Shaun Musgrave

When Vampire Survivors first started going viral in early 2022, it seemingly came out of nowhere. Of course, that wasn’t exactly the case. Developer poncle was inspired by a 2019 mobile game called Magic Survival along with the Castlevania series, and the resulting game actually hung around for a few months unnoticed before it started picking up in a big way. Since then, poncle has grown Vampire Survivors beyond anyone’s wildest dreams with updates and expansions. No one can doubt the developer’s ability to build on a good thing, but what about making another game whole cloth?

Developer Terarin has built a strong reputation for quality shoot ’em ups, and his latest release is not going to upset that. Blaze of Storm is another vertically-scrolling shooter from the developer, and it once again rides the line between paying tribute to the classics and carving its own path in the genre. On its face, it’s a shoot ’em up fan’s game, but it’s actually rather accessible for those who want to dip their toe into this sometimes hard-to-approach genre.

Ah, the Hello Kitty Island Adventure roller coaster never ceases. When it showed up as an upcoming game for Apple Arcade back in the day, I chuckled and didn’t expect much. Then I played it and found a surprisingly deep and compelling game, one that had me excited to pick it up in a more lasting form when it launched on the Nintendo Switch. Just as I was running out of things to do, the Wheatflour Wonderland DLC arrived. That scratched my itch for more to do, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel a little empty in the end. We’ve now got the second paid DLC, City Town, and it promises a whole lot more than the first, but with a price tag to match that claim. Let’s see where this ride goes now.

You know, there was a time when it was really a struggle being a console-owning RPG fan in the West. Before the one-two punch of Final Fantasy VII and Pokémon Red & Blue proved the genre could roll big numbers outside of Japan, it wasn’t unusual for any given console to see fewer than ten RPGs in a year. That’s not even talking about the quality of those games, which naturally varied. In those days, by hook or by crook, I would try to play just about every single RPG that got released in English on my beloved NES, Game Boy, and Super NES. That was something you could do! I’d even relish the bad ones, because beggars couldn’t be choosers.

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.