11 Feb 2025
Keep Driving PC Review 7.5/10 "The Crazy Gas Fuelled Adventures Of A Sedan!" 🚗 @YCJYgames #IndieGame #GameDev
You play as a young driver who has just bought their first car around the early 2000s, and your main goal is to meet up with your friend at a music festival on the other side of the country within four weeks. Interestingly, the game features a procedurally generated world with various routes, 'shopping' stops and random encounters along the way.
10 Feb 2025
"Games of a Lifetime" by Jaz Rignall > Book Review By Rich 📚📖 @JazRignall @bitmap_books
Growing up in the '80s and '90s and reading various video game magazines from the period meant that Jaz Rignall has always been a hero of mine.
My first experience of Jaz's brand of video game journalism came through the much-thumbed pages of the Mean Machines monthly video game magazine in the early '90s. I remember my first purchase of Mean Machines magazine vividly. I bought Issue 7 of Mean Machines from local Happy Shopper branded newsagents with The Simpsons, complete with Homer strangling Bart, on the front cover as the headline stars of that month's magazine.
Whilst reading the magazine from cover to cover I remember feeling like I had just become a part of a cool club of video games-loving pals. Jaz's writing and the rest of the Mean Machines staff writing (including Richard Leadbetter from Digital Foundry fame for example) was perfectly in sync with its audience.
You knew you could trust the reviews from Mean Machines as they knew their onions and Jaz and the gang were independent. In a future issue, there would be a cover giveaway of a miniature Jaz Figure which I cherished for many years and in some ways added to Jaz's legendary status in my own video gaming world.
It's now 2025 and Jaz has put virtual pen to paper to chronicle his lifetime in gaming by writing this wonderful book called "Games of a Lifetime" by Jaz Rignall.
7 Feb 2025
Starbound Xbox Series X Review 9/10 "Terraria in Space" ⭐️ @ChucklefishLTD #IndieGame #GameDev
A few years ago, my partner and I were hips deep in Terraria, I genuinely think I own a copy on every system it’s been released - aside from Switch, thinking about it - and we would often spend weeks just getting back into the groove with the amazing music (which I am lucky enough to own on vinyl) and just the pure sense of wonder and relaxation that exists in the quiet exploration. To be honest, we barely bothered with the boss fights, it was all about pottering about for us.
My next – and true – love, came through the glorious Aground, and once my gaming thirst had been slaked there, I vaguely hearing about Starbound, but as it wasn’t then available on consoles, I promptly forgot about it and went on my day, a day that was bereft of crafty, pixel, action-adventure games…until now.