set to release on September 27th, 2018 for the PS4, Xbox One and PC. There is currently no official release date for the other episodes in the sequel.
So, here’s to 10 years of Braid. And 10 years of Blow.
Braid went on to become a hit, critically and commercially. It contributed to the rise of indie games, digital distribution being a viable platform and self-publishing. Its most profound achievement is showing an industry what games can be – like Ico before it – that games can be an art form and it inspired this sensibility, not just for indie games, but the AAA market too.
What Braid is, is a fine – and very rare – example of postmodernism in videogames. Braid takes what we know from platforming games – especially citing the pinnacle of the genre Mario on several occasions – to only flip it on its head; to take what we conceive and then change our preconception of it.
This is evident in the closing level when you finally come to rescue the princess in more ways than one. How its narrative is told through books of text and not a cutscene, or how its story is fragmented and deconstructed is like the postmodern literature of Vonnegut, Moore or Pynchon. It takes the fun and simplicity of Mario (Modernism), then changes it to a high concept and philosophical platformer, Braid (Postmodernism).
Everything in the game has meaning, even if it’s not clear consciously. This has many people speculating and theorizing the true meaning of Braid; such as the game is about a scientist working on the atomic bomb, obsession, etc.
The game’s story sees you playing as Tim to rescue a princess from a monster. The story is told through text at the start of each world, here you’ll read that Tim has made a mistake that he would like to forget. After completion, more text is revealed adding more narrative, in a more ambiguous nature highlighting more of the deeper themes of the game.
Aesthetically the game is seeping with European and British iconography of countrysides and castles smeared with whimsical watercolours. All this accompanied by a folk-inspired soundtrack, that just hearing it makes you smell the fresh moisture produced from the green pastures. It screams of classic children’s novels like ‘Peter Rabbit’, ‘Charlotte’s Web’ or ‘Wind and the Willows’.
Braid, on the first glance, looks like a typical platformer with puzzle elements, with an added bit of collecting jigsaw puzzle pieces to complete a jigsaw on each level.
It’s when you play the game where one of the mechanics is the manipulation of time, mainly reversing time. It’s here where Blow shows his skill as a game designer and takes what I call a ‘Nintendo’ approach to game design; using a single mechanic and exploring that single mechanic to its full potential (now if anyone wants to debate this, please write in the comments as I’ll happily discuss… Even if you are Jonathan Blow yourself!).
This time manipulation is stretched and rolled like a piece of dough with some in-game items not being affected by it, the player’s shadow leaving an imprint on the world, slowing down time in a specific area or the world where time is governed by the direction you walk. Time manipulation isn’t just the mechanic, it’s the central core of the gameplay.
Here in the UK, we never had a video game crash. It was around this time the rise of independent video games happened. Teenagers coding on the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro or Commodore 64. Hobbyists turned into rock stars and the biggest entrepreneurs in the UK.
So, independent games have been around for decades but the rise of independent games from the past 10 years owe it to Braid. Braid was released on the infamous Xbox Live and then saw ports to various other systems. It cemented Johnathan Blow as a video game legend overnight; ushering a new wave of independent developers with new sensibilities to game design.
I was in my second year of university studying media when a close friend from my hometown, I kept in contact through Xbox Live and party chat, told me about this game he was playing that blew his mind.
Eager to share this experience, my friend purchased me an Xbox cash voucher and told me to buy a game called Braid. Like my friend, I too was entranced by this video game, this piece of philosophy, this work of art. Never had I gazed upon a CRT for that length of time simply not moving – watching, understanding the levels and their logic.
You don’t simply play Braid, you assimilate Braid.
Taking classic video game nostalgia in the form of vintage gaming tunes and presenting them in relaxing lullaby fashion is exactly what Materia Collective has gracefully accomplished with their latest set of albums.
Ranging from The Legend of Zelda to Final Fantasy VII, Video Game Music Box features a slew of memorable gaming soundtracks and re-envisions them with an expertly crafted wave of music box allure with the new series, Music Box Classics.
