Happy almost-Thanksgiving! I'll tell ya what I'm thankful for: I'm thankful for action games, I'm thankful for adventure games, I'm thankful for strategy games, and I'm thankful I get to dive into the archive each week in order to share them with you in the JayIsGames Vault. I'd also say I'm thankful for my editor, Dora, but going by my Canadian holiday calendar, I think I was supposed to do that in Mid-October and missed my chance. You'll have that.
[I'm transplanted. Your turkey is mine! -D.]
- Flight - When I was young, I had a dream based around the thought that if I could just run fast enough, I could follow the sun as it went around the entire world, never letting it go down on me, such concerns as "oceans" being beneath my consideration. Even if Juan Sebasti�n Elcano got there first, circumnavigation is a powerfully intriguing concept, and one wielded expertly by Krin Juangbhanich in his 2010 launch game Flight. Flying a paper airplane from country to country, cross plains, forest, jungles, desert, and tundra, every so often stopping to peek in with an installment of a bizarre but affecting little story of how the message carried by the plane is interpreted, re-interpreted and misinterpreted. A fun little game that's sure to make any holiday travel you're doing this week that much easier.
- Cat Astro Phi - Long car rides to grandma's house always meant one thing for me: incredibly low-resolution handheld gaming! So in that spirit, let me present one of the greatest Nintendo games that never was, Photon Storm's 2010 retro-adventure game has all the elements: SciFi asteroid blasting action, acidic mud, a bleepity-bloopity soundtrack, and an adowable widdle kitty to rescue. Chock full of obscure references and clever secrets, Cat Astro Phi will have you shooting, exploring, collecting, puzzling, and hacking across three vibrantly two-tone alien worlds. All without the trauma of running out of AAA batteries on your transparent-purple Game Boy Pocket!
- CoBaCoLi - If our readers will permit me one final indulgence of Turkey Day nostalgia, one of the greatest things about young Tricky's Thanksgiving experience was the bumper pool table at his grandparents house, and specifically the games he would play with Poppy while mom and Grammy were actually doing all the culinary heavy lifting. Thus this time of year makes me oddly wistful for the computation of billiard balls and the computation of two dimensional ricochet physics, and Tonypa's 2008 ode to trick shots, CoBaCoLi is a perfect indulgence. A game with a soothing presentation both trippy and elegant, the difficult-but-not-frustrating challenge of sending colored balls into the correct colored lines makes CoBaCoLi as good as tryptophan for winding players down into a long winter's nap.
While we welcome any comments about this weekly feature here, we do ask that if you need any help with the individual games, please post your questions on that game's review page. Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and rediscover some awesome!
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