As many of you are aware back in 2021 Steam was given the Pixel Remasters of Final Fantasy 1 through 6. This was met with plenty of mixed emotions by many since veterans of the many other remasters felt the graphics weren’t good enough or they didn’t add enough new content (or any at all) or that they removed some things other remasters had.
Other people pointed out that these were Pixel Remasters of the original versions of the games and were simply graphical and musical improvements of those. I obviously have no opinion because I have not played them, but now console games, at least Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch players will soon have the opportunity to do so. Coming April 19th the Pixel Remasters of Final Fantasy 1-6 will be coming to console. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Pearl is the prequel to X and basically tells the story of how Pearl ended up on the farm with her husband. If you recall Mia Goth played both the main characters Maxine and Pearl in X and in this one also plays Pearl once more as a young lady.
Pearl has a much different time than X, taking place during the Spanish Flu of 1918 while most of the men are away during the first Great War it starts out quite happy as Pearl dreams of escaping the family farm for a life of dancing like the girls in her films.
We quickly find that her father is confined to a wheel chair and has very little know of what is going on and needs constant care and her mother, Ruth, an older German woman is quite the uncaring woman. She is constantly speaking down to Pearl and her dreams and simply wanting things done because that is what is best. One example of this was when Pearl rode her bike to town for more medicine she stopped for a show and didn’t bring back 8 cents. Ruth noticed this forbid Pearl from eating dinner and she was only allowed to eat this for breakfast the next day to make up for the money she spent.
This is where we see the madness in Pearl go from subtle to more and more pronounced as she desperately wants to leave this farm and her family behind.
The movie is great and makes an excellent edition to the series of films and there is more to come. It perfectly captures the feeling of the early 1900’s without resorting to using far outdated technology or anything silly like that. This one is definitely worth checking out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Every so often I get the chance to review an Indy title with an interesting concept that seems a bit off,but I need to know more. Black Salt Games and Team17 were awesome enough to toss me a copy of such a game,and that game is DREDGE.
The idea is simple, and it plays just as simple as it sounds. You are a fisherman, who crashes their boat at a small port town of Greater Marrow. You are quickly given a new boat and told you can pay it off as you help out the town.
You will start by meeting the townspeople, they are nice enough people that are willing to fix your ship and buy your fish along with selling you upgrades and sending you on some fetch quest. Oh and they do give you one small rule, don’t go out at night.
Rule 2: be careful what you try to investigate
The fishing is done with various mini games, timing hitting buttons with the green box, or hitting the circle when it lines up or in the case of dredging up new items making sure you don’t hit certain spots on a spinning sort of dial. It is all very well done.
I did get a little tired of simply fishing during the day and decided I needed to see what would happen if I went out at night, because like anyone else told not to do anything I have to try it out. The darker it got the higher the level of panic level went. The fish also became more rare and sold for more money.
This is when things started to get weird. Eyes began to stare at me from a distance. Red smoke would begin to follow me and attempt to overtake my boat as I would flee not wanting to risk losing my days haul. The longer you spend out at night,the worse these things become until the stop being things that watch you and become things that can end your game prematurely.
That’s probably ok right?
The game isn’t perfect,I wasn’t a fan of the inventory system. Imagine the Resident Evil cache case. I often found myself having to toss out fish or wood I needed for upgrades because I needed something else just a little bit more. It made the game more difficult than it needed to be in some aspects when other things were made quite simple and relaxing.
The graphics and sound could have been better I’m sure,but personally I loved them both. I don’t think I will ever forget the first time I heard a foghorn in the night or when an arm of what I can only describe as a kraken crushed my ship because I decided to try to rush back to port in the night.
I know I haven’t mentioned the story and that is intentional. First, you are either going to love it or hate it and second I feel like it should be seen blindly just like I did.
I do however feel comfortable saying this game is a great buy. 8/10 with ease,and at $25 this is one of the better Indy titles on the market.
Once again NIS America was nice enough to toss me a copy of their new game, GrimGrimorie Once More to check out,which of course is always appreciated. This one is a bit different from what they usually send me.
You play as a new trainee magician named Lillet Blan at Silver star Tower. The game starts out like many PS2 games, and that’s what this is. A beautiful remaster of a PS2 game many of us missed. It is a real time strategy RPG that is almost like a tower defense.
The game is simple and straight forward, you use some units to collect magic powers or mana (which ever is easier for you to think of them) which are then used to create new magical circles or buildings. (again however you want to think of them) These act as either towers to defend your base or to create new units, all of which are magical creatures with their own strengths and weaknesses. They range from elves to fairies etc.
This isn’t to say the game is simple,just that the concept is. And while the game is fun (if not a bit repetitive) and the story is intriguing, the mystery of who the ghost in roaming at night and why there is a devil teacher is pretty nice it does show its age in a few areas.
