amphibious_ReViews

Every once in a while, I'll come across a game that I know will be good, even without having virtually any background knowledge about it. A pixel-art platformer starring a radish that is a dad? Yeah, that's going to make the list. I would often see the Dadish games when browsing the Switch eShop, but for ten dollars a pop, I never looked any further than the listing. However, if we mosey on over to the Google Play store, every Dadish game is available (ad-supported) for free! How could I resist? With the Android port having full controller support and surprisingly infrequent ads, the experience is going to be identical between mobile and console for most players, and I had an excellent time with it. Dadish is a straightforward affair. In this precision platformer, you'll be playing as the titular radish himself and you'll need to track down all of your children. It's not like Dadish is an irresponsible father, he was just taking a well-deserved nap when all of his k

Throughout my childhood, I played a lot on the Wii. My family had a couple dozen physical games, but sometimes that didn't feel like enough. That's when I would browse the Wii Shop Channel. I never actually had any points cards, but I'd download a demo now and again and had some staples I always returned to. BIT.TRIP RUNNER and MotoHeroz come to mind, but if I had ever bought a game based on its demo, it would've been Pokémon Rumble. That demo lodged itself so deep in my brain that I have become a fan of the series for life. Now that I've finally played through the whole game, I can see its flaws; yet somehow, it's still as amazing as I had always dreamed it to be. Pokémon Rumble is a simplistic beat-'em-up-style adventure focused on collecting and battling toy Pokémon. Unlike the 3DS entries, there isn't much of a story here, but that just helps to keep it focused, and the game isn't long enough for the omission to really stand out. Instead, your go

I had not even finished Katamari Damacy REROLL yet, and I was already looking for more. That game was excellent, and if I have self-control issues with anything, it's video games. Now, Amazing Katamari Damacy was delisted a while ago, but I downloaded it for a bit when it was still around, so I was able to flick through my Play Store library a bit and download it again. When I first tried it a few years ago, I had no background in the Katamari series and didn't end up playing for long. I figured that this time around would be different since I was familiar with the mainline games, but I ended up dropping the game just as quick as the first time. Turns out, in stark contrast to its source material, I find this game to be pretty uninspired. Amazing Katamari Damacy is a score-based runner. While the genre has been done to death by now, there's still room for innovation and excellence, especially if you are true to the property that the game represents (*cries in Spider-Man Unl

I thought I knew what I was getting into when I started playing Katamari Damacy, but I was wrong. Before I booted it up, I had the idea that this was going to be like one of those games where you eat everything smaller than yourself in order to grow and eventually be big enough that you can consume absolutely everything (which was pretty much right). I also expected that to be the game's focal point (which I'd now argue is pretty much wrong). It was once I heard the first "NAAA NA-NA-NA-NA-NA NA-NAA" of Katamari on the Rocks (the game's opening theme) that things started to shift in my brain. Now, while Katamari Damacy's gameplay is unique and quite excellent, it's clear to me that everything else, the art style, the music, and the story, is what actually makes this game as exceptional as it is. Katamari Damacy sees you taking control of the young Prince of All Cosmos as he rolls up objects around Earth into big balls using magical devices known as katamar

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