Recent reviews by Pÿthon

Extensive knowledge of Shetland folklore isn't exactly a topic on my resume, so I had no idea what a Wulver was. Apparently, it's some kind of humanoid wolf creature. But unlike a werewolf, the night sky doesn't need to be lit by a full moon for a Wulver to scare the living daylights out of you. Combining Scottish mythology and Roman history, Wulverblade tells the story of a Caledonian tribe trying to stop the invasion of their land by the Roman Empire's Ninth Legion about two millennia ago.

Wulverblade is a side-scrolling brawler with an incredible attention to historic detail. If history isn't your thing, then you can just ignore this aspect of the game and enjoy some hack-n-slash fun. But if you want to take a breather from chopping off enemies' heads and killing more enemies by throwing those heads at them, you might learn a thing or two by checking out the game's extensive historical background section.

I hadn't played a beat 'em up in years. After trying the game with my keyboard for about five minutes, I quickly went looking for my old gamepad in a box in the attic. I'm absolutely no expert in arcade games but I really enjoyed playing Wulverblade. The cartoonish graphics really appealed to me and I found the gameplay to be really enjoyable. The game consists of eight stages and while some might find that a little short, there are three different characters to choose from and you'll have to finish the game with all three of them if you're an achievement hunter. Besides the main campaign, there's a wave mode with a bunch of arenas you can choose from and once you finish the game, a beast mode unlocks. So even if you find the main campaign on the short side, there's still plenty of fun to be had once you've finished it. It's also possible to play the game in co-op but I haven't tried that yet.

I really enjoyed playing Wulverblade. I even bought a new Xbox controller because of it because my old gamepad turned out to be rather rubbish. I can imagine that a lot of people don't care about the history aspect of the game but I really like it. Scotland is still on my list of holiday destinations and I'm sure that some of the locations mentioned in this game will be part of a future trip to old Caledonia.

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... Mountain!

The answer is 42.

When Full Throttle was released 25 years ago, it was on top of my wish list. LucasArts had released some of my favorite point and click adventures - the first two Monkey Island games and Day Of The Tentacle - so I was looking forward to playing Full Throttle as well. For some reason, though, I never ended up playing this biker adventure. Until now... after the remastered version of the game landed on my digital doorstep.

For me, the biker theme and Ben, the foul-mouthed protagonist, are the main assets of the game. Add a cool soundtrack to the mix and you're in for what I expected to be an exciting adventure. Unfortunately, about two hours into the game, things started to get annoying. Puzzles that rely heavily on pixel hunting are a no-go in my book. Now, I could turn a blind eye to a handful of pixel hunting puzzles throughout an entire game but these are not the only annoying puzzles. One puzzle in particular, is very time limited. You only get about two or three seconds to inspect the scene and perform a certain action. Once your time is up, an animation kicks in and you have to start over. This gets frustrating very quickly: trying something for two seconds and then having to watch a ten second animation over and over again. This could have been handled differently.

As the story advances, more and more puzzles are replaced by mini games: fighting rival bikers on the road, a demolition derby... When Full Throttle was originally released, point and click adventures were overtaken by first person shooters in popularity. Were the mini games a way of keeping things interesting for players of a genre on the decline? Possibly. And while these mini games themselves are rather fun, they're not what I'm looking for in a point and click adventure. On top of that, the game itself is rather short and the puzzle design really falls short compared to its aforementioned predecessors. Maybe my expectations were set too high, but I was disappointed in Full Throttle. In hindsight, I'm glad I finally got to play it but I would rather have spent my time playing a different adventure game.

Superhot is a fairly simple first-person shooter with even simpler graphics. The one thing that sets it apart from other games, is its time management. The in-game time is only as fast as the user's real-life movements. So, if you don't move, nothing will happen in the game. When you slowly look around, everything will move in slow motion.

This version of the game was specifically designed for VR. I haven't played the original version, but the VR version is a lot of fun. In Superhot VR you need to work your way through a number of levels with a very minimalist design. All levels are white, all enemies are red, and all weapons are black. You don't really walk around in these levels. You just start in a certain place, you kill the enemies that are coming for you and when they are dead, you're teleported to the next section of the level.

