The 1993 original is, for a certain audience, a cult classic. In that as in this modernised remake you play a famed warrior who’s gifted a naked 10-year-old girl by the gods, and must raise her to adulthood. Will you up her combat skills and send her adventuring, make her the best cook in the land or, uh, force her to work in a sleazy bar and become a teen hooker? It’s your call!
But, even in a world where the likes of Baten Kaitos, Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninjas and Famicom Detective Club have been exhumed from their mouldering gaming graves, seeing Rainbow Cotton back on sale is genuinely surreal.
But it unfortunately fails to capture the charm and replayability that oozes from every pore of the game that it apes.
As I sat on the London Underground playing Death Becomes Her on my Switch I became intensely aware of the passengers on either side of me. Before this moment I’d never been self-conscious about gaming in public - why the hell should I care what some random strangers think of me? But I realized a glance at my screen would show two canoodling cartoon schoolgirls. Let’s face it, this is a powerfully bad look for a middle-aged man.
Sadly the format didn’t last, presumably, because the internet is swimming with free trivia quizzes. These daysBuzz! games and peripherals are most commonly found clogging up the shelves of charity shops across the nation: casual players don’t need this plastic tat in their house and retro games fans are a little snooty about this powerfully mainstream mini-franchise.
It’s now been thirteen years since the last Buzz! game and the (aptly named) developer Simplicity Games thinks it’s time for a comeback. Enter Brain Show, which waits until the dead of night, grabs a shovel, heads to the graveyard, and tries to bring Buzz! back from the dead.
I can say that watching the film Vertigo didn’t really help. The game doesn’t follow the plot at all, it takes a couple of aspects but changes them heavily which isn’t a bad thing, per se. The game tries to have a Hitchcockian vibe and incorporate the ‘master of suspense’ style into many aspects of the game. This is a huge undertaking, and the game never gets near hitting the heights of Hitchcock or Vertigo.
Nope. within the first twenty minutes, I could see where we were heading, except it now included technical problems. Now, this game is obviously made on a budget, so I do cut it some slack, but it does things that make you think, “if you’re on a budget… just don’t do it, horror is the perfect genre to scale back and subscribe to the motto less is more”.
“Whilst Autobahn Police Simulator 2 is a tough one to recommend due to the above-mentioned issues, I really hope that a third game comes out and has more time spent on the basics such as camera work, animation, controls and overall smoothness.”
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Contrast that with 35mm, in which I spent an hour trudging through an abandoned village trying to find a bucket so I could use a grubby broken-down well. Let’s face it, that’s probably a more realistic scenario for you if civilisation collapsed.
But.
BUT.
Consequently, bullet hell is a genre I admire from a distance. Deep in my bones I know I’m never going to be good at it but I can appreciate what works and what doesn’t.
All of which brings me to indie dev Last Boss 88’s SHINORUBI, a new early access title “inspired by classic shooting games”. You know the drill, pick your ship and jump into a vertically scrolling battlefield teeming with enemies, power-ups and thousands of bullets. The developers promise “all the best aspects of Japanese bullet hell games” in super shiny Ultra HD.
And there lies the rub. In reviewing Skatebird, I find myself constantly wondering whether Tony ruined me for other men. Birds. Games. OK, it isn't a great analogy but, we are where we are.
Turns out that The Blair Witch Project is the absolute worst film to watch if you’re camping out in the woods that night. With no evidence to the contrary I thought it was real and - though I still doubted the existence of actual witches - I spent the night sleeping in the backseat of someone’s car. The Blair Witch Project remains the most terrifying experience I’ve had in a cinema and makes me basically the prime target for Blair Witch VR.
