Hello. On the link below, you can download a free early access alpha version of a 2D dodgeball video game, which is about learning or refreshing your memory on idioms. An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense.

This version is free to play, but proceeds of the game sales will go to help me host more English speaking clubs and dodgeball events in Ukraine, to help people stay active and healthy in a fun way, and to help Ukrainians practice their English speaking skills.

I’m from the USA, but I was in Ukraine for a few months of this year, seven months in 2021 when I hosted a few English speaking clubs and dodgeball events, and a few months before, and I was glad to have the opportunity to help Ukrainian people in these different ways, even if it might only be something small. I have documents to live and work in the Netherlands which requires me to stay in their country at least six months per year, but I’m ready to return to Ukraine asap if the English game project is successful.

https://corygreekgodofdball.itch.io/dodgebnb-chapter-2

Tomorrow is the day! Today's game is Halo. Specifically the public multiplayer of Halo 3. We also did some CE but Steam seems to be feuding with anything microsoft recently and has so issues with the screenshots, so i had to go in with theater and take them that way.

The main screenshot is from a slayer match where i saw someone coming on my Minimap and hid behind a corner to jump them. It was fun, it felt cheap though so i only did it once, the constant fire though made it difficult to try and get off those stairs.

I've always dismissed Halo public matchmaking as being not for me, as i didn't grow up with it, but i had a friend in my party who did and he suggested turning off the Precession slayer and Swat modes, and what do you know? I actually did really well. Maybe it's just sheer blind luck, but i won 2/3 games i did by a pretty close margin. This isn't meant to shit on people who are really skilled at the game btw. Mad respect to them, just, I want something a little more casual personally.

Before we turned off Swat though, we were getting stomped by these guys who seem to be regulars. They were really skilled, we didn't have much room to move before they sniped us and we kept matching with them lol. No ill will though, it's just the way PvP games work and we still had fun.

I mentioned Halo CE and i did manage to get one screenshot of it. it's an absolutely random one but i love it. It's from me getting pelted by a grenade from across the map while holding the point. That's honestly what i love about CE multiplayer. It's like a Magnum and Grenade Hell. There's explosions left and right and you can absolutely get your ass handed too you by the most basic weapon in the game. I love it.

I wanted to end off tonight with my favorite kill of the match. Some guy came down the stairs when i was trying to get off and i tried to get him with the hammer. I missed enough that he still went flying but he didn't die. He killed me but the momentum from the hammer sent him backwards and he fell right off the landing and i got the kill like 5 seconds later. It was a fun match. I doubt the people i played against are going to see this, but absolutely a good game. Sorry for Teabagging you though, I got a little caught up in the moment and Campaign Co-Op instincts kicked in.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/48062133

The Amiga game Roguecraft from Norwegian indie developers Badger Punch Games has enjoyed great success since it launched last year, and this weekend saw it win an award for best retro game at the Debug Indie Game Awards in Brighton. We caught up with Henning and Ricki from Badger Punch Games to hear more about them and their game.

Just started the Hearts of Stone DLC

From the linked GameSpot article:

"8BitDo has revealed the successor to its popular Pro 2 Bluetooth Controller. Officially called the Pro 3 Bluetooth Gamepad, the upcoming controller retains the form factor of the Pro 2 while implementing some of the enhanced features found in the Ultimate 2 Bluetooth, such as TMR joysticks and trigger locks. It also has a few entirely new features not found on other 8BitDo controllers, including swappable magnetic face buttons and an extra pair of arcade-inspired ball-top stick caps.

The 8BitDo Pro 3 Bluetooth Gamepad is available to preorder now at Amazon for $70 ahead of its August 12 release. It comes in three retro-themed colors: G Classic, Gray, and a shade of purple that pays homage to the Nintendo GameCube. All three models come with matching charging docks and a set ball-top arcade stick toppers that can be swapped in for the traditional rubberized caps. Out of the box, the Pro 3 is compatible with Switch 2, Switch, PC, Android, Apple devices, and Steam Deck."

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is, at the very least, ambitious.

Is it good? Debateable.

It suffers from what I like to call Poochie syndrome. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when a franchise tries so hard to be cool and edgy that it ends up alienating everyone. Poochie was a character on The Simpsons added to The Itchy & Scratchy Show to make it more “youth-oriented.” It backfired. Spectacularly.

This game is the Poochie of Ninja Gaiden.

