As a gamer, it can be tough when your favorite game franchise doesn’t really exist anymore, or you’re still in love with a legendary one-off title that came out 30 years ago. You may love those old games, but you’ve played through them a million times; so, of course you still want more, but the companies or developers that made them either don’t care or are long gone. Where can we turn?
Enter the Spiritual Successor.
I may be late to the party (as usual), but I recently played and finished Heavy Rain for the first time. Being a 2010 release for the PlayStation 3 (although I played it on PS4), I guess it’s technically “retro,” although personally I’m not a big fan of attaching the “retro” or “classic” or “vintage” tags to anything quite that recent. However, during the hours I poured into just one play-through, certain aspects of its design felt very familiar, and I recognized immediately why: Heavy Rain features an interesting combination of game design concepts that hearken back to adventure games of the ’80s and ’90s, but reimagined and presented through a modern filter. Continue reading “Heavy Rain’s Classic Ancestry”
On August 21, 2018, something that nobody thought would ever happen did, in fact, happen: Shenmue I & II were re-released in HD for current consoles and PC. Continue reading “I’m in the Shen-mood”
