Remember the first half-hour of Darksiders? It largely involved hitting things. That's the kind of guy War was, after all: a hulking brute with massive hands and a gigantic sword. When the apocalypse was triggered a touch too early for his liking, he took to the streets - New York, I think - and started smacking around avenging angels, all of whom looked a bit like Transformers. He looked a bit like a Transformer too: squat, thick-limbed, and covered in complicated armour.

The first half hour of Darksiders 2 is a little different. It largely involves scampering over things, up things, around things and across things. Then hitting things. You're Death this time, right? Fellow horseman and friend/brother of War. When War takes the blame for the apocalypse being triggered a touch too early for his liking, you race off on your own journey to prove his innocence. A parallel timeline, but a slightly different adventure.

Death's a lot - well - thinner than War. He's ditched much of the horseman armour during the first few sequences of the game for starters, because Vigil's introducing a new loot system that sees you collecting boots, chest plates, gloves from the enemies you destroy. Kicking things off, then, he looks a bit like an extreme sports star, or Tarzan out of the Disney movie: lean and sinewy and quick.

Read more…

Doctor Who fans are used to making the best of a bad situation. Even before the long dark days when the show was off the air, relegated to the cupboard of cheesy pop culture ephemera, even when he was crammed into a terrible TV movie for American audiences, even when he looked like Colin Baker, we kept the faith.

Through cheap special effects, hammy acting, clunky scripts and ramshackle production, we excused it all, because underneath was something brilliant: a story about a mercurial, incurably curious, pacifist eccentric with all of time and space at his fingertips. Even at its worst, Doctor Who always offered the broadest canvas possible, a rainbow of narrative colour and a twinkle-eyed madman for a brush.

It's perhaps this daunting universe of possibilities that has kept Gallifrey's wayward son from finding a satisfactory home in gaming. Games skew towards protagonists who favour direct action, those who lead with the fist and the gun rather than intellect and wit, which means that to truly capture the spirit of Doctor Who, a game would have to break out of the comfortable paradigms that have served TV and movie spin-offs so faithfully all these years.

Read more…

"Football, bloody hell." There's probably never been a truer, more eloquent summary of the beautiful game than that given by a beaming, breathless Alex Ferguson after his side's last-gasp Champions League victory against Bayern Munich. Those three words perfectly encapsulate a sport both vainglorious and just plain glorious, a game that can swing from abject tedium to high drama in seconds.

It's a delicious irony that perhaps the acme of Ferguson's statement should end up condemning his side to a trophyless season in what may have been the craziest English top-division campaign to date. Fitting, then, that a game almost as maddening and wonderful as the real thing should land on the App Store just as Martin Tyler's feral roar of "AGÜEROOOOOO!!" finishes reverberating around the Etihad.

Score! Classic Goals is essentially a line-drawing game with a football theme. The objective is to recreate famous strikes from international matches by hitting passes and shots with the right strength and direction, with power an additional consideration when you reach Professional mode.

Read more…

There's a wall inside the offices of Sanzaru Games covered in cute fan art and hand-written notes for Sly Cooper. Each was mailed directly to this building in Foster City, Calfornia, but - as the team readily acknowledges - were prompted by the creations of another studio based 1340km to the north.

Well, that's not completely fair. Yes, the klepto-critter's original trilogy released on PlayStation 2 in the last decade courtesy of Washington State's Sucker Punch; but many of the kids who painstakingly scrawled these letters and sketches weren't even born when Sly 3 crept out in 2005.

This new generation of fans was in fact inspired by Sanzaru's well-crafted HD remake of the series for the next generation of PlayStation. And the 2010 release also impressed Sony sufficiently for it to entrust development of a new instalment to the studio, with Sucker Punch - like Naughty Dog - having left its PS2 cartoon capers behind as it focused its attentions on PS3.

Read more…

Nostalgia's a powerful weapon, and Mighty Rabbit's pixelated gem Saturday Morning RPG is armed to the teeth. For any TV-addled child of the 80s, this knowing trip down memory lane should be utterly compelling; a turn-based RPG based in and around a fictional cartoon world, with barely a minute passing without some nod or wink to our misspent youths sat cross-legged in front of the family telly.

The other thing with nostalgia, though, is that it can play tricks on you. Thankfully, Saturday Morning RPG has more than just mindless reverence under its blocky hat. You play as Marty, a typical nerd-turned-hero underdog, who gets sucked into the latest episode of his favourite generic action animation as he drifts off to sleep. Soon, he finds himself doing battle with the odious Commander Hood, a dastardly type who's kidnapped Marty's sweetheart and charged a pack of armed guards to stop our hero from ever getting her back.