You play as Yaiba Kamikaze—an undead ninja who got sliced in half by Ryu Hayabusa, then resurrected as a cyborg with a robot arm and unresolved anger issues. The story? He wants revenge. Also, zombies exist now.

So yeah. Not your typical Ninja Gaiden.

This isn’t a tight, serious action game like the NES classics or the 2004 reboot. This is a loud, cel-shaded beat-’em-up where you chain combos, dismember clown zombies, and occasionally say things like “BOOM, baby” while swinging from grappling hooks.

It’s ridiculous by design.

But weirdly, it’s not that far off from the original arcade Ninja Gaiden, which was more of a side-scrolling brawler than a precision platformer. In that sense, Yaiba feels like a spiritual detour—not a betrayal, just a case of missed execution.

And to say this game wasn’t received well is an understatement.

Critics hated it. Players hated it. Metacritic slapped it with a “generally unfavorable” rating. Polygon gave it a 3. The most common complaints? Repetitive gameplay, terrible camera, sloppy controls, and painfully unfunny writing. Fair.

But I’m going to make the case that Yaiba isn’t as bad as people say. It’s just weird. And weird games don’t always land, especially when they carry a legacy name.

Spark Unlimited handled the development. They weren’t exactly industry royalty. Team Ninja helped out. So did Keiji Inafune—yes, that Inafune, the guy behind Mighty No. 9. He designed Yaiba and pitched the whole zombie-cyborg-ninja concept. The idea was East-meets-West. Japanese combat with American humor. The problem is: it leaned too hard into the West part.

The visuals are the one thing that really works. The cel-shaded “living comic book” look still holds up. Blood flies in huge red arcs. Enemies explode into color-coded gore. Yaiba himself looks like a pissed-off character from a graphic novel you’d find in a Hot Topic clearance bin. I mean that as a compliment.

Unfortunately, once the game starts, the wheels start coming off.

Combat is fast but shallow. You get a sword, a cybernetic punch, and a few environmental executions. There’s a rage mode called Bloodlust that lets you tear through enemies, but it takes forever to charge and burns out too quickly. Enemies come in waves. Then more waves. Then more. It doesn’t evolve.

There’s an elemental system layered on top—some zombies explode, some zap, some poison. If you get two types near each other, you can cause secondary effects like electric tornadoes or poison crystallization. It sounds cool but plays like a checklist. The game doesn’t reward experimentation. It just wants you to solve the puzzle its way.

Boss fights are worse. Giant sponges. They kill you in three hits, and you fight them in arenas where the camera actively works against you.

Speaking of: the camera. It’s fixed. You can’t control it. It’s bad. It hides enemies behind geometry and cuts off parts of the screen during fights. No lock-on. No recentering. Just vibes.

Also, the platforming. There isn’t any. You don’t jump. Seriously—there’s no jump button. Movement sequences are QTEs. That’s it. No room for improvisation, no exploration, just press A when prompted.

PC performance is another mess. The game is hard-capped at 62 FPS, and if you try to lift that cap by editing the config files, the game starts breaking. Physics glitches. Soft locks. Entire levels stop working. The framerate is literally tied to game logic. You’d think someone would’ve caught that.

Controls aren’t much better. Dodge is mapped weird. Block is inconsistent. Inputs sometimes just don’t register. It feels like you’re fighting the engine more than the enemies.

There’s a skill tree, but it’s shallow. You unlock new combos and passive buffs, but nothing that dramatically changes the way you play. Some users even reported skill points not saving properly unless you exit the menu a certain way.

And then there’s the humor. The writing aims for B-movie irreverence and lands somewhere between 2007 YouTube and straight-to-DVD energy drink ad. It’s all juvenile innuendo, “cool guy” one-liners, and grotesque slapstick. One scene has a truck fly through a pair of giant mannequin legs. Another has you beating zombies to death with their own intestines. And Yaiba himself? He never shuts up. It gets old fast.

But I’ll give the game this—it commits.

It doesn’t half-ass the tone. It full-asses it. The voice acting is bad on purpose. The plot makes no sense. And every single thing feels like it was made by someone yelling “more awesome!” into a headset. That kind of confidence, even when misplaced, is rare.

Length-wise, it’s short. Maybe 6 hours. Eight if you’re bad. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, which is honestly a blessing.