“Music Box Classics will be a lifelong project, with each new album dedicated to a single game title or game theme (…) Each album will feature pure music box sound with no additional instruments. This is perfect for relaxing or falling asleep. And for those gamer parents who want to introduce their little ones to videogame music early on, these will be the perfect albums.” – Video Games Music Box
Have a listen to one of the tracks from The Legend of Zelda album below:
Here are all seven available albums to help ease you (or your precious little one!) to sleep:
Remember the nostalgic adventures with the perceptible score from The Legend of Zelda series re-living the classics in an all-new style.
No video game soundtrack collection would be complete without a trip to the world of Super Mario Bros. featuring some of the most memorable scores in gaming.
Chrono Trigger is well-regarded as one of the greatest games in history and the beloved soundtrack only adds to that very proposal.
Perhaps one of the most cherished scores in gaming comes from the talent behind Final Fantasy VII and charms its way into the Music Box Collection.
Undertale joins in and invents a new vision in how to enjoy the unforgettable soundtrack behind one of the most remarkable gaming journeys in recent years.
Last but not least, the Pokemon album recreates some of the most iconic songs from the series and leaves you itching to jump back into classic Pokemon Red/Blue titles from when it all began.
You can score these exceptional treasures from the Music Box Collection from Materia Collective at a variety of digital music sites, such as Bandcamp, iTunes or Spotify.
I’m sure you are well aware of the controversy: game giants IGN reviewed the indie game Dead Cells. It was revealed later that the review was plagiarized from a small independent YouTube channel known as Boomstick Gaming.
The channel exposed the giant with a comparison video of both reviews side by side. This resulted in people grabbing pitchforks and flaming torches in the dead of night, ready to hunt down this behemoth who prayed on a helpless mortal man – the pitchfork-wielding community vowing never to trust the giant again.
One thing is for certain, the review was extremely similar, enough for the plagiarism claim leading to the writer’s dismissal, forcing IGN to make a public apology to their audience, Boomstick and the developer in the hopes that just some of the pitchforks will be lowered.
The mob of us
No one except the writer can say with 100% certainty if it was copied knowingly in the hopes that he would get away with it, if he maliciously copied the review due to some internal crazed cosmic justice, if he was frightened of missing a deadline out of fear and panic copied the review, or if he watched or read several reviews and subconsciously copied the review; for the later you only have to look at the genius of the George Harrison plagiarism claim on his iconic track “My Sweet Lord”.
The timescales for any review are daunting; I know that from my own experience working a full-time job and with a review to be completed in a reasonable amount of time on a regular basis.
As some of you may not be aware, a lot of developers or publishers provide you with a code for the game and expect the review to be uploaded in a timely manner (usually within a week); this is usually completing the game, writing, maybe rewriting parts of the review and then publishing it.
Now you are probably thinking, ‘this guy’s full-time job is to write review pieces’ and you’d be right, but this wouldn’t have been the only piece he was working on. By all means, this is not me defending plagiarism, it’s merely an understanding of what variables are in place that may have caused such an endeavour.
My personal favourite Beatles member
To meet developer or publisher timescales for a review is crucial for any game news/review outlet, failing to do so can have lasting repercussions if a review is not met within a professional timely manner; review codes or copies usually are not distributed to you from that point.
Again, I’m not saying timescales and deadlines are bad, they are very good things that motivate us, however; with the ever-increasing length of games and these timescales presented to game journalists, they can contribute to ‘misunderstood games’. How can anyone confidently critique 100-hour experience in the space of a week?
We only need to see reviews of the first Nier to see how games do not always get correctly represented. Unfortunately, this will never change as there are too many forces at play; the developers and publishers want it published efficiently, the outlet requires the piece to be published as early as possible to generate the traffic that helps advertisement and funding.
But the above isn’t the major issue within this controversy, that is just the machine cogs turning. The problem with games writing is the writing itself. Most games journalism/writing is, in my personal opinion, boring. What a review tends to be is a list of mechanics, what it looks like, what it sounds like and an overview with a few fancy words thrown in for good measure so the writer feels credible. In short, it’s a glamorised laundry list devoid of any emotion, personality or creativity.
