Posts tagged “Have You Played”

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is a name so crap I can't even be bothered to mock it. And yet unlike 95% of crap names, I never forget it. EYE is one of my favourite games. It's a mess. There's so much wrong with it that I could probably slag it off for two full reviews, but I still like it too much.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Streum On Studio, E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy.

Good morning and welcome to just another regular day. What better way to celebrate either being in a relationship or being alone than by toying with the love lives of tiny cartoony people? Kitty Powers' Love Life it is, eh?

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Magic Notion, Kitty Powers' Love Life.

I booted up Devil May Cry V for the first time recently. I hadn't touched a Devil May Cry game since the rather odd fourth one that introduced Nero, a poster-child for emo lads in the mid to late 2000s. He just wasn't as good as sassing demons as Dante, perhaps a bit too serious for my liking. I liked Nero in Devil May Cry V a…

Tagged with Capcom, feature, Have You Played, Devil May Cry 5.

Halo 2 came out just after I turned 20, and I bought an Xbox to play it. This was a big deal. I’d always been really careful with money, but I’d been living away from home for two years by then, and my discipline was starting to slip. Until that point, buying anything that cost more than £99 had been an agonising, days-long process of…

Tagged with Bungie, feature, Have You Played, Microsoft, Halo 2.

Crafting systems, like skill trees, are one of those features that have become so trendy that developers have found a way to crowbar them into nearly every type of game. There are good ones - like Minecraft’s seminal tic-tac-toe assembly board, and guff ones - like ARK: Survival Evolved’s, which saw me chewed into winalot by a hell-creek’s-worth of gigapredators again and again as I…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, matt furniss, Psygnosis, Wiz 'n' Liz.

When I was younger I didn't have a console or a very powerful PC, only the big chugging family one in the corner of one room. There weren't many games for it either, just the ones my brother had left behind when he went to university (he kept the discs in big stacks on his desk, rather than in their cases, and remembering that today…

Tagged with Ben Leffler, feature, Have You Played.

I didn't expect to be taken on a NES-fuelled fever dream when I first started playing Old School Musical, but this retro-infused rhythm game ended up being one surprise after another. A love letter to the pixel classics of the 8 and 16-bit eras, Old School Musical follows the tale of white square Tib and his younger, taller brother, Rob, as they fight to save…

Tagged with Dear Villagers, feature, Have You Played, Old School Musical.

Guillotine! Guillotine! Guillotine!

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Polyslash, We the Revolution.

See that yellow caged duck in the top-left corner there? We call her Big Birdie. And sooner or later, Big Birdie is going to find you, and make you pay for what you've done.

Tagged with A&F Software, feature, Have You Played, Chuckie Egg.

When 3D engines started becoming more prevalent in the mid-90s, a feature that should have taken off way more than it did was the idea of switching from a top-down management/building game, to a first-person view where you could tour your work at ground level. 1997’s Dungeon Keeper is probably the best example of this, with its charming ‘possession’ feature, but to me, 1996’s SimCopter…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Maxis, SimCopter.

The first Ni No Kuni game arguably pulled off the biggest art coup in the history of games: getting the renowned Japanese animation giant Studio Ghibli to magic up a living, breathing game world that looked (and sounded) just like their beloved films. Its sequel, Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, never benefited from the same Ghibli wizardry as its predecessor, but put the two…

Tagged with Bandai Namco Entertainment, feature, Have You Played, Level-5, Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom.

There are, these days, far too many games to play. Well, there were always too many games to play. But only since the advent of digital distribution, have their numbers so wildly and obviously exceeded my capacity to get through them all. If I’ve heard of a game, the odds are I can have it on my PC in as little as a couple of…

Tagged with Brøderbund Software, feature, Have You Played, Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.

We often get excited about a game doing more things. Who amongst us has not enthused about a game on the basis that "and you can x and you can y, wouldn't it be cool if you could z as well"? ΔV: Rings of Saturn has some more growing to do, principally in its promised story. But it's already got this calming, almost hypnotic core…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Kodera Software, ΔV: Rings of Saturn.

Hardwar is one of the most under-appreciated games I've ever played. In recent years we've had a revival of free roaming spaceflight games with... sigh. Okay, fine, Elite-likes. I still wish we got a modern version of Hardwar. A remake that captured its novel feel, and expanded on its ideas. And not another bloody MMO.

Tagged with feature, Gremlin Interactive, Have You Played, the software refinery, Hardwar.

Also known as Theme Park 2, also know as Sim Theme Park. This game consumed my prepubescent years. That Theme Park World hasn't received a gussy up and polish to sell on Steam or GOG is a genuine surprise to me, because it's a smashing little management sim. I mean, it's a Bullfrog game, so you know what to expect.

Tagged with Bullfrog Games, feature, Have You Played.

You have a game or two like this, in your mind somewhere. It lurks. You wouldn't necessarily say it's a particularly good game, or even your favourite. You might even forget it exists for long periods. But occasionally, perhaps twice a year, or every two or three years, you get an unaccountable craving to play it again. That's what A Valley Without Wind is to…

Tagged with Arcen Games, feature, Have You Played, A Valley Without Wind.

Tictac.io was almost the first game I covered from the treehouse. It's noughts and crosses (aka "tic tac toe" if you don't acknowledge that the ground is a floor) online, except in realtime, and you can pick up and move the pieces after you place them. It's bloody great.

Tagged with Alvarop, feature, Have You Played.

Lately, whenever I've had a spare couple of minutes, it's become a habit to fire up Dicey Dungeons. It's an RPG that is played over the course of many, many runs. I've succeeded rarely and failed often, yet somehow I've come back for more. Lady Luck has enticed me with her lethal game show of dice rolling.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Terry Cavanagh, Dicey Dungeons.

I’m not sure if me playing Lego Island really happened or if it was a fever dream. Even watching back videos of the game, I still can’t believe it was a thing. Let alone a thing I sunk a load of time into. Let alone as thing I spent a lot of time with as a child. It’s nightmare fuel.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Mindscape, Lego Island.

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. I am partial to top-down wizards. It's a perspective that makes plans as important as reaction speeds, where every spell and step is clearly visible to everyone. Battling in Battlerite isn't about who gets the jump on who, it's about who can bait out a jump…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Stunlock Studios, Battlerite.