Blogs.Canada: If the recent Canadian Video Game Awards are any indication, Canadians are finally starting to realize how many awesome video games are created in this country. At its recent spring showcase on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 in Toronto, PlayStation Canada highlighted upcoming indie titles that will soon be released. The room the showcase was held in was cramped, hot and sweaty, but the innovative Canadian-made indie titles were well worth the wait.
VGChartz;s Adam Cartwright: "For a console that can only really be seen as a commercial failure, the PlayStation Vita did extremely well for itself in terms of software – more than 1500 games are available for it and that figure is surprisingly still growing each week, despite the hardware being discontinued earlier this year and despite the rhetoric suggesting it’s only a good machine for indie 2D platformers and niche Japanese RPGs.
Unfortunately certain genres didn't receive any representation at all and act as glaring holes in the Vita’s software library. Some of these just aren’t particularly popular on consoles in general, such as city builders, which have been niche for years. It’s these genres I’m aiming to look at in this article – what they are (including examples of some modern entries in the genres), why they weren't represented on the Vita, as well as some suggestions about what alternatives are available to scratch that itch."
Alex S. from Link-Cable writes: "The official end of the WiiWare service may not be until early 2019 but we wanted to give everybody as much of a chance as possible to remember all of the great games that Nintendo’s first every download service brought us. Last week we counted down the first 10 games in our look at the Top 20 WiiWare games ever made, and if you haven’t had the chance yet you can check out those picks right here but now we switch our focus over to the very best that WiiWare has to offer so if you still have a Wii (or a Wii U) kicking around make sure to download these games before they are lost forever."
PSLS: "Five years ago indie studio Minority Media released Papo & Yo on the PlayStation Store. The 3D puzzle-platformer features contrasting settings of a fantasy world where monsters exist and the broken down favelas of Brazil. As the player continues solving block puzzles and attempting to keep their friendly beast of a partner away from the frogs that enrage him, they start to learn that this isn’t a story of fantasy, but of a young boy trying to find an escape from an alcoholic and abusive father."
This game and it's meaning are very deep. If you know the developers story and depending on your own childhood playing this game can be a healing or scar opening experience.
It's great that this excellent game helped you grow. I never had to deal with the things this game portrays in my home, but one a dead on analogy for one of my friends and his Dad. It was scary when he'd come home drunk at 1 or so in the morning. The guy I talked to at dinner with the nice smile and kind eyes was gone replaced by a beast of a man who was willing to scream at and hit his family for apparently no reason.
I find it odd that videogames as a medium are so disregarded as an art form/medium that can convey powerful messages. I almost feel like movies lately have lost that touch because they are just being churned out to be churned out. Meanwhile, there seems to be more videogames that have made made me go through a broad range of emotions and sometimes connect with in game characters on a more personal level. I also love how music and sounds in videogames has come so far to become very effective for setting moods and eliciting feelings as well.
In all my years of writing about video games this has never happened. No one has ever submitted one of my stories to N4G before me.