Author: Justin Wagner
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Gigantic: Rampage Edition is a slightly shaky but mostly thrilling revival of my favorite dead game
Six years ago, the Gigantic subreddit pinned a mod post titled “Grief is the price we pay for love.” Only a year after release, the MOBA/hero-shooter hybrid shuttered its servers after fighting tooth and nail to even release in the first place. Much like contemporaries Battleborn and Paragon, Gigantic pulled together a small, enthusiastic community,…
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This Flash developer is battling 18 years of legacy code to bring my childhood favorite platformers to Steam
Flash games are supposed to be janky. That’s what hindsight tells me, anyway, even if it’s at odds with my fuzzy childhood nostalgia. By that metric this remaster of one of my childhood staples, which arrived on Steam in February, truly isn’t a Flash game. Moments into Fancy Pants Adventures: Classic Pack’s first level, I…
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The new Contra: Operation Galuga crushed my skepticism with new ideas that actually work
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It’s safe to say Contra passed on its crown as run-and-gun royalty a long time ago. The last truly great entry was 2011’s Hard Corps: Uprising—an unrecognizable-as-Contra game which doesn’t even bear the series name—and even before that point, Contra had muddled through multiple halfhearted reinventions in between quality games. I approached Operation Galuga with…
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I’m still catching up on 2023’s hidden gems, and now I want everyone to play the most underappreciated retro platformer of the year
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I love a good throwback to the formative years of console gaming when developers had to create whole worlds with just 56 colors, but I’m always worried my trip through time will be spoiled by a game too busy winking at the camera to say anything new. Prison City, a platformer that debuted last August…