👨‍⚖️ The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles | PS4 | Review | 8/10 | "Elementary, my dear Ace Attorney" 👨‍⚖️

This is the first entry I have played in the Ace Attorney franchise; I've always been aware of them and always thought I would like them, but for some reason never played them.

This seemed like a good starting point as it’s set many years before the other games, which meant I was sure I could avoid spoilers and be able to grasp the story - as no prior knowledge would be needed. 

🚁🧟‍♂️ Highrisers | PC | Gameplay | Ten Minute Taster | "Get In The Chopper!" 🚁🧟‍♂️ @SolarPowerGames #IndieGames #GameDev

Highrisers is an Urban Survival RPG! Crafting, Exploring and Defending in a desolate metropolis haunted by the mysterious dreamers. Lead a team of 4 survivors through this urban desert of skyscrapers and high-rises, where the streets are crowded with the mutated victims of a strange disease.

🛣️ Road 96 | PC | Review | 7/10 | "Digixart’s game is actually a series of carefully designed and written vignettes" 🛣️ @Digixart #IndieGames #GameDev

Road 96 bills itself as a “procedurally generated” story. Going in this was a big red flag: I don’t want some algorithm telling me a tale, I want a human being with thoughts, feelings and opinions! 

Fortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that Road 96 is using procedural generation as more of a buzzword.

💿📀 Mango Mage Records | Interview With Britt 💿📀 #VideoGameVinyl #Vinyl @TheMangoMage

During my recent dalliances across the internet in search of gaming vinyl, I happened across new label Mango Mage Records, and as they seemed so blinking lovely, I thought it would be great to get to know them a little better, especially as they seemed in an interesting position as they were a new label and just celebrating the sell-out of their first release. Fear not!

There are more releases to come…

https://www.mangomagerecords.com

🔘🏙️ Button City | Xbox Series X | Review | 7/10 | "Pastel-Shaded Playtime with Pals" 🔘🏙️ @ButtonCity #IndieGames #GameDev

A cute and pastel-coloured adventure aimed at younger players, Button City is a simple story told with charm and an accessible and fun main game in Gobabots, propped up by other mini-games and light exploration.

🤡 Ayo the Clown | Nintendo Switch Review | 6.5/10 | "Pastel Palettes, Twinkly Music and a Cast of Toy-like Side Characters" 🤡 @cloudm1 #IndieGames #GameDev

Ayo the Clown was given to me as a game my kids might enjoy. Having watched the trailer I was inclined to agree, the younger one anyway (the older one is currently obsessed with Zelda and recently finished Breath of the Wild, so might need a bit more challenge). 

The trailer is narrated by a soft-voiced American who sounds like a kids' TV host and introduces us to the word of Ayo. He's a clown who has lost his best friend, his dog Bo. You accompany Ayo through multiple brightly coloured levels, taking on a host of enemies in order to get Bo back.

🃏🎴 Draft Of Darkness | PC | Ten Minute Taster | "It's Drafty and its Dark!" 🃏🎴 @CrawlyGames #IndieGames #GameDev

Draft of Darkness is a survival horror deck builder with roguelike dungeon exploration. Recruit allies, synergize their decks to create powerful card combos, manage your resources, explore procedurally generated maps and determine the outcome of the story.

🌳 Seed Of Life | PC | Ten Minute Taster | "Watch Me Sow My Seed" 🌳 @leonardointera #GameDev #IndieGames

Seed of Life is an epic adventure game about the persistence of life. 

You're Cora, the last known survivor of Lumia, a dying planet. 

Your only hope to save your homeworld is to activate the Seed of Life and rekindle the sun once again. 

Will you be the light that conquers the darkness?

⚔️ Greak: Memories Of Azur | Nintendo Switch | Ten-Minute Taster | Gameplay | "Its All Greak To Me" ⚔️ @PlayGreak #IndieGames #GameDev

Greak: Memories of Azur is a beautiful single-player puzzle-platformer adventure.

You will take the role of three siblings: Greak, Adara and Raydel to guide them through the lands of Azur.

Alternate control between them and use their unique abilities to escape from the Urlag invasion.

🏜️ Glyph | PC | Gameplay | Ten Minute Taster | "Rolling Around In the Sand" 🏜️ @PlayGlyph #IndieGames #GameDev

 

Glyph’s gameplay combines breathtaking aerial manoeuvres with tranquil exploration in a stunning 3D platforming experience. Add a mesmerizing original soundscape, and Glyph is lifting you up and whisking you away.