There are bugs. Tons of them. Cutscenes sometimes run at 30 FPS even if gameplay is smooth. Loading screens are long and repetitive. Collectibles bug out and vanish. Some levels don’t load properly if you die in the wrong spot. There’s a DLC where you can play as Beck from Mighty No. 9. It adds nothing.

So yeah. Yaiba is janky, shallow, crude, and annoying.

But also: kinda fun.

It’s not a good Ninja Gaiden game. But it’s not trying to be. The problem is it shares the name. If this had just been called Yaiba: Zombie Slayer 2099 or something, I don’t think anyone would’ve cared. The expectations wouldn’t have crushed it.

What you get here is a loud, dumb, cartoonish splatterfest with a lot of rough edges and a couple moments of actual brilliance—mostly in its visuals and sense of identity. When it’s not glitching out or annoying the hell out of you, it can be strangely entertaining.

Buy it on sale. Don’t take it seriously. And absolutely don’t go in expecting Ninja Gaiden.

It’s not good. But it’s definitely not boring.

There’s a lot of buzz in the Norwegian gaming industry right now, with plenty of small and large projects vying for the favor of international players. We caught up with Alex Espeseth from Lugn Games, a developer studio working on the cozy game Kioku: Last Summer, to hear a bit about both the studio and their game.

Will The Last General be the last real-time strategy game you will ever need? The game is set to be a massive RTS featuring procedurally generated terrains, dozens of towns and cities, and, most importantly, fully destructible environments. We took a closer look at this promising game and asked the developer how it’s coming along.

2 Day's until a year! Today's game is Red Dead Redemption 1. The Last of Us was initially planned for today, but the crashing kept getting on my nerves that i decided to step back for a sec. I'm going to try and look into a fix because i'm really enjoying but those freezes seem particularly horrendous today for some reason. I still was in the mood for a narrative heavy game though and i had recently picked this up so i went, "what the hell?" and installed it since it was small and would take less than an hour.

I have to say, i'm glad i picked up on discount. Not worth the intial price, but god damn it's not a bad port at all. It's gorgeous and features a pretty decent selection of graphics options. And i'd argue it looks better than the original version unless you're fond of the crunchy 720p. Like, damn, this is a Xbox 360 game? I don't think they changed much graphically besides a few tweaks and extra options, so fuck does this look good. It runs well too. I'm at 1440p and it runs at a stable 60fps for me with FSR at Native Resolution. I did have some stuttering the longer the game went on though, which is odd because i remember Red Dead 2 having the exact same problem on Steam Deck/my gaming rig. I wonder if it's a issue with the Rockstar launcher and Proton?

When i played the first one, i was young enough for a lot of things to go over my head. So playing this again, especially after 2 i'm picking up on a lot of things. Like for example the same Motif in American Venom from Red Dead 2 plays during this same mission. Which is a cool detail that i'm glad they added in two. It must have been so cool to remember this song from the first one and then finish 2 and hear that Motif. I'm just a sucker for Motif's in general though.

I got to experience the absolute joy of this game's physics engine too. When doing one of the Wagon missions i hit a rabbit or a rock or something and watched the wagon flip into the air before hitting the ground like nothing happened. It's amazing. I wish i got a clip of it just to share because it was hilarious.

Finally, during the first mission, at the very very beginning, do you see that guy there? The one behind John? I accidentally pointed my gun at him and he ran off. When i got on my horse i caught up to him and he got absolutely railed by a train. He falls to the side, and then just walks it off like nothing happened. God this game has an hilarious physics engine. I loved Red Dead 2's but god there's some sort of magic in this one or something.

Bromantic Games, a trio of brothers, is developing Folklands, a city-building game set for release in early access today. Inspired by classic games like Settlers, Anno, and Caesar, Folklands combines nostalgic retro vibes with modern multiplayer functionality, allowing players to drop in and out seamlessly.

Hey, it's been a minute! I took a break from gaming for a bit; partly voluntary, partly because some jerk destroyed the Internet cable in my yard and it took forever to get someone to come fix it. But I'm back! And just in time to play a really fun co-op game that just dropped last month.

PEAK is a climbing game where you can either solo the various mountain regions, or climb with up to four players. I highly recommend playing with others, as you can help each other out on your journey. As you can see from the first screenshot above, my good friend Victor McKnight is offering a hand to help lift me up a ledge.

The game starts in an airport, where your team of scouts is preparing for a flight. You can pull out a passport and customize your character's appearance at this point. More outfits and facial features will unlock as you gain achievements in the game.

