cassette

Everyone who grew up with a tape deck remembers mixtapes, or compilation tapes, as we used to call them in the UK. They remember sitting with a pile of records or CDs, assembling the perfect order, sending the right message. The narrator of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, Rob Fleming, had a set of parameters that had to be observed: “You can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs, and … oh, there are loads of rules.”“My first girlfriend and I had a cassette,”…

Also, Maquette It’s an indie week on the Nintendo eShop, with the highly anticipated Cassette Beasts launching on the Switch. In a nutshell, you’ll record monster abilities on retro cassette tapes. Yep, it’s just as unique as it sounds! Maquette is also coming out today, which is described as a “first-person recursive puzzle game” where “objects are simultaneously tiny and staggeringly huge.” Consider me interested. If that’s not enough for you, there’s a ton of stuff you can check out below, like Bat Boy (a take…

The new indie monster-catching RPG Cassette Beasts launched today for PC and console, and for a limited time, you can grab the Steam version for 20% off at Fanatical. This special launch week deal lasts until May 3 and applies to the standard and deluxe editions of the game. It's also a much better offer than Steam's own 10%-off launch price.Thanks to this deal, the Cassette Beasts standard edition is down to $16 (normally $20), while the deluxe version is down to just…

Considering how wildly popular the Pokémon franchise is, it always surprises me that it still has no real competition. Plenty of developers have tried to create their own spin on the monster-catching formula, but few have achieved a true mainstream moment. It isn’t for lack of trying either. Games like Temtem worked hard to position themselves as a viable alternative to Nintendo’s juggernaut, but it’s never been enough to work them out of a niche. Anytime a release like that fails to gain large-scale attention, I’m…

Sales of cassettes in the UK have reached their highest level since 2003, following vinyl records in a small, nostalgia-fuelled resurgence. Five readers told us why they prefer to listen to supposedly obsolete tapes.‘You have no way to skip tracks, which makes it more special’Dan White and his collection“Buying a cassette direct from an independent artist on platforms such as Bandcamp is such a fun way to consume music. Often produced in very small runs, it is nice to receive something though the post that is relatively…