👀 Before Your Eyes | Part 3 | Walkthrough | Ending | Gameplay 👀 @Goodbye__World_ #GameDev #IndieGames

 

Join Rich in Part 3 of the Before your Eyes Gameplay Walkthrough as we see the ending of the game... 

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

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♜ Jupiter Hell | PC | Gameplay | Ten-minute Taster | "Turn-Based Roguelike Doom Shotgun Chess" ♜ @chaosforge_org #GameDev #IndieGames

 

Jupiter Hell is a turn-based shooter from the depths of cosmic hell, built on a classic roguelike framework updated with modern 3d graphics. Rip and tear zombies, demons, and heavy metal monstrosities with chainguns and chainsaws. Like chess... with shotguns!

📕📘 Lock On Gaming Journal | Issue 1 | "A Luxury Piece Of Gaming Journalism" 📕📘 @LostInCult #LockOn

I’ll level with you immediately. I am a self-confessed video game magazine geek. Physically holding a magazine and even smelling its pages are more of a thrill to me than just digesting web pages and half reading video games related emails and press releases.

Owning a video game magazine collection for me allows me to fulfil that fantasy of having my own library of video games related literature. In the last 5 years or so I have begun to fall for the various video games coffee table style books such as Bitmap Books’ Visual Compendium series or their beautiful one-off books like The Art Of Point and Click Adventures. These are the kind of books you can flick through and soak up the nostalgia as you turn each page and transport you back to another time and place where the video games magazine ruled the world. 

My favourite video games magazines have to be the Mean Machines run of magazines that were headed up by Jaz Rignall. The original run of magazines only lasted 24 issues before it split into a SEGA and Nintendo variant but those first 24 are ingrained into my psyche and greatly influenced the way I think about games critique and how to have fun with video game writing.

More recently I’ve also had the pleasure to look at a cool magazine called Ninty Fresh which went through Kickstarter very successfully and is now into a run of issues each being funded by Kickstarter backers.

With all this in mind, it feels like there is something of a renaissance of the written word in physical form within the video games world which for me is a great thing and leads me onto the journal which has been absorbing my time lately.

The lovely people from Lost In Cult have just released their first gaming journal entitled Lock On and I was approached to take a look at this beautiful video gaming tome just before I went on my hols to the Isle Of Wight.

Perfect holiday reading was my first thought.

🚘 Mini Motorways | Ten Minute Taster | PC | "A Pleasure To Play" 🚘 @dinopoloclub #GameDev #IndieGames

Mini Motorways is a strategy simulation game about designing the road map for a growing city. Build a traffic network, one road at a time, to create a bustling metropolis. 

Redesign your roads and place your motorways to get everyone where they need to go. 

How long can you keep the city moving?

💥 The Ascent | PC | Review | 7/10 | "Blade Runner Has a Lot To Answer For" 💥 @AscentTheGame #IndieGames #GameDev

Cyberpunk is in fashion: you can’t throw a rock without hitting a TV show, game, or movie containing a grimy cityscape full of dazzling neon signs, steam-filled vents, video ads featuring Geisha girls, and the all-pervading stench of hypercapitalism. Blade Runner has a lot to answer for. But, perhaps as a result of disappointing Cyberpunk 2077, that wave may now be receding.

But, though the aesthetic is now a little played out, it’s rare to see it executed as well as in The Ascent. 

🐀🔥 A Plague Tale: Innocence | Review | Xbox Series X | 8/10 | "Something is rotten in 14th-century France" 🐀🔥 @APlagueTale #IndieGames #GameDev

Something is rotten in 14th-century France. And it's not just the literal thousands of corpses you encounter, walk over and occasionally make in this game. You play as Amicia de Rune, a teenage girl on the run from not only super-powered plague-carrying hordes of rats but also the Inquisition. Not the Spanish one - in this game, they're French and everyone expects them.

☢️ Chernobylite | PC | Gameplay | Ten Minute Taster | "Stalker,Fallout & State Of Decay" ☢️ @ChernobylGame #GameDev #IndieGames

Chernobylite is a science-fiction survival horror RPG. Set in the hyper-realistic, 3D-scanned wasteland of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, explore a non-linear storyline in your search to uncover the truth of your tortured past.