Good job, then, that Fred Savage's Nintendo-powered superhero The Wizard is on hand to give Marty the confidence and strength he needs to fight back against the Hood army and rescue his good lady. And with this being the world of 80s cartoons, there's no better way than to do this than good old-fashioned fisticuffs.

Read more…

While NVIDIA's new Kepler architecture takes possession of the performance crown in the desktop arena, the outlook is somewhat different in laptop territory. Here, AMD currently rules supreme with its Radeon HD 7970M mobile graphics core - a piece of technology important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's powerful enough to handle some of the most advanced DirectX 11 titles at high frame-rates and extreme resolutions. Secondly, the size of the silicon and the power it requires potentially makes the 7970M a viable contender for a next-gen console graphics solution.

First up, let's talk about the laptop hosting this formidable kit. Supplied by Alienware, the new R4 revision of the M17x features a chassis that is superficially identical to the one used for the R3 model we reviewed a couple of months ago. It's a solid foundation which evidently didn't need much tweaking in terms of finish; the backlit keyboard, 17-inch LCD, and wide spread of connections (including optical out from a new Sound Blaster Recon3Di sound card) embed cleanly into a sturdy, rubberised matte exterior, with glossy flourishes for the two front speakers and its palm rest. For a laptop set in this higher price bracket, it looks the part in its own stylised way, and is reassuringly resilient to downward pressure during gameplay.

But, of course, it's under the bonnet that we see the more radical changes. To begin with, the existing 32nm Sandy Bridge Intel CPU has been ousted in favour of an 22nm Ivy Bridge equivalent, offering a small but useful bump in performance, improved battery life (particularly at full load, not so much at idle) and a far superior Intel HD4000 integrated GPU. This stands in as an energy-efficient graphics output for general use, such as web browsing or watching video, though the Switchable Graphics controls ensure you won't be using it for actual gaming so long as the 7970M is active.

Read more…

It's odd that Penny Time should celebrate the anarchic, anti-establishment nature of skateboarding, only to then submit to one of the most punishing authorities of all: rhythm. Here you skate to the beat, pulling off hippies (it's a boarding term, you filthy animals), ollies and slides within coloured markers. Screw up the timing, or pick the wrong move, and you'll fall off - or 'stack', as the game would have it - and it's all the way back to the last checkpoint with you. In other words, this is a game that asks you to stick two fingers up to the system by following the most exacting of rules. It's a curious irony in a very strange little game.

That's not to say that it's entirely new, of course. If you've played the likes of Bit.Trip Runner or Tomena Sanner (you know, that weird one with the dancing salaryman) you'll know what to expect. Here, instead of sprinting through rapidly scrolling environments, you're skating past a series of hazards frozen in time thanks to the bizarre temporal properties of your board. As you approach each obstacle, you'll see a coloured circle: if it's white you need to swipe up to ollie over it; blue, and it's a hippie jump; yellow, and you'll have to slide underneath it.

The problem with swipes rather than taps in a rhythm game is a familiar one, as anyone who played Rhythm Paradise will attest. You're never entirely sure whether you're supposed to start the swipe as the beat hits or to start a split-second before so your finger leaves the screen at the exact point your skater passes through the middle of the circle. After a while, you acclimatise, but it never feels entirely comfortable, and seemingly perfect flicks can result in a bail, with little feedback to determine what you did wrong.

Read more…

"XCOM is the game that teaches you the meaning of 'acceptable losses'," Firaxis' Peter Murray says to me. As he demos an early build of Enemy Unknown to journalists, and as we talk about the 18-year-old game that inspires this re-imagining, something becomes obvious: He wants me to experience failure. He wants us all to. That's a little worrying.

But for Murray, the possibility of loss is part of what defines the XCOM experience. This could be the loss of a mission, the loss of a valuable and experienced soldier, the loss of an expensive base or even the loss of the game. Success, when it comes, should be paid for in blood, measured in bodycounts. Murray looks on as the assembled journalists play through a scripted tutorial mission that kills three of their four soldiers. He then demos additional footage that features the original game's deadly Chrysalids tearing an unprepared and outmanoeuvred squad to pieces. XCOM, he tells us, will not be pulling its punches.

Much of this challenge will be presented by the game's new approach to small squad tactics. After what Murray describes as a "eureka moment", lead designer Jake Solomon introduced "a completely new approach to combat, based on a move/action paradigm". The currency of time units favoured by older XCOM games has been binned in favour of a more streamlined system that represents the simple and yet critical choices a soldier makes in the heat of battle: moving and firing; sprinting forward; hunkering down to provide covering fire; reloading; assisting a squad-mate.