Now what's so fun about all this? Well, as I said: the time management. When an enemy fires a bullet at you, you can dodge it easily in true Matrix style, as long as you move slow enough in real life. Along the way, you get various weapons, ranging from guns and Uzis to knives and ashtrays. One hit with any of those weapons is enough to kill an enemy so it's not at all realistic. But realism is not what you should expect from this game anyway. Playing this game in VR for half an hour is an excellent workout session. The first couple of times I played this game, I was left sore the next day.

Honestly, Superhot VR doesn't have too much to offer but it's still recommended VR fun. As a player it's a good workout session and as a spectator it's a lot of fun to see your friends move in slow motion as if they were auditioning for the next Matrix movie.

If I remember correctly, it was 14 years ago that someone introduced me to the board game Carcassonne. I loved it straight away and quickly bought my own set and a couple of expansions. Obviously, this game is meant to be played together with friends. But occasionally, I feel like playing this game when no one is around so a digital version is quite handy in that case.

I don't think I would have paid €10 for this but luckily I was able to pick it up real cheap as part of a bundle. I added a couple of expansions when they were on sale since I prefer playing the game with at least one or two expansions to increase the number of tiles. The upside of a digital version is that the computer keeps track of the score so you don't have to worry about that. This digital version also includes some handy features that you can either switch on or off. The Dead Tiles option shows a big red cross on the playing board where you can't place any tiles anymore (because no matching tiles are left in the remaining stash). You can play with a Remaining Tiles List which conveniently lists all the different tiles and how many of them still remain. And finally, you can also choose to play with or without Fields. If you play with fields you can get an overview of which field belongs to who with just the press of a button.

Since this game is meant to be played with other people, you can play online - either with friends or random other players. I've read a lot of complaints about the online version but I haven't had any issues with it so far. Alternatively, you can play offline against bots and I actually prefer this since you don't have to wait that long until it's your turn again.

Digital versions of board games either work or they don't, and this version just works. As a bonus, the developer has added achievements to the game. Unfortunately, these achievements are in-game only and not linked to Steam. That's a missed opportunity if you ask me because it's always fun to compare achievements with your friends.

If you love the original board game and you see this digital version on sale, I would definitely recommend you pick it up (and maybe convince a friend to do the same if you want to play online).

I picked up Shotgun Legend for a mere €0.40 after obtaining a coupon for it. I didn't have high expectations of it but the reviews were positive so I had a go at it. Apparently, this is supposed to be Zelda with a shotgun. I have no idea what that means because I've never played a Zelda game before. I can only assume that there aren't any shotguns in Zelda.

The gameplay is pretty straightforward. You use the arrow keys to guide your character, Eugene, through forests and dungeons. Killing enemies gets you coins, which you can use in shops to buy ammunition or health. Even though the game's called Shotgun Legend you can collect a few other weapons as well such as dynamite and, uhm... a banjo. So I guess Hillbilly Zelda could be an appropriate name as well. The game is presented in a top-down perspective with pixelated graphics. This gives the game a great retro 80's atmosphere.

Every dungeon has a boss you must defeat. I didn't find them too difficult to fight, except for the final boss, which took me quite a while to get rid of. I can easily say this was the most fun I'd had in a while playing a game. I even feel bad I had used a coupon to buy this game. I would gladly have paid €5 for it. I believe the regular price right now is about €0,80 so there's no excuse not to buy this gem.

Highly recommended! Looking forward to play more games like these from this developer.

This is the first VR game I played after getting a Valve Index back in December. Half-Life: Alyx was still a couple of months away so I needed something to show off my new VR set. As this was my very first VR game I was pretty excited by the added realism of actually having to pick up ammunition (compared to just running over it in pancake shooters) and manually reloading your guns. Being able to hold guns in both hands was pretty neat as well. However, my initial enthusiasm quickly turned into frustration when my guns kept disappearing after restoring a checkpoint. So after about an hour I gave up and patiently waited for Alyx to arrive.

