The Video Game Archive

Super Mario Run was initially released on the iOS and then released on Android systems. The free-to-start version of the game only consists of the first world. The full price of the game is Rm39.99. Played it on Samsung Note II with settings set to ‘Low’. Got most of the Black coins for a majority of the levels and done enough Toad Rallys to get the required amount of Toads to unlock new buildings. A constant internet connection is required to play the game. It’s been awhile since I last played a Mario game. Super Mario Bros. 3 was the last time that I sunk in an appreciable amount of time into a Mario game. Super Mario Run feels like Nintendo ’s attempt to recapture the hearts of those who have a nostalgia for Mario games but have lapsed and not kept up with gaming ever since their younger days. Similar to how Pokémon Go served as a way to reintroduce gamers who used to play Pokémon games by appealing to their nostalgia. Which has been Nintendo's strategy for the mobil...

Adventures of Mana is a remake of Final Fantasy Adventure (Gameboy) on the PlayStation Vita. I played the game to completion and got the platinum trophy. I spent half of my playing time on a Vita and the other half on the PlayStation TV. The game is also available on the iOS and Android. As a remake of one of earliest entries in the Seiken Densetsu or Mana series, it’s understandable that Adventures of Mana might not have all of the bells and whistles that one would expect from the later installments. This faithfulness to not change much of the design of the game outside of the UI is both a blessing and a curse as it might be a little off-putting how simplistic the game is and yet convoluted in certain aspects that only serve to annoy the player. You play as Sumo, whose main goal is to become a Gemma Knight , save the maiden and subsequently the world. It’s a light story that’s suitable for a portable game that you play on the Vita or on phones, but I would have liked a sim...

Every few years, a new form of media comes out for movies. It started with VHS, Laser Discs, DVDs and now Blu-rays and digital formats. Unless you are watching a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg movie, you are technically watching the same movie albeit with an increase in visual and audio quality. If you were a film buff, you would be happy to just throw away the old formats so that you could get the latest and best way to experience the movie you love. For games, it’s different. Consoles have been using specially designed architectures and processors up until the latest generation of consoles and porting the code that was specifically targeted for those consoles might prove to be a challenge with each one being so wildly different from each other that it might even be impossible to get the game up and running at all without doing a lot of legwork to redo the underlying engine that runs the game. Which is why one of the most common ways that developers might choose to allow new p...

A few weeks ago, I started seeing new gameplay footage from Sonic Mania being distributed through media outlets and because I am a Sonic fan, I got excited for it. And if you know how The Sonic Cycle works, you start having hope that the next game will be good, then you get excited for it and in the end, you are horribly disappointed and the cycle repeats itself when the next game gets announced. But it seemed like Sonic Mania was poised to break this cycle and after releasing promising gameplay footage, they announce at SXSW that Sonic Mania will be delayed by a few months. Which is fine, it's just a few months. I don't have a current-gen console right now. So I can wait. But they just had to announce at the same time as the delay, Sonic Forces . I'm not a fan of the modern era of Sonic games, and to be fair, Sonic Forces is a follow-up to Sonic Generations , which featured classic Sonic and modern Sonic. Basically, that means that they had a 2D and 3D section to...

As a writer, there’s one thing that I’ve personally struggled with a lot. And that’s writing reviews. Maybe it’s because it’s due to a lack of a corporate reviewing guideline, but personally I struggle because I overthink the whole process and perhaps over time I’ll get better as I find my own voice. But it does prompt me to wonder, why have reviews become a topic of controversy lately? Or maybe it’s always been controversial but we’ve only started seeing it now because of how easy it is to get feedback from readers. Growing up reading reviews from magazines, I guess they wouldn’t really have to print out every negative feedback they get in the letters. Just those that they were able to reply to. So things were pretty much one way most of time except for a few brief glimpses of interaction in the letters section.

One of the goals that I had when I went back to visit my parents during Chinese New Year this year was to try and get my PlayStation 2 out of storage and see if I could manage to get it to work on a HDTV. I had not tried this previously because I only have an HD monitor while I'm living in Kuala Lumpur, so it didn't cross my mind to attempt this until fairly recently when I started thinking about collecting games for the older generation of systems. I was personally pretty excited to give it a try because I theorized that I could use the AV cable that came with my AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable (LGP) with the PlayStation 2 as the AV cables of the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 are the same. However, to my dismay, it didn't work out quite as I theorized and I spent the rest of my time back in Brunei looking up ways to get it to work. I was disheartened as many videos I saw online were quite straight forward, just change the Component Output from RGB to Y Pb/Cb Pr/C...

January was a rough month in terms building my collection, due to me overspending during December. It didn’t help much that I had to get plane tickets to go visit my parents in Brunei for Chinese New Year. But knowing that I would be heading back gave me a little bit of hope, an oasis in a desert. However, the truth might have been closer to a mirage.

The new expansion for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn was just announced over the weekend last week and I’m excited for it. Much more so than Final Fantasy XV and the remake of Final Fantasy VII . And the reason might seem weird, it’s because it’s an MMO. FFXIV is the first MMO that I played and I was hooked by it. To those who know me know that I’m a prefer to play my games solo with a side helping of competitive multiplayer on the side from time to time. So what really got me playing, and quite fanatically at times, was how the game set itself apart from the likes of World of Warcraft .

I think it’s pretty cool that Overwatch is currently having their new seasonal event (October 11th, 2016 to November 1st, 2016), Overwatch Halloween Terror , right now. Blizzard tested the water earlier this year with their Summer Games (Olympics without the trademark) event and it was met with mixed results and I believe that they’ve made steps to improve the player’s experience with their latest event.

Raiding is a popular type of game mechanic coming from MMO-type games. The first time I heard about a game having a raid mode was in World of Warcraft . The concept is that you and a group of friends would invest the time to get the required gear and strategize how to tackle certain situations is riveting when done right. You would spend hours and hours in a game building up your character, slowly getting better gear and weapons, eventually reaching a point that you would be strong enough to deal enough damage to enemies and not get killed by their attacks. Raid modes have a tendency to focus on the preparation stages and lesser emphasis on execution. And while some games have done a great job balancing both, there are times when this isn’t the case and playing the game becomes insufferable.