amphibious_ReViews

It can be a difficult thing to convert a fully physical game into a digital format. Questions like how to keep players' cards hidden from each other on a shared screen or how to handle house rules can stop a great tabletop experience from being a great videogame. While concessions were certainly made with Uno, I think the developers did the best they could with the options available to them. The problem is, the best part about Uno is the banter across the table as you play, and that will never come easy to a virtual adaptation. Just about everyone I know has played Uno (the physical version) multiple times before, so I'll spare you a rehash of the rules. Instead, I will say that whatever rules you've played Uno by in the past, you can probably recreate that same ruleset in this digital version. That was one of the most delightful surprises for me when trying this game out for the first time. While the official rules of the card game are faithfully implemented in this digita

Google's collection of doodles is often the source of delightful little games that I never expected to play. The minigame-stuffed quasi-RPG that coincided with the Olympics was a massive standout in that regard, and set a bar I'm excited to see the doodle team surpass someday. However, not every doodle game is quite so fleshed-out, with most lasting no more than a few minutes. This short runtime isn't a bad thing though and actually fits the format really well. Celebrating Bubble Tea is a great example of this, fulfilling its role as a doodle game in just five short challenges. In Celebrating Bubble Tea, you act as the owner of a little bubble tea cart and have to fulfill five increasingly precise orders of bubble tea for a cast of colorful characters, most of which you may find familiar if you've interacted with other doodles before. For each order, you're told how much boba, tea, and syrup (or maybe creamer? I don't drink much bubble tea myself) to add to each

I wouldn't necessarily consider myself an expert on video game history, but before Shovel Knight made indies mainstream, I credit games like Limbo for putting them on the radar in the first place. In an industry increasingly dominated by big-studio, big-budget, big-name titles, it was notable for a game like this to break out from the noise and find widespread acclaim. I didn't end up playing more than the first few chapters when I originally bought it on PC, but I've never had enough time to dedicate to PC gaming in the first place. Once I bought the game on my phone though, that was a different story. Thanks to the portability and generous checkpoints, I could pick up and play for minutes at a time, slowly working my way through Playdead's dark world. Limbo is a game about a boy trying to find his sister. The plot leaves a lot of room for interpretation beyond that, but to avoid giving anything else away, I'll just say that I was surprised, then confused, and fina

I'm really into getting games for free, so much so that I'll check online communities every once in a while just to learn about deals I may have missed when checking on my own. That's how I learned about the closed beta for Google's "Project Stream" that came with a complimentary copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which I then applied for immediately. I was accepted into the beta testing group, and while I only had a few opportunities to sit down with it, Project Stream left me extremely impressed. I was playing a full, triple-A game through my browser with almost no input delay. The possibilities that I had floating in my brain for the future of that technology were incredibly exciting. Eventually, Project Stream graduated out of its beta to become the ill-fated Google Stadia, which I tried so hard to love. I bought multiple games on it and I tried the"Pro" subscription, I just never had a good enough reason to play it over my, more convenient, S

It was only a few days after Christmas and I was exploring the capabilities of my new retro handheld. I had already experimented with the usual emulation and native-run games, so I started to dive deeper when something caught my eye. A few years previous, I had learned about PICO-8, a fantasy console that interested me, but that I had never gotten around to doing much with. Casually listed amongst the consoles my new handheld could emulate, PICO-8 sat ready to bid for my attention once again. This time, I couldn't resist the invitation, so I downloaded the only game for the "console" that I knew off the top of my head and I didn't put it down until I had beaten it. The original Celeste game is a short, yet challenging, precision platformer. Your goal is to scale a wintry mountain through thirty stages of increasingly complex platforming challenges, mastering your full array of movement capabilities along the way. You'll encounter walls to cling to, gaps to clear,

Occasionally, Google will surprise me with a new game to play. I'll be using one of their products for one thing or another, and then find a game that I wasn't expecting. Normally, my encounter rate for these games is pretty spread out, but Hop Mania ended up being the start of a relatively rapid burst of Google games that I discovered around the same time, each housed in a different product. Found within the Google Play Games app, Hop Mania is one of the "offline" games that come built-in, alongside the likes of solitaire and Snake . I don't think I even meant to play it for more than a minute or two, but the familiar gameplay coupled with the eerie atmosphere kept me around for a little longer. Seemingly as a tribute to its inspiration, Hop Mania gives you the choice between a frog and a chicken, the mascots of Frogger and Crossy Road respectively, as your playable character. Then you get two on-screen buttons for movement, allowing you to go either forward or

I absolutely love the Galaga series. The gameplay is deceptively simple and incredibly rewarding. Every once in a while, I'll check the Play Store to see if there's finally a good way to get my fix, but I'm always disappointed to find that Galaga Wars is still the only option. I recently decided to give it another chance and it immediately reminded me why I stopped playing so quickly the first time around. Galaga has had some amazing mobile releases in the past, like the Tekken crossover, or the 30th-anniversary collection, but Galaga Wars fails miserably at meeting any of the standards set by its predecessors. The saddest thing about this game to me is that it actually has the foundation to be a pretty great mobile interpretation of an arcade classic, but someone decided that intrusive ads and predatory micro-transactions were more important than the integrity of the franchise. It's almost unbelievable how many ways they try to squeeze something out of you. Even the ve