Kay's Corner

Two genres that couldn’t seem further apart at a glance are the first-person shooter and adventure game. But first impressions can be deceiving, because they're more similar than you'd think. Older FPS games (particularly those following in Doom’s footsteps) tend to be a bit more exploratory, due to their secrets and the process of gradually building up your weapon arsenal, which isn’t totally dissimilar from exploring Hyrule and obtaining new items in a Zelda game. So, what would you get if a developer decided to go all-in on a slower pace, exploration and backtracking while retaining that first-person perspective? I’m willing to bet most people’s answer would be Metroid Prime, but as for me, my mind immediately goes to a little game called Powerslave. Released in 1996 as the first game from Lobotomy Software, Powerslave was a shooter that dared to be different. Rather than simply iterating upon the formula Doom popularised, Powerslave took its elements and combined them with...

Mickey's Speedway USA is a strange game, particularly where its legacy is concerned. This is an N64 game developed by Rare, released during the height of their relationship with Nintendo... and yet, it’s fallen into total obscurity. Even during retrospectives on Rare as a company, it’s left as a mere footnote; as just “that other game built on the Diddy Kong Racing engine” and nothing more. With a reputation like that, I had no reason to think the game was worth playing, so I paid it no mind for years. That was until recently, when two YouTube videos spotlighting the game and its supposedly ruthless difficulty caught my eye: the first from Pyrrhickong of Designing For , and the second from Ray0ken . That was enough to convince me as a lover of challenging games, and while I didn’t struggle with it quite as much as I anticipated (probably thanks to Huey’s overpowered stats), I still discovered a real gem of a kart racer! Mechanically speaking, Mickey’s Speedway USA feels like a comb...