The Cartridge Thief Blog

For me, Hanbei the Undying is not just one of FromSoftware's best characters, he also provides a lesson in how to tell stories through gameplay. (Image property of FromSoftware and Activision) Spoilers below for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. If you haven't played it, go do that, it was the best £50 I spent on a new controller after I smashed mine. It's wild what you end up talking about when you drink in other countries isn't it? It was during one of my semi-regular escape attempts from Brexit Island when I was asked by the people I was travelling with who my favourite NPC in gaming was. An odd question but an important one. So often we give attention to gaming's protagonists for their role driving the story but in doing so we forget that non-player characters are the ones driving the world where that story takes place. It was at this point, for the first time in a long time, that I remembered Hanbei the Undying from FromSoftware's 2019 shinobi-em-up Sekiro: Shadow...

 I recently started playing Persona 5 Royal on the overwhelming strength of the entire internet's recommendation. Pretty much everyone I know or respect has played it by now and declared that it's better than an empty house on prom night and so I thought I should finally get round to it.  I'm three years late to the party but that's backlogs for you I suppose. Unsurprisingly, it's quite good, but you knew that already. The music has this infectious energy to it and the art design makes the usual JRPG menu prospecting feel more like an explosive artistic expression than the usual discount Microsoft Excel vibe. (Image property of Atlas and Sega) As I said, we've all already heard about why the game is good. Instead, what I want to tell you about today is what I didn't expect from the game. Namely, I want to discuss how Persona 5 forced me to approach it differently to how I usually play games and how that adds to its feeling of uniqueness. First, a bit of ba...

If you have the same kind of debauched search history that I do then you might have noticed some of Assassins' Creed Mirage's  marketing and developer interviews rolling out ahead of its release in October.  Now, usually this kind of corporate bumf slides off me like water off the world's most bitterly disinterested duck but, on this occasion, I noticed a few shiny corn kernels mixed in with the turds that I felt were interesting. (Image property of Ubisoft) First amongst these tidbits is the odd stink of shame that this game gives off like a teenager with poor hygiene.  There's a lot of talk about  wanting to take the series back to its roots after a few years in the RPG wilderness with Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla .  In fact,  Ubisoft's own site  makes a big deal of the game being, 'a modern take on the features and gameplay that have defined a franchise for 15 years,' carefully ignoring the fact that for the most recent 5 of those 15 years, th...