The Cartridge Thief Blog

Have you ever played a game that feels like a maze?  It might have been in 2D or 3D.  It might have had powerful, popping pixel art or fantastic, fluid hand drawn animations.  Perhaps it had an intricate and dynamic traversal system where you unlock new abilities to access old areas through new means.  Chances are, if any of this sounds familiar, there’s a very good chance that you’ve played a Metroidvania game. (Image property of Konami) As its name suggests, Metroidvania was a genre title created to describe games that fit into a similar mould to the Metroid and Castlevania series.  We are arguably in something of a revival for Metroidvania with Metroid: Dread and Metroid Prime: Remastered having come out in recent years alongside indie titles like Hollow Knight that fit nicely into the genre. (Image property of Nintendo) I noticed that even the Nintendo E-Shop has acknowledged the genre directly with a recent sale on Metroidvania games.  It was durin...

(Image property of Obsidian Entertainment and Private Division) Since 2018 when I booted it up for the first time, I have played Fallout: New Vegas around 11 times. Not all of these playthroughs reached the credits but most of them involved tens if not hundreds of hours of playtime. This was partly because I played it when I was at university and it was one of the few games in my Steam library that my pack-mule of an old laptop could actually run. The game still crashes frequently but anyone who has played it can tell you that that's just New Vegas .   Beyond practicality though, I also played it because I was a huge fan of the action-RPG gameplay and the strong story focus. As a result of this history with Obsidian's first-person action-RPGs, their new game, The Outer Worlds , was an easy purchase me when it released in 2019. I bought the game around new year 2020. However, if we fast-forward to the present day, I have still never beaten the game.  I have tried twice an...

With the recent release of the trailer for Lego 2K Drive, many questions have been raised about the future of licensed Lego games and how it could change the experiences provided by them. (Image property of Traveller's Tale Games, Warner Bros. Games and Lego) To get you up to speed quickly, almost ever since they started working together, Lego and Traveller's Tale Games (TT Games)  have had an exclusivity deal.  In other words, since the first Lego Star Wars  game,   TT Games have been the soul developer of home console Lego games.  However, in January 2022, there was a damning report from behind the scenes on Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga which heavily criticised TT Games.  The report  particularly focused on the treatment of its developers and the intense crunch that they experienced when making the game. Fast-forward to this year and we have the announcement that multiple sports titles, based on the Lego  brand, are in production via 2K ....