Welcome back to another Crowdfunding Review here at The Splintering. Today, we’ll be taking a look at Jawbreakers: Grand Bizarre, which contains three separate stories by different creative teams. For those of you not familiar with our review format, we grade a crowdfunding campaign on four distinct categories: Book Content and Quality Communication and Fulfillment Packaging and Shipping Stretch Goals
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Welcome back to 80s August, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of the greatest decade since the breakup of Pangea! Since the original RoboCop film was released in July 1987, that makes this year an anniversary of sorts. To celebrate, we’re going to pick apart RoboCop for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Published by Data East in 1989, RoboCop is for NES
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Upon first hearing about Avenging Spirit, I immediately thought of an old GameCube game called Geist. Ever play that one? Well, the gist is, you play as a ghost who possesses enemies and then uses their individual abilities to progress. Definitely a similar concept to Avenging Spirit, but after playing through it, I am more reminded of the old SEGA Genesis game, Kid Chameleon.
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Astral Ticket and independent comic book creator Isaac Fox recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for Cremisi issue 2, a sci-fi fantasy adventure book. We were fortunate enough to get a chance to discuss his latest Cremisi campaign, which is available to support here. As always, the answers below are represented as closely to “as written” as possible with only minimal edits. The Splintering:
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Originally published by Hanako Games in 2013, Long Live the Queen has recently been re-released on all next gen platforms.* The game is a visual novel that revolves around a young girl named Elodie who is training to become the next queen of the land. She has forty weeks to prepare because on her 15th birthday she will be coronated.
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It’s 1996, and Nintendo’s Super Mario RPG was released only four months before Super Mario 64. Super Mario RPG on May 13, and Super Mario 64 on September 29. Also in 1996, cows were big mad about something… I don’t remember what. 90’s Nintendo Finance 101: Mario = $ // Mario x 2 = $$ Nintendo was not wrong. Both
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Following up on their recent retro revivals for Ninjawarriors and Wild Arms, developer Tengo Project are back at it trying to breathe new life in a latent Japanese franchise with Pocky & Rocky Reshrined.* Unless you are a seasoned Super NES veteran (or a connoisseur of rare Game Boy Advance curios), it’s very likely that you’ve never played Pocky & Rocky game. Originally developed by
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If you are old enough to vaguely remember your parents panicking over Y2K, then you are old enough to remember a time when the FBI was cool, tossing plastic waste into the trash made it disappear, and being a conspiracy theorist was not only associated with voting for (non-descriptive color and political animal mascot). However, if that does not sound
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My personal Wonder Boy Collection is already complete, as I like to think of myself as one of the Wonder Boy series’ biggest fans. My very first game (outside of the pack-in Hang-On/Safari Hunt) was the original Wonder Boy for the Sega Master System. While my brother picked up Alex Kidd in Miracle World (wise beyond his years), and my
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Konichiwa, bitches. Today we’re going to take a look at Samurai Riot, an co-op, arcade-style brawler developed by Wako Factory and published by Hound Picked Games. Enough setup! Ikso! (いくそ！) Samurai Riot takes place in a time of political unrest. You play as one of two warriors loyal to the master: the Tsurumaru (つるまる) the samurai and Sukane (すかね) the kunoichi (くのいち). Sorry readers,
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The first Jurassic Park game was a huge blockbuster on the Genesis, and SEGA quickly tried to recapture that success. Not content with waiting for a true movie sequel, Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition is a “what if” type of story which takes place in an alternate timeline picking up immediately after the events of the first film. Rampage Edition is
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Have you ever played R-Type? That’s what I thought when I first saw Remote Life.* However, other than the fact that it is a horizontal-scrolling shooter with space ships, Remote Life offers up a pretty different experience. It also does quite a lot of things right, but the mechanics don’t quite stick the landing (even in zero gravity). But first, the
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Welcome back to Monochrome May, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of all things chromatically challenged. Today we’re going to pick away at Fiendish chapter one, a 46-page comic (more if you count chapter 2 preview pages) written and illustrated by Irene A. Strychalski. Set in the cold lands of Northern Europe, Fiendish is a horror/fantasy book strictly intended for a mature audience. The project
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Alleyway was probably just fine for 80s and 90s kids looking for a simple game to play with their new Game Boy. But is it worth a pick up today?