Read more…

There was a time I frequented a particular dive I'll call "X" that was well known as a destination to drunkenly meet and possibly hook up with the opposite sex. It was a scummy little hole in the wall that, in reputation anyway, provided asylum for wayward hipster types from the rampant club-bros and their arm candy that populated pretty much every other square inch of the neighbourhood.

I don't know why anyone would go there, other than out of obvious motivation. The place was a matchbox, the dancing real estate made it impossible to move, and they made lousy drinks. (And that bit about unattached girls? An urban legend.)

Go Robo! reminds me a lot of going to X, not because it's icky or it slings bad cocktails, but because its robot protagonist is cool with just dancing. About 95 per cent of X's clientele just wanted to dance, too, though ultimately they probably aimed to get down in a different way.

Read more…

The only thing that's changed is the translation, but Gravity Daze felt ever so slightly different on my second play-through. For starters, the game's called Gravity Rush now that it's reached the UK (or is about to - it's released on 13th June). On top of that, I mostly knew what was going on this time around.

That's because for my initial review, I played the Japanese version, and I can't speak/read/in-any-way-understand Japanese. I could follow the visual mission prompts and fumble my way through the levelling screens, but the plot was largely the stuff of mystery, the characters were little more than passing faces, and the dialogue was just pleasant sound playing in my ears.

I now know that the story's about a girl named Kat and a cat named Dusty, and I know that Dusty's some sort of magical cat, and Kat's some sort of magical girl, blessed with the ability to alter gravity at her will, blasting herself from sidewalk to rooftop to the grim slope of a church steeple as she explores the gorgeously warped city of Hekseville and gives monsters a good shoeing.

Read more…

"I think caves are just interesting," says Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

"They're kind of this source of beauty on one level and I think there's a prehistoric part of our brain that triggers them as a place of safety. They were our homes for hundreds and thousands of years. There's something intrinsic about a cave that I think everybody likes on some level."

"Do you like exploring caves in real life?" I ask.

Read more…

Games are excellent teaching tools. After all, what are they if not mechanisms that teach us how to use themselves through interaction? By playing, we learn how to play. It's something of a no-brainer that those same loops of feedback and reinforcement can be used for more than training us to be really good at headshots.

Here to illustrate the point is Hiragana Pixel Party, one of many apps that promise to teach you Japanese. The difference here is that it's a rhythm-action game, and the only way to get good is to understand Japanese writing. You play because you want to win; you want to earn all three ranks for every stage. Language acquisition is just the mechanism you engage with to achieve your goal.

Our hero is the aptly named Hiro, who jogs his Limbo-esque silhouette across the screen to the sound of jaunty chip-tunes. Up pops a young girl, who starts by uttering vowel sounds in time with the music. You then copy her, by tapping on the relevant symbols, helping Hiro hop over obstacles in the process. The more obstacles he clears, the more birds he attracts. Make a mistake and one of the birds flies away. Run out of birds and Hiro's adventure in linguistics is over.

Read more…

"Is it a downloadable game?" If I had a pound for every time I'd been asked that while playing Dirt Showdown then I would have, well, £3. Still, that's three times that the first instinct of one of the people walking past our games room was to inquire about this new racing game's origins, which suggests not everyone has gotten their head around Codemasters' latest brand extension, or that it raises some doubt at first sight.

It's not a downloadable game though; it's a boxed release that happens to draw its name and some of its inspiration from Codies' increasingly gnarly rally game series, itself an offshoot of the superb Colin McRae games. It's also, along with Ridge Racer Unbounded, proof that the arcade racing genre isn't just surviving following the closures of studios like Bizarre Creations and Black Rock, but delivering some of its best work.

But whereas Ridge Racer Unbounded was a subtle trick - a rollercoaster of destruction, balancing on the knife edge of a thrilling handling model that almost didn't work - Dirt Showdown's success is much more familiar: brilliant racing disciplines, accessible handling, gorgeous presentation and tremendous variety.

Read more…

"Heroes of Ruin" conjures up an image of the most traditional of role-playing games. It's the sort of name where you know it's an RPG without looking at a single screenshot, or moving your eyes any further down the box's cover. But the plural 'Heroes' is vital too.

The game's eponymous heroes inhabit a fantasy land that's no less traditional. It's a world inhabited by magicians, living weapons and leviathan sea monsters. The local ruler Atraxis (he's a sphinx) is sick with a mysterious illness and it is the task of four heroes to find out why.

So you become embroiled in the game's steady loop of missions and side quests, acted out within the game's dungeons and interspersed with visits to Nexus, the game's main city and hub. Nexus is Atraxis' seat of power and the source of the game's main story elements, fed to you through in-game scenes that offer information for the quest ahead.

