Author: DDOCentral

Time for our regular bunch of quick-fire reviews and impressions of what’s been under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both… I’ve actually spent most of the week in New York so not quite the bumper crop we looked at last time, but it’s a decent crop all the same!

And the cream of the crop, mere days before a whole year had passed since I waited in a virtual line during injury time at a football match to order it, my Deathsmiles I+II Collector’s Edition finally turned up in the post! It contains the Switch port of the enhanced Xbox 360 presentation of Cave’s 2007 supernatural side-scrolling bullet-hell shoot ‘em up, which also happens to be my all-time favourite shoot ‘em up, and its 2009 sequel, which doesn’t quite reach those heights but it probably is my all-time favourite Christmas…

It’s always a bummer when, after countless hours of searching, you realize that you’ve lost one of your favorite games. Sure, sometimes it’s a game that recently came out and replacing it doesn’t cost you too much, but sometimes it can really sting to lose a game you’ve had for years. What games have you lost?

The first game I remember losing was Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge for GameBoy Advance. It was a side-game of the Banjo-Kazooie series that felt a little bit weird compared to the other Banjo games. A friend at school didn’t believe that it was a real game, so I brought it to school to show him. By recess, the game had left my pocket and gotten lost who-knows-where. The game wasn’t really up my ally, so when I discovered it was gone, it was less of a “oh no!” and more of a “well, whatever.”

While…

I love to examine how a game “feels” to play. This isn’t just how smooth the mechanics are, or simply the world and story flavor, nor is it just book presentation.

How a game “feels” to play (by my own definition) is this:

“How an RPG “feels” is how successfully it manages to evoke the setting or situation presented, in concert with the mechanics and book organization, while ensuring smooth game flow.“

Let’s unpack that.

Evoke: To simulate. This doesn’t mean that all games need to simulate situations in line with our own world, but with the dramatic presentation of the game. Does a game about superheroes allow players to create a storyline filled with comic book-style drama and action? Does a gritty medieval RPG create challenges which feel as though they came out of a movie or book in the setting?

A game which is “about” god-touched…

Delighted to have received my copy of Dwarrowdeep, the latest megadungeon from the pen of Greg Gillespie, this afternoon. While I have held the .PDF for quite some days, I am glad to at last to have been able to begin to read in earnest this rather exciting book.

Dwarrowdeep is the largest Dwarf-themed dungeon adventure ever written, or at least so the book claims. I can believe this and have had a great deal of joy from flipping through the pages, noting many references to those other famous Dwarven halls from literature and gaming.

Of particular note is the method, not dissimilar to the way Iron Crown approached Moria, of mixing fixed primary areas of the dungeon maps with randomly-determined secondary areas. It looks like the resources provided to create the vast majority of the megadungeon offer an entertaining mix of random tables themed to the Dwarven realm.

Well, I thought that I’d talk about why personality is one of the most important parts of any videogame. This was something I ended up thinking about after re-playing yet another part of the dark comedy first-person shooter game “Postal: Brain Damaged” (2022). Objectively speaking, this probably isn’t the best game I’ve played this year, but it does seem to quickly be becoming one of my favourites so far this year.

A lot of it is because the game has personality. Yes, the gameplay itself may be heavily inspired by a mixture of old and new games, but it is presented in a relatively unique way. The game’s sense of humour extends to everything from the bizarre monster designs to the surreal levels to the background details to the voice-acting for the game’s anti-hero too.

This is a screenshot from “Postal: Brain Damaged” (2022), showing the main character…