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Welcome back to Monochrome May, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of all things spectrum impaired. Today we’re going to look at A High School Girl in the Crusades, a 22-page comic that was successfully crowdfunded earlier in 2022. Written by Jon Del Arroz (Deus Vult) and featuring artwork by Dachul Akamoto, A High School Girl in the Crusades is a comedic adventure intended to parody the Isekai
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Welcome back to Monochrome May, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of all things weiß und schwartz. Today we’re going to do another Silent Movie Review, this time looking at one of the early Sherlock Holmes serials. Based on the short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Twisted Lip is a silent film directed by Maurice Elvey. It was created in 1921 as the eighth of the Stoll
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I can remember seeing the original Cotton in game magazines back in the early 90’s, and thinking how it looked like a game that I would probably enjoy. My favorite games were typically shooters (shoot ’em ups, in modern terms), and I thought the premise of a witch flying around and shooting on her broom sounded like a fun idea.
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Groken was on my radar for a long time before the campaign launched. Kenneth Rocafort (Superman, The Ultimates, Red Hood and the Outlaws) is no stranger to comics. His prior work with the “Big Two” had given him a fan base that eagerly awaited his independent launch. I was one that was counting down the arrival of January 29, 2021,
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Welcome back to Monochrome May, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of all things color deficient. Speaking of deficient, today we’re going to take a look at The DeaDBeat, a 112-page graphic novel by Jeremy Massey and published by Alterna Comics in YEAR. The story was originally published as four mini comics, but the Alterna edition collects the entire tale in a handy
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Welcome back to Monochrome May, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of black and white entertainment. No, not that kind…. Written and illustrated by Ibai Canales (Iron Sights, The Abductables), Decimators is a cautionary science fiction tale set in a politically correct, dystopian future. The age of nanotechnology is upon us, and humanity has overstepped its bounds. Upon recognizing that the nanobots now living in
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Welcome back to Monochrome May, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of colorless creativity. Despite the frustration in doing so, I like to review anthology books from time to time, as they don’t seem to get the same level of attention as single-story graphic novels. But why is it so frustrating? Not only do anthologies typically include works by multiple creative teams, but they
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Welcome back to Monochrome May, The Splintering’s month-long celebration of all things ashen and old. And we do mean old, because today we’re going to take a look at the silent film Gypsy Blood, a lighthearted tragedy (if such a thing can exist) based on the opera Carmen by French composer Georges Bizet. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and released in the US in 1921 (1918
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A review of the crowdfunded campaign “The Cryptidnals” by 656 Comics.
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The Kickstarter campaign for John McGuire’s In Our Dreams Awake issue 1 (here) is now in its final days of funding.* The book is a blend of multiple genres and art styles, all tied together by the broader themes of love and questioning reality. The story of In Our Dreams Awake follows Jason Byron, a man who falls asleep in
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Avid SEGA/Sonic fan and friend of the site Zealous FoX has never been one to pull punches when it comes to expressing his opinion on gaming. He recently unleashed a righteous tirade targeting modern game rating regimes (both the ESRB and Pegi), and we at The Splintering felt like it was worth posting in its entirety here (with permission, of
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No Arkanoid, no Bubble Bobble, no Space Invaders, no Darius… How does one create a Taito Milestones arcade collection without those games? While some are available on other collections, it’s very strange to have a collection of classic, 1980s Taito arcade games without them (Fully acknowledging that the original Space Invaders was released in the 70s). Instead, Taito Milestones (published
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Originally created thanks to crowdfunding, Fat Panda Games’ 2D platformer Flat Kingdom: Paper’s Cut Edition is making the jump from PC to consoles thanks to publisher Ratalaika Games.* The eternal battle between 2D and 3D has come to the peaceful Flat Kingdom. Now a brave warrior named Flat must venture into unfamiliar 3D landscapes to collect six magical jewels, rescue
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Today we’ll be reviewing the crowdfunded comic book campaign Absolute Book 2 by Jason Bascom.
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Streets of Rage 2. Geez, what a joke. I know a lot of you SEGA dorks out there just love your Streets of Rage 2. I myself still have my original Genesis cartridge as a relic from the 16-bit console wars, but I have to tell you, it’s not as good as you remember. Don’t believe me? Come along, friends, and
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What started in 2020 as a table top role-playing game, the Ascendant Universe has now graduated to the esteemed medium of comic books. Do you sense sarcasm? Maybe. Certainly modern comics have fallen far from their heights decades ago, but thankfully for you, dear reader, Ascendent Comics’ first book Star-Spangled Squadron (which is now crowdfunding via Indiegogo here) isn’t trying
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