Read more…

In most games you essentially act as your avatar's brain, using your fingers and thumbs to send electrical impulses to their body and limbs: run here, jump there, climb this, pull that. In This Could Hurt, the latest game to roll off the prolific Chillingo production line, you have but one command to issue to your plucky hero: stop.

Apart from his blue quiff, the protagonist is a fairly old-school adventurer, complete with tunic, red neckerchief, tights and thick brown boots. He's an apprentice, training to become an Oakguard, the protectors of a magical tree that sustains life in a quiet village, and he's about to take his final test before he gets the job.

And it's a tough one. His task is to walk the Path of Pain, a series of dangerous obstacle courses filled with the kind of hazards that suggest the Oakguard elders have been playing a lot of Rick Dangerous or Super Meat Boy recently. Little wonder the boy carries a permanently anxious look on his face.

Read more…

Like it or not, Modern Warfare exerts a powerful gravitational pull on the games within its orbit - and, while the titles under the Tom Clancy brand may have started out as tactical simulations, they're not immune to the inexorable tug of Activision's super-dense star.

A couple of handheld spin-offs aside, the last time Ghost Recon saw the light of day was in 2007's Advanced Warfighter 2, and much has changed since then. All three Modern Warfare games have raised the blockbuster stakes where military bombast is concerned, while two Gears of War sequels have solidified and defined the template for third-person cover-based shooters. The fact Future Soldier takes more than a few cues from these commercial juggernauts is as inevitable as it is disappointing.

This influence manifests across both gameplay and storyline, with the narrative now following the obligatory quartet of wise-cracking soldiers - including such genre staples as Gruff Black Captain and Sarcastic Redneck - as they criss-cross the globe on the trail of yet more stolen nukes. Even as the action hops restlessly from South America to Africa, from Pakistan to the Arctic Circle, it spins a predictable tale, familiar from too many other shooters, culminating in the pursuit of rogue Russian hardliners with their eye on worldwide chaos.

Read more…

There are so many insane statistics about Russia's losses in World War II that the mind starts to bounce off them after a little while. Let's limit ourselves to just a single detail, then: one in seven Soviet citizens died in the course of the conflict. That offers some kind of insight, doesn't it? That allows you a decent handle on the fate of a nation blessed with such a talent for suffering that its strategy - for much of the early fighting at least - appears to have been to lose and lose and lose again, until there was nobody left standing for them to lose to any more.

Russia overwhelmed with numbers: with the sheer quantity of its often unskilled, frequently unarmed soldiers, and with the bizarre scale of the landscape its enemies would have to conquer. Russia endured because endurance was another talent. Was it triumphant? That really depends on the degree of elasticity you're willing to lend the word.

That one-in-seven stat came to England recently in the PowerPoint presentation of Quinn Duffy, the game director of Company of Heroes 2. For the RTS series' long-awaited sequel, the developers aren't reinventing or re-engineering from the ground up, and they aren't moving the game into an entirely new time period, laying on space marines or medieval trebuchets. Instead, Relic's shifting the focus to a different theatre of the same war. It's looking past the gritted glamour of Normandy to the mass-murder taking place on the Eastern Front.

Read more…

In an industry driven by the constant forward thrust of technology, labels can very quickly turn from useful signposts to restrictive dogma. Take the word "sandbox", for example. Once used to help us understand the anarchic freedom on offer in games like Grand Theft Auto, it's now become a catch-all term for games set in cities where you get to run around and blow stuff up for no reason.

As you'd expect, given its name, The Sandbox is a sandbox. A literal sandbox, mind you, into which you pour various elements and see what happens. Think of your iPhone as a cosmic petri dish, ready to see what happens when acid rain falls on a volcano during an ice age.

There are 30 elements to tinker with in The Sandbox, ranging from obvious building blocks such as dirt, sand and water, to more technological tools that enable you to construct electrical circuits, powering heaters and coolers. The sun and weather can be switched on and off, and you also have control over the climate of your tiny pocket-sized universe, freezing it solid or subjecting it to blistering temperatures. You can even unlock musical notes, transforming your improvisational landscapes into chip tunes.

Read more…

Diablo 3 is an action role-playing game - with the emphasis firmly on action. You'd get that, of course, from the murderous riot on the screen, the boom and splatter from the speakers and the showboating skills of its five astonishing playable heroes. You'd get it from its two predecessors, in which you hand-cranked your characters through near-limitless levelling with furious clicks of the mouse.