Graphically and music I have no complaints. They did a nice job bringing it up to date. The game play itself follows the same pattern and gets dull fast. Mine mana, build the same buildings, send the same creatures up and down a 2D surface to kill the enemy, repeat. Every so often they add a new enemy or unit. The game isn’t bad,it just wasn’t my kind of game.
We all know I won’t punish it for that,fans of the original GrimGrimoire will appreciate this,and it is a solid 7/10 and worth checking out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
We all know my love of these types of games, and Urban Games was awesome enough to hook me up with a review code for this one.
The idea behind this game is pretty easy, deceptively so. The map is covered in different cities and different businesses. Each city in Transport Fever 2 wants something from these industries, it might be food or construction materials or even liquid gold, I mean of course fuel. You have one job, bring all these things together in the best way possible and make millions.
This is more fun than it looks I pormise
The problem is, everything is easy when you say at first but actually do it,not so much. You can start basically at any time between 1850 and 2050 and the technology will match. 1850, all you got is his horses and some basic trains. Now do you use trains to get wheat from the farm to a bakery then use some trucks to ship it to a nearby city? How you do things means as much or more than what you do.
My first free play game I had a nice run going. I had 3 trains set up running crude oil to turn it into oil. Then one that ran it up to a fuel depot and turned it into actual fuel to be delivered to a nearby down. Eventually I was making money hand over first and decided I could make more money by upgrading my trains.
This is when I didn’t realize the oil cars I had would transfer to the new train and I went bankrupt. You live and you learn I guess.
That is the basics of the game, how it plays is what matters. I am happy to say it plays beautifully. As much as I love these games historically they don’t play well on consoles, which has been changing lately thankfully. Transport Fever manages to nail putting the controller in this format. I never felt like I was held back not having a mouse. If you do feel that way, good news, that’s an option here.
Yes you will see wild animals if you look
The game looks beautiful as well,more than once I’ve just rode one of my trains and watched the trees or occasional animals go by. In the 1850’s seeing the horses just troy along and the people jumping in and out of the carriages is simply mesmerizing. It doesn’t change with the time either, watching trucks show up to drop off merchandise or pick up a load of logs. It never seems to get old for me.
Normally at this point I would start to wrap things up, but I do want to offer some advice to anyone playing this game. First,start with the campaign. Even if you don’t finish the campaign it acts as the tutorial. It will teach you everything you need to know about getting things set up,setting up lines for your vehicles and what connects to what to make some money.
Second,don’t feel obligated to play on normal or hard. Start in easy and work your way up, even doing things right on the higher difficulties doing it at the wrong time can be just as bad.
And last but not least, money made is based on distance traveled from point A to point B, but done as the crow flies as they say. Going around mountains and such won’t help, the faster you can get from point A to point B the better.
Now those looking for a score in this one, this is probably the best simulation style game like this I have ever played. It’s a 9/10 must buy for fans of the genre. It has vehicles from the US and Asia and Europe, different animals and cities etc. Definitely check this one out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
The Guise is a new metroidvania game from our friends over at Ratalaika Games and they were nice enough to send me over a copy to review. Now at a very reasonable price point of $6 U.S. dollars, and the company it was coming from I expected exactly what was advertised. A short but solid Metroidvania game that would be fun to play through,get a pretty reasonable Platinum trophy for trophy hunters and be a fun little story.
What I got was a pretty reasonable Platinum trophy for the hunters, a fun dark fairy tale about an orphanage of kids going into a room they shouldn’t have and one of them being trapped in the body of a monster and of course some solid,but not perfect by any means gameplay.
During the boss fights it always seemed like dodging didn’t quite go as consistently as it really should have. This caused a few deaths that were a bit annoying. Nothing that stopped me from enjoying the game of course, far from it. It was easy to adapt to in fact,just be aware of it.
The sound however, chefs kiss. It is the perfect level of sinister for what the game is trying to portray. It was actually my favorite part of the game,aside from playing as a creepy monster that can eventually spit acid on things.
This guy should die in a fire
All in all the game is fun, cheap an reasonable Platinum and most importantly it is fun. I can easily recommend this one for fans of metroidvania games, trophy hunters or just someone looking for something new to check out. 8/10, pick it up and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
When I first heard about this movie from a friend, I did not believe it was real. A quick google search ends up at imdb and discover hey Dark Side of the Moon is very real. The reviews are horrible, and rightfully so, but we will get to that in a bit.
I love the sharks
The story for Shark Side of the Moon is simple, and completely bonkers. The movie starts a long time ago in the USSR, right after America landed on the moon. After winning the space race, the USSR decided it would claim the moon for itself. It would do this by creating a human/shark hybrid that could survive pretty much anywhere and just ship them to the moon.
This ends about how you would expect, a scientist scares another as a joke, a bucket flies into a pool and hits a laser which leads to their escape. Two scientist eventually board a conveniently placed rocket and take these things to the moon, you know the moon the USSR couldn’t get to in the first place?