After completing Alyx a few months later, I decided to revisit Arizona Sunshine. At first, I didn't encounter the disappearing guns bug anymore so I was excited to give it another try. The game doesn't hold up to Alyx but I didn't care. After all, this was all about shooting zombies so I didn't exactly expect an award winning story line. However, about two hours into the game my guns started disappearing again. It looks like this bug pops up when you go back to a previous checkpoint (either because you died in-game or because you continued a previous session). It turns out that the guns you were holding in your hand are just gone. Now that's a pretty annoying bug. It bothered me so much that at some point I was more concerned about which guns I could do without in case I reached a checkpoint in the game and had to return to it (because only the guns on your belt would still be there then). A second annoying bug is that the scope of the sniper rifle makes the zombies invisible. That made the sniper rifle completely useless. Apparently, this bug has now been fixed in a recent patch but it shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Despite these two major flaws, I did enjoy the game. However, I'm afraid I can't recommend it as long as the disappearing guns bug is still in there; it's just too frustrating.

Update: Coincidentally, a couple of hours after I posted this review, a new patch was released which fixes this bug. So, fair is fair, I've updated my review from not recommended to recommended.

I guess I'm getting old. I picked up the remastered version of Day Of The Tentacle during the summer sales and realised it's been 27 years since I bought the original version of this game. It's at least 25 years ago since I last played the original but when I launched the game I still remembered all the intro dialogues. The game is even funnier than I remembered, mostly because I didn't get all the jokes and historical references back in the day.

Day Of The Tentacle is a classic point and click adventure game with a great story, wacky humour and lots of time travel. When they try to stop a megalomaniac tentacle that is trying to take over the world, three friends are separated in time by a malfunctioning time machine. One character is sent back 200 years in the past, one remains in the present while the third one ends up 200 years in the future. The puzzles are very cleverly designed and quite a few of them rely on the whole time travel aspect of the story.

This is actually a sequel to 1987's Maniac Mansion but apart from a couple of microwave and hamster jokes, you don't really need to know what happened in the first game in order to enjoy this sequel. However, if you are eager to learn what did happen, you can always play Maniac Mansion as a game-within-a-game. Being able to play the first game on a computer that you find somewhere in the sequel to that game is exactly the kind of thing that set this game apart from the competition more than two and a half decades ago.

I really enjoyed playing this game again after all this time. The graphics were state of the art back then but have been completely redrawn for this remastered version. As with most (if not all) remastered LucasArts games, you can switch between the original and remastered graphics, which is a nice bonus.

If you've never played this game but you enjoy point and click adventures, go buy this game. You won't regret it.
If you did play the original game but you haven't played the remastered version yet, go buy it as well. You won't regret it either.

They had me at 'Portal'. Well, kind of. I had to overcome a couple of prejudices first:
- A Portal game, not developed by Valve? That can't be any good.
- This must be a crappy game if they need the Portal association to sell it, right?

I've had this game on my wish list for over two years and I finally got it during the latest summer sales. Now I'm wondering why I've waited this long.
Is it a good game? Yes. Is it as good as Valve's Portal games? No. Well, not in my opinion anyway.
Ellen McLain returns to voice GLaDOS, so that's a big plus in my book. Just like in the original Portal game, GLaDOS guides you through a number of levels. Where Portal's main focus was finding surfaces to place your portals on, Bridge Constructor lets you build bridges (really, surprising, I know) to guide small forklift trucks safely to the exit. In true Portal style, the lives of the passengers aren't very important. As long as the forklift trucks get to the exit.
The levels start out pretty simple and build up to more complex constructions later on in the game. A number of Portal favorites return to either help or annoy you: blue Repulsion Gel, orange Propulsion Gel, Turrets and Weighted Companion Cubes.

About halfway through, I found that building bridges became a bit tedious. This is especially the case in some later levels where moving certain parts of your bridge a couple of pixels creates an entirely different outcome. I found this to be very annoying and gave up a couple of times because of this....
... only to return two days later. Luckily, this 'pixel hunting' business only applies to a handful of levels and overall I find this game very enjoyable.

If you liked the original Portal games and GLaDOS was one of the reasons for that, then I can recommend Bridge Constructor Portal, especially if you can pick it up during a sale. The game will keep you solving puzzles for quite some time while the typical GLaDOS humor makes it even more enjoyable.