The action bias goes deeper yet, though. Game director Jay Wilson and his team have taken big risks, stripping the game's role-playing systems to the bone in a series of pitiless cuts that lasted into the final months of development. Their bosses have taken even bigger risks, requiring an internet connection to play and introducing an auction house that allows players to trade items for real money (which isn't online yet).

The result is an incredible game that finds, in Diablo, the link between two worlds you never thought you'd see reconciled. On the one hand, it channels the senseless thrill of the arcade, reconnecting dungeon-crawling with Atari's 1985 classic Gauntlet as well as the furious spectacle of modern greats like Geometry Wars. On the other, it embraces the customisation, connection, macroeconomics and long, long, long-form progression of massively multiplayer online games - including World of Warcraft, of course, but also more liberal player economies like CCP's Eve Online.

Read more…

Sorcery's a game about wizards - and wizards, it transpires, spend a lot of time strafing. In Sony's delicately pretty spell-'em-up, your Move controller is a wand, see, and your wand, in turn, is essentially a gun.

If this calls to mind the recent Harry Potter outing with all the shooting and the taking cover, don't worry. That was thick corporate slurry from concept to implementation - just another unpleasant by-product of the increasingly grim Hogwarts machine. Sorcery's an entirely different proposition. It's slight, but it's also lively, personable, and rather sweet while it lasts. If you have any kids knocking about the place, it might even be a little bit, you know, magical.

It's a simple tale, too, about a boy who's a sorcerer's apprentice, and a cat who might not be a cat at all. The boy, as the format more or less demands, likes to mess around with dangerous things he doesn't understand, and pretty soon he's gotten himself involved in a whole mess of magical trouble. After that, the duo is off to save the world - and probably right some ancient wrongs along the way. That's how it generally is with sorcerers and apprentices. And cats, come to think of it.

Read more…

We live in a time where most games are delighted to hand out virtual tchotchkes for the lowliest accomplishments. Pressed start to continue? Here, have a Trophy! Viewed the tutorial? 20 Gamerpoints for you! It's an ego massage for the easily disheartened: reward the player to keep them from switching off. All of which makes Match Panic something of an anomaly; it's not often you'll find a game purpose-built to make its users feel very stupid indeed.

Of course, to make players feel really stupid, you first need to make them feel smart. Match Panic's opening stage is artfully constructed to induce maximum overconfidence. You have a pixel art character (a panda, say) on the left of the screen and one on the right (a happy cloud, perhaps) with a scrolling column in the middle. The object is to tap left or right to match the central image to those on either side. Rattle through the whole stack within the allotted time and you'll move on to the next stage.

At first, it seems laughably easy. Even when Match Panic springs its first surprise by putting two images on one side you'll comfortably be able to cope after a split second's adjustment. Several stages later, when you're dealing with three pictures on each side, your thought processes will have stuttered to a near-standstill, leaving your thumbs hovering uselessly above the screen.

Read more…

Dragon's Dogma is a game soundtracked by screaming guitars and a hyperactive orchestra; a game whose story is told with showboating faux-Shakespearean flourish; a game set within acres of countryside scrawled with boastful castles; a game fronted by a hero whose heart has been plucked from his chest by a dragon's fingernails. Despite all of this, it is also a game that understands the value of understatement.

For years, video games have aped cinema's love of the action set-piece, with critical fights telegraphed to viewers with grim ceremony. Warriors exchange worried glances as the string section falls silent; a tumbleweed tumbles as the party stands frozen in fight/flight uncertainty; an inhale of calm before the storm.

But Dragon's Dogma's set-piece battles have none of this. They occur brutally unannounced - truer to life perhaps, if life consisted of wandering through a dense forest patrolled by a two-ton Chimera. Midway through a routine battle with a band of goblins, a red wyrm might crash awkwardly through the tree canopy, breaking trunks like twigs as it tries to stow its wings while breathing fire. This sense that any monster could arrive on the scene at any moment lends the game a fraught tension.

Read more…

When you hear the word "safari" you probably get pretty distinct mental images: the savannah, lions and elephants, straw yellow and burnt earth. But this is not what Brisbane-based Defiant Development had in mind, at least if Ski Safari is any indication.

Maybe it has something to do with living in a country where a mundane trip into your backyard could yield a wildlife encounter considered exotic on other continents. It could be that the developers just have an affinity for the scant parts of Australia that can support a skiing tourism industry. Whatever the case, Ski Safari's brand of outdoor expedition is a bit more SSX than Afrika, more escape than serene savannah experience.

Unlike the crudely slaloming found in SkiFree's similarly endless mountain, Ski Safari gives you bigger problems than wayward abominable snowmen looking for a quick snack (on the contrary, the yeti population of this mountain are actually quite helpful).