 

🚗 Crash Drive 3 | Xbox Series X | Review | 9/10 | "It's an open-world, cross-platform arcade stuntfest" 🚗 @M2Hgames #IndieGames #GameDev

I wasn't really sure whether an open world MMO racing game on a budget would actually be any good. I mean, I've played and enjoyed the Forza Horizon games, but they have huge amounts of money thrown at them and are very, very shiny (to the extent it kind of stops being that much fun after a while, as they take themselves a bit seriously). 

Crash Drive 3 does not have this problem. It's an open-world, cross-platform arcade stuntfest where you tear about in a huge array of vehicles in amusingly varied environments. And it's fun.

🎨🖌️ Paint the Town Red | Xbox Series X | Review | 7.5/10 | "I’m a Big Fan of Voxels" 🎨🖌️ @SouthEastGames #IndieGames #GameDev

I’m a big fan of voxels. I’ve been introduced to some fantastic games over the last couple of years that made awesome use of them and Paint the Town Red can very easily be added to that list.

A first-person title with a heavy focus on melee combat, Paint the Town Red’s multiple game modes mean that it can be used for either brief blasts of bloody bashing bonkersness or delved into for a deeper, more RPG-ish experience. The one thing that really feels like it’s missing from the console versions is some sort of multiplayer mode. The game would really come to life with friends - although the PC version does offer it so perhaps it’s a possibility for consoles down the line.

🐔 Ranch Sim | PC | Ten Minute Taster | Gameplay | "The coolest Golf Buggy In Video Games!" 🐔 @RanchSimulator #GameDev #IndieGames

 

Ranch Sim - Builder. Farmer. Hunter. Trader. Ranching certainly isn’t your average job. Think you have the skills to turn your family’s rundown homestead into the most prosperous ranch in the valley? 

Then it’s time to head out into the wilderness in this captivating single and multiplayer open-world simulator.

🧹🧙‍♀️ Cotton Reboot | Nintendo Switch | Gameplay | Ten Minute Taster | "The Original Cute Em Up!" 🧹🧙‍♀️ @ININ_Games #GameDev #IndieGames

 

In Cotton Reboot!, Japan’s favourite shooter mascot finds her way into a beautiful HD game with stunning graphics and remixed soundtracks. This is the original “Cute ‘em up”, and will test your skills as well as tug on the heartstrings as Cotton and her friends are finally back in the ultimate celebration of one of Japan’s most beloved gaming mascots. Choose between the HD Reboot mode or go legit with the X68000 original mode with pixel perfect graphics from the iconic Japanese home computer.

Features:
• Play the brand-new HD Reboot mode or the fantastic retro X68000 mode
• Cute ‘em Up action based on one of Japan’s longest-running game series
• Enjoy the awesome soundtrack either fully arranged or in its original home computer form
• Guide Cotton and her friend Silk in a highly approachable game! Easy to play, but difficult to master!
• Compete online for high scores

🕹️ GAME LINK:🕹️

Amazon Affiliate Link: https://amzn.to/3eKN6D7

🎙️ Senile Team Game Dev Interview 🎙️ @SenileTeam #IndieGames #GameDev

Having recently thoroughly enjoyed Senile Team’s Dreamcast / PC release ‘Intrepid Izzy’ (https://www.gamesfreezer.co.uk/2021/07/intrepid-izzy-dreamcast-review-910-im.html), following some great conversations with WAVE Game Studios, I was lucky enough to get some time with the mind behind the game. 

A great indie developer with roots going back to 2003, it was a pleasure to find out more about the history of the Senile Team. Also, huge thanks to WAVE Game Studios for just being awesome and so passionate about what they do, quite frankly.

🐏 Lambs on the Road: The Beginning | Nintendo Switch | Preview 🐏 @LambsOnTheRoad #IndieGames #GameDev

Lambs on the Road is a 2D platformer with puzzle elements, set sometime after a horrific apocalypse, whereby society has crumbled, food has become scarce and people have turned to murder and cannibalism.

📀 Hang on to Your Hat | Black Screen Records | Vinyl | Review | (A big band take on the music of Mario 64) 📀 @blackscreenrec #Vinyl #VGM

A huge part of Mario’s charm is in the music and you’d be stretched to find a more fondly remembered title in Mario’s canon than Mario 64, the 1996 release on the Nintendo 64.

