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Denshattack: chugga chugga

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The bright colours caught my eye, and since I was stuck at some hunters in a room on the way to the Silent Cartographer, I thought I’d give it a go. I’m glad I did. Denshattack bombards you quickly with different controls, and it’s an assault on your concentration for the first few levels as you battle to remember to grind around corners, jump ahead of blockages, and find routes to the collectibles. However, as soon as I realised that it’s an experience meant to be repeated, with you working out the best places to perform stunts and where there are quick switches between rails, then it turns into a much calmer experience; the first one or two runs through a level are there for research, before then trying to nail a proper run.

In Denshattack, you control a train which can jump between the rails (both double and single) which have, for some reason, been installed around large areas of Japan. You do stunts as you jump, choose which route to go down, and explore varied locales including the inside of a volcano, a factory, and a mountain. At one point I jumped on a Ferris wheel and rolled it down a hill, knocking over satellite dishes and rolling through the bay.

It feels like a Dreamcast game, with colours, very solid-feeling worlds, high score chasing, multiple objectives, and short levels. But it builds on the last twenty-five years of game design, pulling in everything that makes gaming more accessible nowadays.

There is a story. Someone who takes photos told my character about denshattack, and as a train operator she decided to become the best. There’s someone who I am travelling to see in order to challenge her, but on the way there are others to beat. I’m sure there’s more nuance to it than that, but I missed it.

Burnout Legends: without the legends

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Or, indeed, any other traffic. Burnout Legends on the DS is quite impressive given its age, but it doesn’t feel like a Burnout game; it’s pedestrian, there’s little danger or threat, it’s really difficult to actually cause a crash, and the digital steering means the cars feel almost identical to each other. You can build up boost by driving on the wrong side of the road with basically no concern that you might meet something coming the other way; if another car does appear you have the same chance to avoid it as if you were driving on the right side anyway. I can’t make the car drift around corners, but it doesn’t really matter since you don’t lose much speed by scraping along the walls.

I don’t think I’ll be dedicating the time needed to unlock everything. Or, indeed, anything.

Whitewater Wipeout: triple 360

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Whitewater Wipeout was one of the first games available on the Playdate, being released in the first week of Season 1, and I think it’s still my favourite on the system. It has the vibes of California Games, but with a clear end point, refined scoring system, and responsive and intuitive controls.

The front of the board goes where the crank is pointing. It is such an immediate piece of feedback that it gives you an innate sense of connection to the character, but the fact that you can turn the crank quicker than the board can turn makes it crucial to plan in advance when to stop your stunts. Being able to shift weight on the board as you launch, using up on the d-pad, gives even more depth to it.

It’s ideal for a handheld game too. Three lives; you lose one each time you land the wrong way or stray to the bottom of the screen. As you travel to the left, the wave slowly catches up with you unless you constantly move, and the further to the left you go the smaller the wave is – making it more difficult to launch and land tricks, and eventually forcing a wipeout. I’ve reached that last point once in all my games.

The top global scores are over 2 million, and I have no idea how they can be achieved – you would need to have a perfect run on each of your three lives, getting a triple and then quadruple 360 on every trick, building up the combo for the whole run, and hitting a few birds along the way. My top score is less than a quarter of that, and even that felt like I was lucky so many times throughout.

Forza Horizon 6: tell me what to do

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Having loved and completed Forza Horizon 1, 2, and the strange Fast & Furious offshoot to 2 – completed, at least, to the point where I had unlocked and won the final showdown type events, and raced on every track (I’m not going back to complete 156 multi-race championships in 2) – it took me many years to start and then play through 3, hampered by the confusing mess of storyline, non-linear unlocks for races, over-abundance of cars, and confusing map. I would often finish a play session with more on my to-do list than when I started. But bit by bit I worked through, sometimes having a month or two off, and I uncovered and discovered many new ways to play, hidden modes, new types of races, and fun through the more extreme car types. By the time I felt I had completed the game – probably marked as having fully upgraded all the festival sites, which I did in June 2021 – I was still keen to play more, feeling familiarity with the map. My last save was in March 2023.

I’m coming onto 6 soon, I promise. There is a point.