Read more…

While I'd never stoop to the old "games cause violence" argument, there's little doubt that games teach us to treat death as a numbers game. Each individual demise isn't important: what matters is the body count, the chain reaction, the comforting tick of small numbers getting bigger.

Pandemic, a morbidly fascinating disease simulator from Dark Realm Studios, is a game that, played successfully, trades in enormous numbers. Get things right and billions of people will die, yet it's always that first death that feels the most exciting and special. It means you're on the right track. The counter will rise.

Pandemic started life as a Flash game on the Newgrounds website that went appropriately viral, but it's been heavily redesigned for its first paid outing as a 69p app. Not all the changes have been for the better, but the ghoulish core of the game has survived intact. If you ever wanted to exterminate mankind, here's your chance.

Read more…

This is ridiculous. I must've pressed the wrong button somewhere, selected the wrong option, because every time I step into the Torchlight 2 beta my experience is less akin to a game and more like an orgy of destruction, spiralling further and further out of my control until everything becomes a bloody mist of damage numbers and body parts. I feel like Caligula with a carving knife. I hope that's not my own voice I sometimes hear cackling.

The numbers just keep getting larger. All the stats increase, the body counts rise, the monsters enlarge, the percentages double and the sheer magnitude of the powers at my fingertips is only matched by the volume of the things I have to fight. And it never ends. And I never want it to, either, until I glance at the clock and, once again, see how many more hours of my life I've lost. Playing Torchlight 2 is like being drip-fed a powerful, soothing and hypnotic drug in ever-greater quantities.

That's not to say it's bad. Not at all. The game does one thing and it does that one thing very well indeed - that thing being hurling stuff at you to slaughter, carefully metering this carnage with rewards of commensurate size. Every other monster is a self-propelled piñata just waiting to gift you gold, a shinier shield, a deadlier dagger or a slightly sleeker pair of pants. (Although saying that, right now one of my characters has the most astounding pair of mechanical pants that I can't ever imagine trading in. I try to show off my pants to other players in the beta, but they never seem to want to stick around).

Read more…

One of the beauties of smartphones, and especially tablets, is how beautifully they fit traditional board games. The daddy of them all is chess. It's been rather brutalised by technology in the past, one of computing's pre-emininent challenges being a program that could defeat a human grandmaster, until, in 1997, Deep Blue finally felled Kasparov. It's a mighty achievement, tinged with tragedy.

15 years later, supercomputers seem like relics and you can buy a chess app called HIARCS Chess that wins real-world tournaments, dispatching grandmasters as a matter of course. There's a bewildering range of tutorial programs, problem-setting, and multiplayer-focused apps. Some even do all three. But if you just want to play the king of games against other people, then the best of the bunch is Social Chess.

The thing about Social Chess is that it isn't rammed with features: just all the ones you need. It incorporates the ELO rating system and lets you search for similarly ranked or random players. Finished games can be saved or emailed. Players can chat, there are no ads, and you can have five games on the go for free. If you want to play more games simultaneously then it's £3 for a year's sub, which I handed over after the generous month's trial without hesitation.

Read more…

The human immune system is one mad marvel. It monitors our physical well-being through a series of rigid precautionary and at-the-ready defence systems. It's governed by an army of cellular bodies carrying out their respective duties, in order to repel invasion from hostile viral and bacterial agents.

With that in mind it's no stretch to imagine your role in Ballistic SE as that of a renegade code hacker who must break into a totalitarian empire's sophisticated online immune system. You are a single invading aggressor in a wild, Gibson-esque digital grid; a lone orb versus a seemingly never-ending barrage of swarming enemy sentries. You'll want to take down as many as possible - it's just the staying alive part that isn't easy.

Viewing Ballistic as a sort of digital ecosystem under attack (you can still pretend you're Neuromancer's Case or Neo if you feel the need to justify your assault) may seem like an odd comparison, but it makes sense when you see this dual-stick shooter in action. Since each level's set number of enemies can be cleared in a matter of minutes, you'll quickly learn to tell the behavioural characteristics inherent to each of your colour-coded opponents.

Read more…

I hope you weren't holding your breath. Save for the New Play Control Wii remix of GameCube's Mario Power Tennis in 2009, we've been left hanging on for a proper update to the series since 2005's Mario Tennis: Power Tour on Game Boy Advance. Quite why this solidly successful formula skipped the entirety of the DS generation has been something of a mystery - at least, it was until I'd spent several days thwacking my way across the courts of the series' 3DS debut.

Mario Tennis Open is as mechanically robust and colourfully compelling as you'd expect from Camelot, Nintendo's unfailingly reliable doubles partner. But where could it all go after GameCube? As undeniably enjoyable as 2012's take is, the studio still seems to be searching for a clear answer.