Notice that your achievements in the game will appear as badges on the scout sash you wear across your chest. They'll fill out both the front and back of the sash.

When your team is ready to depart, someone will select the game mode from the terminal gate. You can play "Peak," which is the game's standard difficulty, or "Tenderfoot," which makes climbing a little easier, requires less food to stave off hunger, and grants unlimited time to explore each area.

After departure, you find yourself waking up on a beach near the ruins of a plane. Your flight has crashed and you and your scout team need to climb to the highest peak to signal for help.

There is one backpack nearby and a couple luggage cases on the ground. You can hold 3 items in your inventory, one in your hands, and up to four items in the backpack. One of your team members can equip the backpack and everyone else just packs as many supplies as they can in their inventory. You will find more luggage scattered all over each region, so there are plenty more supplies to pick up along the way. Keep your hands free for climbing!

You have five regions to climb before you get to the highest peak (and thus, the end of the game):

1.) SHORE: Rocky, sandy bluffs

2.) TROPICS: Lush vine-covered jungle cliffs with slippery rainfall

3.) ALPINE: Frozen snowy alps with piercing cold wind storms

4.) CALDERA: A lava pit with hot rocks and fire tornadoes

5.) KILN: The inside of the volcano.

The regions are always the same, but their layout is procedurally generated daily, so you never have the same climb from day to day. That forces you to be creative and learn good skills instead of just memorizing a certain path up the mountains.

You can rest at a campfire at the top of each region, which will recover all your ailments. You'll also find marshmallows to roast over the fire. I recommend cooking them twice for the best stats boost. Perfectly golden brown. You'll also get a new backpack at each campfire, which lets another scout carry additional supplies.

You'll notice that your green stamina bar is quickly filled up by weight. So don't carry too many heavy items or else you won't have enough stamina to climb!

Also, as your hunger grows, it will fill part of your stamina bar. Remember to eat to give yourself more stamina. Everything takes up space in your stamina bar. Poison, cold, heat, injuries... if you run out of space for stamina, you will pass out.

If you pass out, you have a very limited time where a fellow scout can revive you. Or if they don't have anything to revive you with, they can carry you on their back in place of a backpack. So don't leave your scouts behind!

If you're passed out too long without aid or being carried, you will die and turn into a ghost. Ghosts are tied to another teammate and can switch between living teammates to watch and call out assistance. As you can see below, I was the last hope for my team and I passed out. Oops.

At the end of each climb, you can revive your fallen scouts at a statue. If everyone is still alive, the statue will instead give a random beneficial item. Like this Bugle of Friendship, which will give unlimited stamina to nearby teammates while it's being played. If everyone dies, the game is over and you have to start over at the very beginning.

If you're playing with "Peak" difficulty, you will have fog that slowly encroaches on you from behind. If the fog envelopes you, you will quickly freeze to death. Make sure you out-climb that fog! Here's my buddy Victor confidently giving himself to the fog as the rest of our dead team watches on.

Just a heads up, this game is about teamwork so don't leave your teammates behind. I found out the hard way that if you climb on your own and get too far ahead of your teammates, the Scoutmaster will come for you. If he catches you, he'll attempt to throw you off the mountain. And he's absolutely terrifying to encounter, running at you on all fours like a nightmare skeleton creature or something. (Although you get an achievement and a costume item if you summon him)

Little tip: If you carry the bugle from the airplane, you can serenade some capybaras in a hot spring in the Alpine region. This is also an achievement. Don't forget to eat the apples on their head. They'll fill you up and give you a stat boost.

Victor and I got real close to beating the game. We were so close to making it out of the volcano!

Then his game froze and his character fell to his death. I tried to finish solo, but without his help, I ran out of stamina and fell too. It's practically impossible to finish that final climb without some climbing gear to help you! Oh well, we'll clear the summit one day.

If you want to pick it up, cheapest way is via the humblebundle sale.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32988436

Rune Song is a promising adventure platformer made by American indie developer Jesse Luciani. We got in touch with him to talk about how it is to work as a single developer on a game, and how the game is progressing.

The NES version is one of the greatest titles of all time. The DOS version? Decidedly not.

It starts like a bait-and-switch. You see the name Ninja Gaiden—and your brain lights up with nostalgia: the cinematic cutscenes, the frantic wall-jumping, that savage, surgical difficulty.

