I’ve been a big fan of racing games for a long time. I spent many happy hours in high school running my friends into the supernaturally solid shrubs and lampposts featured in Top Gear. Indeed it was the arcade version of Race Drivin’ that taught me how to use a manual transmission, and I’ve preferred [...]

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Keeping a series going is always a tricky balancing act between stasis and change. Keep things too much the same, and your audience is likely to get bored and look for something else to do. Innovate too much, and you risk alienating your audience by ruining what made the original popular in the first place. [...]

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I once had a screaming nightmare that affected my sense of reality so badly that I couldn’t get back to sleep. Instead, I stayed up and played video games. Harvest Moon was my last grip on reality at 4AM. After that incident, I had a new respect for the cute sim games. We play games [...]

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The Cooking Mama series can do no wrong by me. These are near perfect games because you get exactly what you’re expecting, and then some. As the title suggests, Cooking Mama 2 is a cooking game with 80 recipes from around the world, including favorites like kimchee and pancakes. You prepare food in steps, with [...]

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The Phantom Hourglass is finally here! After months of delays, the latest Zelda release finally comes to the Nintendo DS. Zelda personifies the action-adventure style by offering puzzles only occasionally mixed with fighting or jumping around. Where many adventure games have tried and failed to achieve a mix of challenging mind games and satisfying battles, [...]

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Children of Mana is the latest Squenix addition to a long line of Mana RPG/adventure games that have moved into the Nintendo handheld world - this one being a game for the DS. And out of all the mana games I’ve played, it is by far the worst, and possibly one of the worst RPG [...]

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