Quite different from other vinyl orchestral releases that I’ve heard/covered, Hang on to Your Hat is recorded in a big band style by the Video Game Jazz Orchestra and is all the better for it with the original tunes completely fitting this particular swinging throwback style.

📀 Zelda & Chill | Vinyl Review | Black Screen Records | "it’s all about the tunes baby, and it delivers (Ocarina of) time and time again" 📀 @blackscreenrec #VGM #Vinyl

My partner @kingdomofcarts first came across Mikel’s Zelda & Chill on Spotify a year or so ago, it popped up as a recommended listen and we were both instantly hooked.

The blend of familiar, timeless Zelda melodies with trip-hop beats is a real winner and an album we continually return to, several times a week.

🎶🎧💿 Creaks Soundtrack on Vinyl 🎶🎧💿 #Vinyl #VGM

As a fan of Amanita Design’s previous game Machinarium, I was looking forward to covering Creaks and my subsequent review (https://www.gamesfreezer.co.uk/2021/06/creaks-review-xbox-series-x-910.html) cemented them – for me - as a developer with a really unique perspective and masters of their craft, especially in terms of presentation, mood and atmosphere tied to richly-textured and yet accessible gameplay.

Before listening to the album, Lukas Kunce at Amanita Design sent me a link to a documentary put together by the man behind the Hidden Orchestra – Joe Acheson – that turned out to be not just an invaluable resource for understanding the creation of the music for the Creaks soundtrack but is also just plain awesome in terms of being a really relaxing and incredibly interesting documentary, full stop - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67S-rAyku3U I urge you all to watch!

🦖 Super Sami Roll | PC | Ten Minute Taster | "A Delightful 3D Platformer That Brings A Smile To Your Face" 🦖 @SuperSamiRoll #IndieGames #GameDev

In Super Sami Roll, Sami’s on a mission to rescue his friend Vera and he needs your help! Join him in this exhilarating, colourful 3D platformer and fast roll, air-grapple, and jump to save her!

🎶💿🐿️ Mr Nutz - Wayo Records 🎶💿🐿️ @wayorecords #Vinyl #VGM

 

Mr Nutz - Wayo Records

PURCHASE LINK

Wayo Records’ previous release - a double 12-inch, gatefold presentation of the always-welcome Yuzo Koshiro’s 1990 Actraiser - has been followed up by something distinctly more cartoonish in nature, namely the well-received 1993 French 2D platformer, Mr Nutz. 

🎮 How To Take Your Online Gaming Experience To A Whole New Level 🎮

Image Source - Pexels

Online gaming can be such a fun and exciting experience. There are so many different games to play, adventures to take and skills to learn, and it's so easy to get lost in a session of online gaming for hours on end.

However, simply sitting down at the same old computer to play online games in the most basic fashion possible is holding you back dramatically from being able to appreciate the full potential of each game.

You need to put time and effort into creating the best environment and atmosphere in which you can use top-quality equipment to get the most out of your online gaming session, otherwise, you're only getting half of the adventure! Thankfully, it doesn't have to be as difficult as you might expect to take your online gaming experience to a whole new level, as there are in fact just a few key tips and tricks that you can make the most of to turn your entertainment dreams into a reality in no time at all.

So, if you're interested in finding out more, then simply read on to uncover some of the handiest hacks that you can utilize today! 

📹 Night Book | Xbox Series X | Review | 7/10 | "Kannar Help But Love a Bit of FMV Gaming" 📹 @WalesInter #IndieGames #GameDev

The most recent title from Wales Interactive is Night Book, a game in which you play as a pregnant, online interpreter as she gets involved in the dealings around a sinister book written in the supposedly cursed language of Kannar.

⚔️🛡️ Guild of Darksteel | Nintendo Switch | Review | 5.5/10 | "Immortality Ain’t What it’s Cracked Up To Be" ⚔️🛡️ @DigeratiDM #GameDev #IndieGames

Guild of Darksteel has a promising and high concept setup. As a mercenary ‘cursed’ by immortality, you wearily make your way to the titular Guild of Darksteel in order to join a shady clan of immortals who use their eternal life to solve problems for others in exchange for coin, usually by stabbing things with their swords.