Very few reviews go into the deeper themes of the game, analyse it or represent games other than a product and not a mature piece of a medium that can be and is art. I want games to be viewed in a positive light, yet we don’t talk about them in any capacity to represent that, in the end, it’s the same old list with different words.
I’m not saying I’m the god of video game writing, nor am I the best writer out there, I am far away from that and I to, fall in the very laundry list trappings, but I try to add as much emotion, personality or creativity in my pieces.
So, Boomstick was plagiarised. Should it have happened? No. Could it have been avoided? Yes.
Write in a way that is your own, do something different, write in a way that can’t be plagiarised. It’s our responsibility to tell people what a great, joyous and inspiring medium video games is; how it has helped people view depression, how it can educate children, how these emotional journeys can offer more than any piece of literature, TV show or movie because these are video games, and they mean something to us.
One would imagine that if you backtrack before the release of Hello Neighbor by Dynamic Pixels, before coding and artwork, before storyboards and script writing, someone, somewhere had a great idea for an amazing game.
Hello Neighbor [Switch] – Great Idea, Little Satisfaction
They wrote pages and pages of scribbled notes on a napkin sitting at a diner booth in the late hours of the night, drinking coffee and eating a cold plate of fries. This budding game designer would feverishly jot down ideas for a wild new concept that would revolutionize a genre. As their fries got colder and the napkin count rose, a fully fleshed out world would start to take shape.
I am sure whatever was written on those grease-stained napkins was pure genius, but that genius never made it past the face towelette stage. Hello Neighbor, a self-professed “Stealth Survival Horror” game, might have sounded like a spectacular idea at the start, but what we got will more likely make you weep then shake in your boots.
Hello Neighbor Review
The main objective is to sneak into your shady neighbor’s house and find a way to break into the basement to discover his dirty secret(s). You have the option of going through open bedroom windows, the front door, via the roof, and more. Be careful though, if the evil neighbor catches you, he’ll throw you out on the street. If he sees you lurking outside, he’ll jump through the closed window to boot you onto the curb. Magically, the window gets fixed in an instant.
Sounds easy enough, but as you find different ways of infiltrating, the Neighbor finds new ways of stopping you. The A.I. in the game is meant to counter your every move. Where once the front door was open and clear, now there will be cameras watching. Certain windows will have bear traps to stop you, or the Neighbor will find new shortcuts to get to you before you complete your mission.
If you manage to make it in the house, you can hide in cabinets and under tables as your enemy searches frantically to no avail. The house itself grows with new rooms and ways of getting lost, which I found to be pretty neat.
Hello Neighbor Review
It should all be fun and innovative, but instead, feels clunky, buggy, and frustrating. For instance, you can stack boxes to reach a window, but the physics engine seems to be off. The boxes are infuriatingly easy to knock over before ever getting anything done. It reminds me of a late ’90s virtual reality game that you think is going to be really awesome but ends up disappointing your childhood.
The colour pallet looks as if Thomas the Tank Engine had a baby with Marge Simpson, and then gave it up for adoption to Gumby. It’s not that I hate the way everything looks, it’s just that it has this uncomfortableness about it.
Hello Neighbor Review
There was one thing I did like about the game, and that’s a rather interesting auditory experience. If you listen carefully, you can hear the Neighbor’s footsteps as he walks inside and outside of the house (and it’s easy to differentiate between the two).
You can hear him as he is using the kitchen or bathroom sink, snoring in the living room, or grumbling to himself. The Neighbor will even turn on a record player or a broken TV, which you can then turn off by sneaking in through a window. Eliminating the extraneous noise allows the player to hear better and locate where the Neighbor might be at a given time. Out of all the things the developers were going for, I really enjoyed this one specific play mechanic the best. It isn’t perfect, but it’s fun.
Truth be told, I never made it too far into unlocking the mystery of it all, but that’s mostly because I stopped caring. I know this review sounds harsh, but that’s probably because I feel the concept is actually really cool, just poorly executed.
I Love the idea of an A.I. that learns and makes things harder minute by minute. I love the idea of using your senses to avoid the enemy and solve the puzzle. I am a huge fan of using your surroundings to aid in the quest. I just wish it all came together better.
