19 public reviews
The views here are this user’s only and are not representative of Giant Bomb's thoughts and opinions on the discussed video game. GB's official reviews reside at giantbomb.com/reviews.
LEGO Island is one of the first video games I ever finished as a young person. It may have been the first, though I spiritually let Star Fox 64 have that spot. Looking back, considering my own time with the game decades ago as well as a classic Giant Bomb piece of coverage led by Drew Scanlon, LEGO Island sticks out as charming, surprisingly expressive children's media that probably isn't worth sharing with your own…
This game apparently developed a decent meme following over the years for being a real piece of shit. It sure does have a lot of demerits when you look at the back of the proverbial box. It's a PSN exclusive from the murky early years of the PlayStation 3. The art style is simple, even dull. It predates the advent of trophies on Sony platforms, so in this day and age you're playing for token glory on basically dead…
Stars and garters, dear readers. The Xbox One's launch is already codified in the history of our hobby as a large, hubris-driven snafu. From Don Mattrick's tactless dismissal of always-online concerns, to months and months of "900p-gate" nonsense, right up to the rocky rollout of Halo MCC, it was a free for all of bullshit for what felt like an age. And yet, even if the launch had been perfect, LocoCycle would have…
Astro Warrior, released in late 1986 as a standalone game, is shockingly slight. That's not necessarily a bad thing for a first party Sega shmup sitting in that .zip directory full of Master System games you "found" online, but the idea of paying a new game price for Astro Warrior is comical. So much so, in fact, that Sega cottoned to this truth internally; thus Astro Warrior is more likely to be found bundled with…
Let's play a game. One of these screenshots is from HyperZone. The other is from Thunder Ceptor. Edit: After posting this, I was reminded that Star Fox exists on the Super Nintendo as well. I'm not going to change anything about this article to reflect that, as Star Fox is an interactive slide show on the SNES. Carry on. -J I may have sought to garner a reputation as a big Namco game guy, but here's my dirty secret:…
If you wish there had been another Elite Beat Agents game released stateside, I've got some great news. Sure, the title of this review is a little reductive, but I think it does capture the surface appeal of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan quite well. OTO is the first in a series of rhythm games which received a unique western entry, Elite Beat Agents , during the formative years of the Nintendo DS. It slots in neatly with…
There is a presumption of interactivity to this medium. Video games are to be played. This interaction calls back to our earliest stages of development where we began to explore the world around us, and certain actions would cause certain related outcomes. When we cry, our parents come. When we tie our shoes, they don't fall off of our feet. These crucial developmental steps help ground us to a reality with object…
I'll keep this brief as I don't know how much needs to be said here. The Pushmo series revolves around using a little marshmallow sumo man to manipulate block puzzles with the goal of scaling them and reaching a sumo baby-shaped goal at the top. This series had its origins on the 3DS, where the system's gimmick actually added something to the experience by helping the player track the depth of blocks pulled out from…
Bless and keep our dear sweet GunCon family. It will likely come as a shock to younger members of this community that Nintendo tells lies. Case and point, when Wario was depicted to have invented the idea of ridiculous micro games whole cloth in the fantastic WarioWare, Inc.: Mega MicroGame$! , they were behaving in what could be generously be called a counterfactual manner. From whence did the idea of stringing…
Pictured: A better game than every single Star Fox title. I've got something of a long view on Star Fox . To me, the series is Nintendo (and originally Argonaut Games ) doing their absolute damndest to recreate some of the majesty of Space Harrier . Said game is literally perfect, an absolute zenith of the medium by which all other games must necessarily be measured. The Star Fox takes this mode of shooter and adds…
Nekketsu Oyako is one of two games available on Japanese PSN that date all the way back to the Japanese launch of the PlayStation, the other being Crime Crackers. But whereas Crime Crackers is a difficult recommendation to non-Japanese speakers due its reliance on textual clues and menus, Nekketsu Oyako is as a simple a game as one could want. You walk right, and you pulverize everything. This is actually a…
Let's CATCH is one of the most insane things I have experienced in this fine medium. It floored me. It shook me to my core. It is impossible to talk about Let's CATCH at this moment in time without mentioning that the game is intrinsically bound to a service (WiiWare) that is effectively dead, meaning you will be hard pressed to experience Let's CATCH without already owning it, in which case this review should only…
Sonic Heroes features a handful of enjoyable pop punk tracks from stalwart Sega house band Crush 40, generally good use of color palettes, and provides (on paper) a range of de facto difficulty options and styles of play that could make it a viable game for people of different ages and levels of experience. So ends anything positive that may be said of Sonic Heroes. Here's a handy rule of thumb: if the crux of a…
Crayon Physics Deluxe is in the libraries of scores of fiscally irresponsible gamers, having been included in a Humble Indie Bundle before the Humble Bundle service had bloomed into a full fledged shop. It was specifically included in HIB 3, which included the tremendous VVVVVV . It also included the decidedly less tremendous And Yet It Moves , a port of a WiIWare game perhaps best left in hits home mode, and…
The Wii's life cycle was filled with droughts of "serious" games, held up by tent pole Nintendo franchises and a fistful of genuine third party efforts. A major source of consternation to the content-starved fans of the Wii in North America were titles unreleased outside of Japan. Near the end of the console's life, a fan movement dubbed Project Rainfall lobbied for an already English-localized trio of games to be…
Metroid: Zero Mission is a nice package deal for anybody interested in GBA collecting. It includes both the original Metroid (presumably identical to the prior release in the Classics series) and the modernized retelling of same. Controls and graphics have been updated to match the likes of Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion , but unlike the latter game, the developers included a number of "sequence breaks" which had…
I think the Quick Look might have contained some unrepresentative language about this game being some sort of open sandbox. I found it to be more like Psychonauts than anything else, though without a plot to propel you forward. The game is is a fairly linear one, but it keeps you engaged by forcing you to learn how best to use a set of tools to manipulate an environment into allowing you forward. There are a few…
I’ve yet to see Indie Game: The Movie . This is probably a sad state of affairs, and puts me at something of an informational disadvantage to people who are passionate about Team Meat’s debut title Super Meat Boy . Games are not developed in a vacuum; I feel that the context surrounding a game’s development is usually worth consideration, and while I can speak a little bit about the history of this particular title,…
This review, like the ones to follow, will focus both upon the game itself and its Linux implementation. The reviewer dual-boots into Windows 7 and is thereby better equipped to cross-reference performance issues and the like. If FTL is any indication of the sort of quality we can expect from the games the Internet has collectively Kickstarted this year, Linux users should be prepared to lose hundreds of work hours…