I wish I could say this is was the most ridiculous part of the movie but truthfully its not even close. I didn’t even mention any of the stuff on the moon and that is where all the real what the fuck happens.
Visually this is some Grade A high quality B movie stuff going on. Straight out of the 80’s here, and the sound was basically there to match. The acting was actually pretty well done, you can tell the people in this movie weren’t just phoning it in for a pay check.
This movie truthfully got some horrible reviews, and rightfully so. From a technical sense visually and such it wasn’t a good movie. However I was movies to be entertained , and this movie did that better than most AAA titles out there, It was just fun. If you can go into a movie expecting a fun movie, this is worth watching. It is sort of like Sharknado in that regard. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Continuing my weekly monster post, last week I bought you something from close to home with the Trotterhead and this week I want to bring you to the open seas by releasing the Kraken.
The history of the Kraken is well established in lore from Scandinavia sailors, to Clash of the Titans where Zeus himself controlled it. It’s worth noting however that in traditional Greek mythology the Kraken itself does not appear. (Sea monsters do exist just not that one specifically)
Known to resemble a giant octopus or giant squid the power of a kraken is so immense that it easily sinks the biggest ships simply by wrapping its testicles around it and squeezing. Why it does this is also under much debate, some say it is simply a dumb creature that mistakes the boats for food,others that it simply is defending its territory.
Interesting enough the Kraken while believed to have been about a mile long with a body that could be mistaken for a body of land, it is the one mythical creature that not only could be based on a real creature, it was also based on a giant version of 2 real creatures that were thought to not exist for a time that later were proven do in fact exist.
While humans have known about octopuses (yes that is the plural of octopus, despite popular belief octopi is not. I’m as shocked as you) there the Giant Pacific octopus wasn’t really known about then.
The record for one of these is 30 feet and 600 pounds
The chances of one of these taking down a ship is obviously pretty small, though I suppose it might take down a row boat. If you have never seen something like this and it climbed up on your boat it would scare the hell out of you and to have it described to you would be pure nightmare fuel.
The second candidate and far more likely however was a creature discovered within the last decade or so and hunts whales. I am of course speaking of the giant squid.
Unfortunately this one probably didn’t live long
The giant squid is a living monster, fully capable of fighting a sperm whale,and winning. The longest giant squid was about 43 feet, while sperm whales are about 60 feet. With a ship in the 1700 and 1800’s only being about 75 feet at the most for big ones, it’s easy to see why catching sight of one of these rare things would cause the scare it has.
This is part of what makes the Kraken so scary especially back then. It wasn’t really far fetched,most people that lived by the sea probably saw an octopus or squid. They also knew fish further out into the sea were much bigger. So why couldn’t there be a massive monster out in the deep sea waiting to rip a ship apart?
The Kraken is easily one of the scariest monsters in history because it is both easy to see where it came from,and that it wasn’t too far off from the truth. I hope you enjoyed this one,best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Fans of the horror genre have something new to look forward to when Jukai studios and Versus Evil release Stray Souls later this year.
Dive into the mind of Daniel, a teenage boy who inherits a home from his estranged grandmother. As he moves in, Daniel meets the enigmatic Martha who knows more about the house than he would expect. As night falls, dark secrets hiding within the dwelling and Daniel’s past come out of the woodworks – secrets Daniel cannot seem to outrun…
I personally can’t wait to check this one out when it releases on PS 4/5 or Xbox series S/X. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
NIS America was kind enough to once again toss us a review copy of this one,much like they did the first installment of the Crossbell series, The Legend of Heroes Trails From Zero Review and that is always appreciated.
The first thing you need to know about getting into this, you don’t technically NEED to play Zero to play Azure. You can read through much of the in game text and such to get a general idea but to be honest you are much better off playing these two games in order.
The second thing you need to know,if you want to play them both you are probably looking at 40-50 hours each. And it is worth every hour of it.
The story starts up about a month after zero ends and continues the saga of a corrupt government, admittedly seemingly less so at first. It doesn’t take long for things to go bad however. This isn’t strictly true, there is a lot of lore packed into this one. Long conversations and some of it is quite heavy. I don’t say any of this as a bad thing, the story is quite amazing and easy to get into.
Graphically the game does show its age and the sound does leave much to be desired at times. The voice acting and the music could be hit and miss, nothing that takes away from the enjoyment of the game but it does exist and would be dishonest to pretend it didn’t get up to some weird things at times.
As we all know any RPG is only as good as the combat. The combat reminds me a lot of the original Grandia. You walk around the map,and touching an enemy changes the battle screen and from there you can move around to fight enemies. It isn’t quite a tactics style battle, the battle maps are way too small for that but it is turned based and and positioning does matter for a lot of reasons. It is really well done and a lot of fun, but depending on how you play it can feel a bit slow. Thankfully quality of life improvements have been added that have taken care of that.
To be short and sweet about it,the game is highly recommended especially to anyone that enjoyed the Cold Steel series. 8/10, best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Savior Gaming 