Minigames are the coffee Revel of videogames. They are harmless, infrequent and unpleasant to think about. We accept their presence, yet no one has ever eaten a pack of Revels and wished for more coffee nuggets. Nobody completed Final Fantasy X and thought: “Needs more Blitzball”. That minigames exist as a mild distraction inside the glowing guts of other games is itself ridiculous. Imagine you were on a golf course, and hole 12 turned out to be its own 8-hole pitch ‘n’ putt. “This is stupid,” you’d think, and then you would play pitch ‘n’ putt for the rest of the day in a mindless stupor.
Here are the 7 most gratuitous minigames - but do they all deserve to be here?
]]>Remember that thing you like from 10 years ago? It’s probably getting a sequel. Shenmue 3. Evil Genius 2. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. The calendar of upcoming games is packed with throwbacks that will revisit the worlds we left behind over a decade ago. Oddworld: Soulstorm is heading back to the strange homeland of Abe the skinny green freedom farter. Mechwarrior 5 is booting up a bipedal destruct-o-bot that was powered down in the year 2000. If your favourite childhood game is not getting a sequel, it's probably getting a glittering remake.
Reviving forgotten entertainment relics is nothing new (hi, George Lucas) but the recent glut of resurrections has made me wonder: why are developers and publishers so keen to go back to old ground? Why do they want to chase this sense of nostalgia? So, I asked them.
]]>The Japanese games industry is truly huge, and boasts some of the biggest and best titles under its' belt. PC gamers have been reaping the rewards of its renaissance. It took some time for Japanese developers and publishers to get on board, especially with consoles and smartphones remaining the dominant gaming platforms in their native country. Classic console franchises finally made their Steam debuts, with better-late-than-never ports coming with full-fat optimisation options to give you the definitive experience, there really has been never a pbetter time to be a Japanese-loving PC player.
]]>I was always a Sega kid, but in my impetuous, arcade-focused youth I bounced off the Dreamcast's Shenmue games. Part everyday life sim, part fighting game, all martial arts soap opera. With today's launch - and first-time PC debut - of the first two games, remastered for modern systems, perhaps I'm now better equipped to appreciate their offbeat and sedate charms. If nothing else, it would be best to catch up on the first two before long-awaited sequel Shenmue 3 arrives on August 27th next year.
]]>In all my excitement over Yakuza finally coming to PC, I'd forgotten that its precursor series, Shenmue, was still to come. Sega today announced that Shenmue I & II, a touched-up collection of their vintage brawl-o-RPG-a-lifesim Dreamcast games, will launch on PC on August 21st. Finally, I might understand why everyone is tittering while looking for sailors. For now, I shall content myself with this new trailer introducing the re-releases.
]]>In a move that feels long overdue, Shenmue and its sequel Shenmue 2 are getting their first official releases on PC. The action-adventure game series from Yu Suzuki was supposed to launch a franchise in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and has amassed a cult following in the intervening decades. The third game in the series took to Kickstarter in 2015 and became the one of the fastest fundings in crowdfunding history. This new repackaging of the first two games lays the groundwork for folks to get excited about the (hopefully) incoming new chapter. Either way, this marks the first opportunity for PC owners to finally enter Suzuki's clockwork world of forklifts and crime.
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