One evening this winter, a piano-playing friend of mine invited me along to a concert and ‘artistic installation’ he was involved in, held inside a quaint little medieval church in Hove. The place was lit with candlelight, with fake trees positioned to cast flickering shadows about this strange village church in a busy city. Handed a little plastic cup of mulled wine, I sat listening to my pianist friend, debating with another friend whether ‘this was it’.
The first Trine managed an impressive feat. Bringing back the magic of three way co-op from ye olde Blizzard title The Lost Vikings, and heaping on a heavy dose of fairy tale whimsy and magic, it was clever, charming and incredibly distinctive but lacked in one area: if you wanted to play it co-operatively, your friends had to be in the same room. With the sequel, Frozenbyte clearly had their first task all but (pardon the pun) spelled out for…
A fight in UFC Undisputed 3 can go from good to bad in seconds. One false step and you can find yourself on the receiving end of a submission maneuver that threatens to break your arm unless you can break the hold before you are forced to tap. It is an exhilarating experience knowing that at any moment you could lose your match, your shot at a title within seconds.
Don’t let the dashing, hooded Italian on Soul Calibur V‘s boxart fool you. Namco and their rivals aren’t in the business of trying to squeeze a big release out every single year. They understand the value of leaving land fallow. It has been nearly three years since the last Tekken, dead on three years since we entered the fourth Street Fighter era. And Soul Calibur IV? Nearly four years old. The Soul series’ sixth instalment arrives this week, and it’s…
By now, you’re more than likely acutely aware of Popcap’s Bejeweled series – the gem matching game is arguably the yardstick as to which all modern puzzle games are compared to and aspire to match the success of. There’s countless versions of the game with the most recent – Bejeweled 3 – getting a release on Xbox a couple of months ago.
Zombies. Can’t live with ’em, Walk Thru Walls’ first adventure, Metal Dead follows the adventures of Malcolm and Ronnie, two heavy-metal enthusiasts struggling to survive in the midst of yet another outbreak of the living dead. It is the first in a planned series of point-and-click adventures set during the apocalypse.
Well, something had to be left off the list: there were simply too many games. From August onwards we were buried under a huge pile of games that were not just hugely exciting, but typically expansive and demanding in review terms. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was as exciting a prospect as the rest, but it slipped through the net anyway. But then, in this generation of scant exclusives, Uncharted is the single well established bragging point for Playstation owners: the…
For a publisher that specialises in a genre supposedly completely dead, Wadjet Eye Games didn’t half have a decent 2011. A few weeks ago for the Reticule I took a look at Gemini Rue, a spectacularly gritty Blade-Runner’esque sci-fi story, let down only by its clunky combat sequences. My hankering for pointing and clicking still not completely satisfied, and in anticipation of the upcoming Steam release of the Blackwell quadrilogy, I thought it time to revisit the genre once again…
The Harry Potter books and films re-imagined as LEGO games, great combination, I’ll give it a Headshot, everyone can go home happy.
The biggest appeal of a simulation game lies not in when things go well, it’s when things go disastrously wrong. It’s those moments in life when you retract the landing gear instead of deactivating the seat-belt sign, when you shoot your own wing off in a dogfight, or when you accidentally surface your submarine in the middle of an enemy convoy. Excalibur Publishing’s Road Construction Simulator allows for none of these moments, and not only because you don’t get to…