The Cartridge Thief Blog

Warning: Contains references to murder, drowning and images that could trigger arachnophobia.  Read at your own discretion. Usually when you’re buying a game, you know what to expect.  Reviews, billboards and gameplay trailers provide us with a fairly clear picture of the product you are buying long before you take it home.  However, some developers clearly like to keep players on their toes.  Sometimes, whether it's to draw your attention or to simply scare the pants off you,  developers will decide that the best way to do this is to include moments of absolute terror in otherwise non-horror games.  Below are some of my favourite examples of when developers decided to terrify us when it was absolutely uncalled for. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga The long-awaited follow-up / remake to the old-school  Lego Star Wars  series was, for many people, a safe bet for a fun, family-friendly adventure.  Understandably so, after all, how could anima...

So far, 2023 is shaping up to be the year that killed the live service game. We've seen publishers pull support for games like   Marvel's Avengers  and Back 4 Blood and, more recently, there was   a strong public backlash to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League  for its use of looter-shooter and live service mechanics.  By contrast, remakes and re-releases like Dead Space (2023),   Metroid Prime: Remastered and now Resident Evil 4 (2023)  have been met with massive acclaim and strong sales.   What's more, this trend looks set to continue.  While   Kill the Justice League  remains the only high-profile live service game left to drop,  this year is still waiting to give us Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp, a System Shock  remake and potentially Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth.   As such, many people have started to celebrate the end of endless, grindy live service games and have ushered-in the age of remakes and re-...

If you've been playing games for long enough, then you will probably have gained at least a few gaming skeletons in your proverbial closets.  However, there is no time in your life more prolific for producing unfinished experiences than childhood and we all have our fair share of games that, as a kid, we just couldn't finish for a variety of reasons.  Here are just a few examples of games that have done that for me. 1) Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (PC) (Image property of TT Games and LucasArts) If you were alive in the early-to-mid 2000s, there is a very  good chance that you played one of the Lego games.   However, before the game was able to shape my childhood on my PS2, I first played in on the PC.  My parents had this weird thing where they thought that playing games on the garbage family PC would make me just give up on them as a hobby.  That went well.   On this occasion, I was so unbelievably excited to play through some of ...