The game offers hyperactive arcade action over sober simulation, perfectly observing the fundamentals of the sport while sexing it all up (in Uncle Nintendo's wholesome way) with special moves that cause balls to explode away at ridiculous angles.

Read more…

When you're gunning for commercial success in the mobile phone arena it often pays to cover all of your bases, and that seems to be part of HTC's battle plan for this year. Bruised and bloodied by disappointing financial results of 2011, the Taiwanese manufacturer is on the resurgence, keen to claw back market share lost to the likes of Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson. We've already seen the blisteringly fast HTC One X - powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 quad-core CPU - and now it's time to cast a furtive eye over the remaining two members of the brood: the One S and One V, both of which are running the latest version of Google's mobile OS.

It seems almost disingenuous to refer to the One S as a mid-range challenger, as it comes with the kind of features that many rival companies are putting into their flagship handsets. Boasting a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen and 16GB of internal storage, the One S compares very favourably with the likes of the Sony Xperia S and Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Unlike arch-rival Samsung - which seems obsessed with using plastic as much as possible these days - HTC has dabbled extensively with metallic case designs over the past few years. Although the One X features a polycarbonate shell, the One S is fashioned from a single piece of aluminium - rather like the HTC Desire S and HTC Legend before it. This makes for a truly beautiful handset, and the sleek metalwork is only broken by two pieces of plastic (one housing the SIM card slot, the other the microphone and speaker) and the screen itself.

Read more…

Sometimes, what looks like a frame turns out to be part of the picture. So it is with Velocity, which starts off as a scrolling shooter but soon blooms into something more akin to a puzzler. And following on from Floating Cloud God Saves the Pilgrims, it's another great PlayStation Mini - at last, that rather flat marketplace is gaining some momentum.

And speeding up is what the splendidly-named Quarp Jet, your dinky spaceship, is all about. Velocity's more complex abilities are kept back for a while, with the early stages built around the ability to speed up how fast the screen's scrolling - holding R roughly doubles the ship's pace, with a neon exhaust trail for the kids. Rapid-fire shooting and high speeds are all well and good, but you also have to be constantly hoovering up the survivor pods that dot each stage. Then things start to get trickier.

Velocity's first twist is a teleport. Hold the square button and control is switched from the ship to a reticule; put it where you want to go and release for an insta-switch. This wouldn't work nearly so well if the Quarp Jet wasn't able to bash off the side of walls (though being crushed at the bottom of the screen still means death), as the switch between controls often left me overshooting after popping out at the other end. As it is, the short hops are quickly mastered and you're soon materialising in the middle of enemy swarms with guns blazing, blinking out of certain-death situations, and navigating through sealed sections of the level like a pro.

Read more…

Football games on handhelds can usually be divided into two camps: those that offer a cut-down version of a PC or home console game, and those that fixate on a single element, like shooting, and try to make a high-score game out of it. There are some fine examples of both on iOS and Android already, but New Star Soccer is something else: it's a football career built from the ground up for mobiles and tablets, a mixture of Flick Kicks and Football Managers that may even represent a greater threat to your free time than its inspirations.

There's a free Arcade mode where you just flick the ball into the goal in increasingly difficult scenarios - you pull back from the ball with your finger to measure power, then another screen pops up with the ball bouncing or rolling across it and you have to tap to indicate where you want to strike it. But the Career mode - free for your first 10 matches on iOS - is where you'll spend the bulk of your time, gradually levelling up your skills, dividing your focus between training, gadgets, girls and gambling, and making a name for yourself.

Initially you're signed up for a non-league team in a country of your choosing and paid very little for your services. Using canny judgement and a bit of experimentation, you quickly learn how to make more money out of football: investing your earnings in energy drinks that allow you to take part in more mini-games to upgrade your skills between matches, and then taking advantage of your increasing proficiency to make your mark on the pitch and earn performance bonuses and catch the eye of sponsors and bigger teams.

Read more…

As much as I enjoy iOS gaming, I have to admit that a vast majority of games on the platform feel rather slight. Many have novel mechanics or neat art styles, but do little more than help fill the two minute gaps when the person we're hanging out with goes to the bathroom.

There are few that I find comparable to the sort of fully-fledged experience you get on a console, and LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias is one of those exceptions. This shouldn't come as a surprise, being a port of a WiiWare game, but the new mobile version is a splendid translation of an already excellent title.