I think the forthcoming release of Forza Horizon 4 spurred me into starting 3, since it looks like I started the earlier game in 2017, a year after its release, and then I played 4 on release, so there was a time when I was playing both in parallel. After a while I dropped 4, to concentrate on playing 3. I returned to 4 occasionally, but really started to play it properly in December 2023, and even a year later I was still finding the map overwhelming. This, as it turns out, was a bit of a foolish thing to do, because it meant that the regular seasonal festivals, which gave special prizes for altered races, had finished – meaning that there are three achievements I’ll never be able to get, and 77 seasons that are sitting there with fun events that I’ll bever be able to play, Although there is a huge amount to do in the game, an amount I’ll probably never get around to doing, I still feel I’ve missed out every time I see the menu option to see the festival history. It was enough to put me off for quite a while, and I don’t think I played 4 at all during 2025.

What I did play during 2025 was Forza Horizon 5. But not much, because the icons and story and choice of where to go next and everything was massively overwhelming. There was too much to do, and I had no idea what was the best thing to do next. I played it a few times in multiplayer online with John and Kieron, which was great fun, but the game has sat there untouched most of the time since its release in 2021.

And then in May this year, Forza Horizon 6 came out. I tried it out on the day it was released – played via cloud gaming, since my Xbox One S isn’t up to the task of running it natively. Since then, in a month I have played it for twice as many hours as I’ve spent in 5 since that game’s release.

Some of the scenery is absolutely stunning.

The biggest difference I’ve seen is a streamlining of the events. Yes, there is still a map full of icons, but there are effectively multiple pathways you can take now, with the two main ones – the Horizon Festival, and Discover Japan – giving you additional events as you progress through the wristbands and stamps respectively. You can see a much clearer evolution of what is available, and it seems that you have to complete a bit more before new events are unlocked. There’s still a demarcation of road racing, cross country and dirt racing, but you are encouraged to play all and not specialise.

I’ve also been doing the seasonal events. This is a bit of an issue, in fact, because I’m not 20 any more and can’t dedicate countless hours to playing videogames, so completing the weekly challenges actually takes up the majority of my gaming time. I’ve been trying to complete the whole seasons so I can unlock the gift cars, though annoyingly I missed a few of the daily challenges in the very first week so I can’t complete the first season. I hope that once I’ve got a full season done, and they start to move onto other weeks, I’ll be able to spend a bit less time in the seasonal stuff and instead follow the storyline to its conclusion – there’s a whole section of the map locked off until you get the final wristband.

The final thing I’ve found that has helped to unlock this iteration of the game for me is the tuning menu. When I played the first Forza Horizon game I noted how you could tune cars for each race, but I couldn’t get to that much detail. When playing 4 (and to some extent 3) I found that you don’t need to tune the cars yourself, but instead you can browse other people’s tunes and install them. With 6 this is easier than ever, and I’ve found some useful tunes on the Forza Horizon Reddit which create cars that constantly drift, have huge top speeds, or can just shove opponents out the way. I’ve built up a huge collection of cars and there are a lot in which I have raced, encouraged by the fact that several events have strict eligibility criteria.

Forza Horizon 6 is a really enjoyable game, and there is a part of that due to the community that has been fostered around it. Who would have thought that a goods van would be best for drifting?

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: it’s a bit familiar

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I mentioned in my last post that I’d started to play Oracle of Ages again, and I’m still working my way through it. It seems to be taking an absolute … er, age … even though it’s very clearly signposted throughout. As soon as you finish a dungeon, the Deku Tree pipes up to tell you where to go next. The thing is, it all seems very familiar. It follows the Link’s Awakening formula quite closely with you having to find eight thingies in dungeons, and the added gimmick – of time travel – just makes things a little more complicated. Usually that would be a good thing in a Zelda game, but Link’s Awakening understood the audience which was there to play a game on a portable system, probably in fits and starts. Step away from Link’s Awakening for a couple of days, and on return you can still see where to go. Step away from Oracle of Ages, and when starting again it’s tricky to remember where things are and how to get there, switching between time periods.

There is a good use of colour to distinguish between areas, though it can be quite garish.

The other reason it might feel familiar is because I can see that I have played this before, getting to a more advanced stage than I managed this time. I don’t think I completed it, though, which is slightly odd given that I was very advanced. That’s my aim for now. I’ve just finished the fifth dungeon, which granted me the Cane of Somaria, allowing me to conjure blocks from nothing. I’m now thinking if there’s anywhere in the overworld where that might be useful – and am drawing a blank. Off to see the Gorons, then.