Shaun Musgrave

If it’s true that cats have nine lives, Bubsy the Bobcat’s only got a couple more left to get things right. His debut game was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with just enough quality and marketing spend to score a sales hit, and his various owners have sporadically been chasing that dragon ever since. A deeply flawed direct sequel, a baffling exclusive for the Jaguar of all things, a rightly-maligned ambitious attempt to take the character into 3D, a 2.5D attempt to return to form where you could constantly feel the (lack of) budget, and an auto-runner paint a picture of Bubsy where only two things are consistent: Bubsy is obnoxious, and no one quite knows what to do with him.

If you were a kid in the 1990s, or existed in the vicinity of a kid in the 1990s, Rugrats was essentially unavoidable. Heck, that qualifies a good chunk into the 2000s too. The Nicktoons show about a group of babies and toddlers exploring the mysterious world of everyday life aired for a whopping thirteen seasons, and its spin-off All Grown Up ran an additional five. Rugrats had three theatrical movies and two made-for-TV movies, plus all kinds of books, toys, and other goods. To no one’s surprise, Rugrats also spawned a ton of video games. If you were one of those aforementioned 90s kids, you probably owned at least one of them.

Remember the ol’ video game Kickstarter boom that ran for a few years in the early to mid 2010s? For a brief moment in time, it felt like there was a genie out there granting all kinds of wishes if players could stump up the dough. That fever died down after a while into a more realistic state, and a lot of that came down to disappointment. Some games never materialized. Some did, but didn’t live up to expectations in some manner. Still, there were some games that fully delivered on the hopes and dreams of those who backed them, and one of the very best in that regard was Shovel Knight from Yacht Club Games.

One of the big moments of the original Final Fantasy VII, especially for those who were relatively new to the RPG genre, was when the party finally left Midgar. Up until that point, Midgar seemed big enough for the whole game to be set in. It was the entire world, as far as the player knew. Then you step out onto the world map for the first time and see just how small Midgar really is. Just one big little city on the map. The possibilities this suggested were remarkable, even if to some extent they were illusory. No other location in the world of Gaia was anywhere near as large or fleshed out as Midgar. But for a moment, you couldn’t help but wonder.

Back in the early 1990s, one of the hottest genres of games on home computers was the point-and-click adventure. Depending on your own personal experiences, different games might come up when you think about 1990s adventure games. Maybe it’s The Secret of Monkey Island. Maybe it’s Space Quest. Perhaps it’s Broken Sword, or Blazing Dragons, or even something like Myst. That said, I think at least some of the people reading this would fondly recall the amusing adventures of a handful of goofy little gnome-like creatures. The Gobliiins series didn’t tend to get the praise some of its peers in the genre did, but it certainly found a home in the collections of many PC gamers of the era.

How time flies. It’s been a whole year since Nintendo released its latest console, and it’s been anything but uneventful. To say that it has been a turbulent period of time to launch new gaming hardware in would be an understatement, but that hasn’t stopped the Nintendo Switch 2 from having the highest first-year sales of any console ever. On this occasion, we decided it might be fun to take a look back on the first year of the Nintendo Switch 2 and review some of the highlights. Grab a party hat and a piece of cake at the door, because we’re doing that anniversary thing.

When it comes to Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrades of games, the results have truly been all over the map. Some are free, some are set at different prices. Many simply upgrade the performance of the game in question, while others take the opportunity to add some new goodies. While most of them are definite upgrades over the original Switch versions of the games in question, others somehow end up doing less while trying to do more. It can be frustrating because some Switch games stand to benefit greatly from the improved specs of the Switch 2. Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade games are a good example as they often pushed up against the Switch’s limitations, especially in handheld mode.

One of the many unfortunate consequences of advancing technology in the gaming space is that big publishers have shifted more and more towards something resembling the blockbuster model of Hollywood. Granted, the idea of big productions with bigger risks and potentially bigger rewards is something that has been around for almost as long as the medium itself. It’s more that the cost of developing those fancy games has reached a point where publishers have become extremely (and to some degree paradoxically) risk-averse in what gets greenlit. That means we tend to see more sequels and spin-offs, with truly original titles getting rarer as budgets keep on ballooning.

Ever since Level-5 shifted from being solely a developer to publishing its own work, it has felt like every original game it created was a sales pitch for some kind of multimedia project. To be fair, that approach worked well for Level-5 on more than one occasion. That success was a double-edged sword, I think. For a while there, Level-5 seemed to be more focused on making its games suitable for such ventures than actually making them great experiences on their own. Rarely poor, but frequently lacking a certain something.

When you’re looking for stylish, challenging, over-the-top third-person action, you know the name: Devil May Cry. Sorry, I really wanted to do that. While Devil May Cry had its own fair share of inspirations, it’s the series we typically credit for crystallizing a particular sub-genre of action. For the longest time, Devil May Cry and Nintendo platforms seemed to have trouble connecting. That changed with the Nintendo Switch, which not only saw decent ports of the HD versions of the first two games, but even got a fancy Special Edition of Devil May Cry 3 HD that added new gameplay mechanics. For the Nintendo Switch 2, it seems that Capcom has opted to skip ahead to Devil May Cry 5 Devil Hunter Edition.