But this? This is something else entirely. A freak of nature. A shadow of a shadow. Like someone described the original game to a committee over a bad phone connection, and the committee was made up of interns with insomnia and a shared allergy to fun.

Made by Hi-Tech Expressions—a company whose entire business model seemed to be "take beloved franchises and make them worse for DOS"—this port wasn’t so much developed as it was extruded. They didn’t craft games. They manufactured obligations. And what they slapped together here was less a port than a low-rent hallucination of the arcade version, which itself was already the dumber cousin of the NES masterpiece. So now what we’ve got is a port of a knockoff of a spin-off of a legend. A Xerox of a Xerox with ketchup on it.

You’re Ryu Hayabusa, allegedly.

You shuffle from left to right like you're late for work in a pool full of molasses. Your enemies? Identical mime-goons in red jackets, looking like rejected extras from a community theatre production of West Side Story. The punch button makes a noise. Not a satisfying thud—just the PC speaker trying its best to simulate impact and accidentally triggering your fight-or-flight reflex. You’ve got a life bar, but really it’s more of a countdown to when you give up.

Technically, it has graphics. EGA support, sure, if you’re feeling brave. But everything is drawn in migraine-vision. Sprites blend into the background like camouflage designed by a prankster. Choppy scrolling turns the act of walking into an act of protest. The cutscenes? Redrawn from scratch, probably by someone who only heard about the NES cinematics second-hand and thought, “Eh, I’ll just wing it.”

Audio is a crime scene. The entire soundtrack is piped through the PC speaker, which is like asking a kazoo to perform Beethoven. Every track is a remix in the same way banging two forks together is a remix of jazz. Worse still, the wrong songs often play in the wrong places.

Compatibility is its own boss fight. The game only runs properly on a CPU slower than time itself—an 8086. Try it on anything faster, and it plays at hyperspeed like someone sat on the fast-forward button. Unless you’re lucky enough to own a Tandy 1000—and if you are, bless your vintage heart—you’ll spend more time configuring slowdown utilities than actually playing. Assuming you even get that far.

Even the disks were garbage. Cheap floppies that degraded like bread in the sun. The physical media was actively trying to forget it existed.

Yes, they included environmental interaction. Throw an enemy into a phone booth and it explodes. Because... why not? But the animations are stiffer than taxidermy. You can’t tell if that pixel smear is a dude, a trash can, or your own disappointment rendered in 16 colors.

Critics tried to be diplomatic. Players didn’t. One called it “a slap in the face.” Another said “avoid it like the plague”—which is putting it gently. This isn’t just a bad game. It’s an experiment in how low expectations can go before they punch through the floor. It’s a warning label masquerading as software. Proof that even iconic franchises can be fed through a woodchipper if you give the license to the wrong team.

It belongs in a museum, sure. But only in the kind of museum that’s attached to a condemned strip mall. With a flickering light. And carpet that smells like old ketchup.

This is not Ninja Gaiden.

This is Ninja Gaiden’t.

Back in 2014, Wein revealed that Deep Silver was ‘mightily proud’ of the trailer, but it was the spark that ignited a major downfall, and within weeks, milestones were failing to be hit. The product being pieced together by Yager wasn’t reflective of the first games that had sold so well.

About 3 to 4 weeks later, we had a major milestone with the development studio that was in charge at that time. And boy, that game sucked.

It had nothing to do with what made the original Dead Island really fun. We commissioned a play test and got horrific feedback. And we sat down with the development team and said, ‘Okay, what’s the course of action?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, leave it with us’.

Not actually cancelled but "back to the drawing board". It's weird how 4 or 5 years between entries actually feels short these days.

Direct link: https://blenderstudio.itch.io/dogwalk

This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I've found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they're amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games.

Things have clearly changed a lot over time, some of them are insensitive or even outright sexist, but if you just look at it through a lens of being a time capsule, it's fun.

This one's going to be very image-heavy. If you're using Boost on iOS then you might struggle to scroll through this (or maybe not? It's happened with all my other posts though, so you've been warned), if that happens just visit using your browser :)

---

Game Boy Advance/SP:

---

The 'feet' collection were from an ad company in Stockholm, in 2005. I think it is to mean you're using hands to play the GBA, and only have feet left to use for real life:

---

PS2:

---

---

Nintendo Game Cube:

---

---

And that's that! Just interesting to see a time when gaming was a little more experimental and edgy.