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I’ve cooked up a smorgasbord of game reviews I’ve recently written at GamerDad.com for you all to munch on!  Please click on the links and read as many as you can, and maybe even post a ‘like’ or comment or two!  I’d appreciate it.  Bon appetit!

Untitled Goose Game (Switch)

Thanksgiving is this month, but instead of turkey, you may want to eat goose instead after playing this game.  Untitled Goose Game is a unique and original comical stealth action game where you play as a goose out to cause mischief and mayhem to humans in a small town setting.  The game has become quite the phenomenon on the internet, and I’m glad I got to review it.

Doraemon: Story of Seasons (Switch)

Farming games always make me think of Thanksgiving and food.  This is a crossover game but the two properties featured here may not be so familiar to many Americans.  Especially Doraemon.  Doraemon is a cartoon blue robot cat with no ears who is especially popular in Japan.  You may have even seen him and not realized it.  He’s been a star of manga comic books and anime cartoons and movies for decades, and is sometimes even called “Japan’s Mickey Mouse.”  Some of his comic books have been translated into English, and Disney brought some of the newest iterations of the Doraemon cartoons to the US under the Disney XD channel a few years back (good on them), but other than that, Doraemon has stayed relatively unknown in the States.  Some US gamers may be more familiar with Story of Seasons, though, as it’s a farming sim series that used to go under the name of Harvest Moon.  This game pretty much plays like a Story of Seasons game, just with Doraemon characters, and since you play as kids you don’t marry anybody.  But I was very curious about this game and I’m glad I got to review it.  Please read my review if you’d like to learn more about Doraemon characters!

River City Melee Mach!! (PS4)

In Japan there is a popular series of video games that has gone back since the 80s starring a character named Kunio-kun.  Kunio is a hot-blooded high school student who sometimes gets into fights and trouble, but always stands up for his friends and against bullies.  Kunio also likes to play sports and when he’s not beating up baddies, he’s competing in events like soccer or dodgeball.  Some of Kunio’s games have made it to the US under name or graphical changes.  If you’ve ever played a game like Renegade, River City Ransom, Crash N the Boyz Street Challenge, or Super Dodge Ball, then you’ve played a Kunio game!  Now all the characters in the Kunio series are gearing up for a four-player free-for-all martial arts tournament with River City Melee Mach!!  Unfortunately the game is just too hard and chaotic for my tastes.  I wish they’d go back and make another Super Dodge Ball game!  Before Wii Sports came out, Super Dodge Ball on the NES was my favorite sports video game.

Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure (Switch)

Ice Age is one of the longest running computer animated movie series, and it stars a group of prehistoric animals like saber tooth tigers and woolly mammoths.  But clearly the crowd favorite has to be Scrat the saber toothed squirrel and his constant chase for his beloved acorn nut.  And now Scrat gets his very own game with Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure.  While chasing his acorn, Scrat stumbles across a hidden temple of the Scratazons, an ancient advanced race of saber toothed squirrels.  Now in order to get his nut back, he must collect special purple crystal acorns across the land.  Scrat’s Nutty Adventure is a 3-D platformer that doesn’t do anything groundbreaking, but still kept me entertained.  Sometimes licensed games aren’t as bad as people make them out to be.

Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX (PS4)

The Gunvolt game series is made by Inti Creates, who specializes in mostly 2-D action games.  In fact, they helped make some of Capcom’s Mega Man titles and spinoffs, including the Mega Man Zero series.  Gameplay-wise, the Gunvolt games play a lot like Mega Man X, just a bit more anime-ish.  And now the newest in the Gunvolt saga is out, and stars a side character named Copen and his adorable android helper Lola.  But it’s still the same kind of 2-D action that Gunvolt and Mega Man X fans love.  I enjoyed this one quite a bit until I got to the end and had to fight all the bosses in a row.  The bosses are really the only hard part of the game, so having to fight all of them in a row was a bit much for me.  But the rest of the game is neat, just a bit too anime-ish for my tastes.

Day and Night (Switch)

Day and Night is a Tetris-like puzzler exclusively on Nintendo Switch.  I was really surprised how good this game was.  It’s very polished and feels like a complete game, unlike a lot of the other indie titles I’ve played.  It’s also pretty original, too.  Most of these puzzlers play exactly like another game, such as Crystal Crisis pretty much copying Puzzle Fighter.  But Day and Night is kind of its own thing.  If you like playing Switch puzzlers like Tetris 99, you’ll definitely want to read this review!  Only main problem I had with it is that it lacks the simple charm of a Tetris game, as there is a lot more stuff going on in this one.

Family Tree (Switch)

Nothing says Thanksgiving feast like a fruit harvest in an orchard.  This game mixes platforming, pinball, and BreakOut style gameplay as you try to make it up the insides of trees to help a Daddy (?) Fruit save his baby fruits.  Just a simple fun game.

Kine (Switch)

This is a 3-D puzzler that’s kind of hard to describe, but you play as three personified musical instruments and each one has skills that can help and hinder certain movements.  I’m just glad that one of them is a trombone, since I played Bass Trombone in high school band.  Nice to see that instrument getting some video game representation!  It’s a fun puzzler, but it does get pretty hard, and I do like the jazz style and themes.

LEGO Duplo World (iPad)

You know I’ll never pass up the chance to review an educational game for little kids!  There are tons of video games based on the popular LEGO building toy franchise, but not so much about the blocks for the younger set called Duplo.  That is until now.  In LEGO Duplo World, little gamers can learn early concepts like counting and matching, all in the colorful Duplo universe.

Pig Eat Ball (Switch)

It’s a not a Game Review Feast without a game about eating!  The King of Cake rules the space station kingdom and has a pig daughter named Princess Bow.  One day he has a contest to decide who will marry her, but she wants none of that so she dons a disguise and competes in the contests herself.  Along the way she’ll discover a threat to her kingdom and must save the day in the process. So what are these contests?  Well, you must run around mazes and eat these tennis ball-like things to win.  But when you eat a lot of them, you get fatter and can’t fit through narrow corridors.  So what do you do?  You press a button to barf up the balls so you can be thin enough to fit in the mazes again.  So yeah, it’s Pac-Man with gross bodily functions.  Yay?  The sprite based graphics and arcade gameplay are what drew me to review this one, but the chaotic nature and barfing mechanic (complete with gross gagging sounds) kept me from getting into it.

Creepy Brawlers (Switch)

Halloween may be over, but you can still beat up monsters with Creepy Brawlers.  The main character in this game is watching a horror movie in the theater, but then gets sucked inside!  Now he must box his way to defeat all sorts of opponents, like a zombie, wolfman, vampire, and more!  It’s almost like a spooky sequel to Punch Out on the NES!  It even looks like an 8-bit NES game.  You can even get an actual cartridge of this for your NES, but you can also download it on Switch.  I’m horrible at Punch Out, so I wasn’t very good at this game either.

And that’s all for now!  After that Game Review Feast, you all should have nice fat little bellies!  Thanks again for reading and posting comments and ‘likes.’  I do appreciate it!  Happy Thanksgiving!  --Cary