LostWinds 2 is a semi-linear 2D Metroidvania-style adventure, with a hint of Okami's gesture-based environment manipulation set in a lovely storybook world. I fear the "2" in the title will scare off newcomers, and that would be a shame as it's not necessary to have played the original LostWinds to appreciate this one. You'll miss a crumb or two of backstory, but all you need to know is that a young boy, Toku, has befriended a wind spirit, Enril. Aside from this very basic premise, LostWinds 2 is an entirely self-contained tale.

Read more…

It's not over until it's over, as those in pale blue who left the Etihad Stadium before full-time on Sunday found out to their own eternal embarrassment. This year's Premier League has seen the title move from one side of Manchester to another, a seismic shift that some five years ago would have seemed improbable.

This console generation's battle of the football titans has, at times, felt equally dramatic, as full of fumbles and moments of flair as anything the Premier League has offered up in the last nine months. It started with Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer as champion elect, but now looks set to end with FIFA in a position of unquestionable supremacy.

"It's been an amazing journey. I think it's been the most exciting journey that I've ever been on. But it's come with plenty of sleepless nights," says EA Sports' executive vice president Andrew Wilson, a fast-talking Australian who's the embodiment of corporate cool.

Read more…

Time hasn't been kind to Max Payne, the New York cop who used to woo us - or perhaps 'Woo' us - by diving around in slow motion blasting organised crime to pieces. In one of the bleakest game intros I've ever seen, Max begins his latest adventure by arriving at his new Sao Paolo apartment, getting the shakes, then draining a bottle of bourbon, chain-smoking and smashing a photograph of his dead family against a wall in his torment. Press Start.

If Max Payne 2 was The Fall of Max Payne, then Max Payne 3 is Max at rock bottom. He starts the game in a purgatorial funk, bodyguard to a Brazilian industrialist and his family of rich playboys and politicians, drinking his way through the days - the end of chapter one sees him lurching around his apartment, throwing up in the kitchen sink and then crying himself to sleep - while we listen along to his internal monologue. Poor old Max.

For a while though, it seems as though time has been surprisingly kind to Max Payne, the third-person shooter with Bullet Time that first graced our screens in 2001. It hasn't changed much since then, even with the transition from Remedy to new developer Rockstar Vancouver, and when paramilitaries start violently abducting Max's employers that turns out to be just fine. Max may have piled on the pounds and lost his self-respect, but his iconic Shoot Dodge hasn't aged badly at all.

Read more…

At first glance, Spellsword might seem like a clone of Vlambeer's Super Crate Box. It's got that game's arena-based combat, endless waves of enemies, and a steady stream of power-ups you're encouraged to collect. But rather than settle for a "me-too" copy, developer Everplay has taken the structure and infused it with its own magical spin.

Each of Spellsword's missions tasks you with surviving throngs of monsters pouring out from the edges of a handful of single-screen stages. Your weedy attack combined with rudimentary virtual buttons might sound like an uninspired tap-and-slash, but a series of elemental power-ups bring a spark to this rusty template.

At any given time, an enchanted card appears somewhere on-screen. Snatch it and you'll release an area attack as well as infuse your blade with the appropriate magical properties for a short while. For example, grabbing a fire card launches homing fireballs at foes and sets your sword ablaze, while the poison card infects all enemies on-screen, causing them to explode after a few seconds.

Read more…

Skylanders, eh? What a cracking wheeze. Take a game, gate off much of its content (including several levels, a clutch of power-ups and all but three of its playable characters), and release a bunch of toys at seven quid a pop to act as glorified unlock keys. Then drip-feed supplies to stores over six months and watch the cash roll in. You can almost picture Bobby Kotick skipping around his boudoir, casually flicking piles of loose banknotes into the air in slow motion. Just me?

But here's the kicker: Skylanders is actually brilliant. You're not paying for crappy plastic bits of nothing, but genuinely well-made and characterful figurines. And you're not merely unlocking fresh content, but buying into a world. Quite apart from the NFC-driven wizardry of the Portal of Power (it's kind of magical the first time even for an adult; the effect lasts much longer if you're six), you've got a Top Trumps-style card game, a substantial browser-based multiplayer universe, and now a perfectly enjoyable iOS spin-off.

Cloud Patrol is a shooter of sorts, tasking you with firing cannonballs at trolls who've taken up residence on a series of floating islands. Tapping them individually is the easiest and safest way to get rid of them, or you can draw a continuous line between them all to earn a combo bonus. The trouble with this latter method is that it's all too easy to drag your finger into the spiked bombs that bob and swirl around each archipelago, and which result in instant death.

Read more…

Silicon chip production is not an exact art - no two chips that come off the production line are exactly alike. Some are capable of running at faster speeds than others, while sometimes defects manifest when the transistors aren't fabricated entirely as they should be, owing to microscopic imperfections in the material. So what happens to these less-than-perfect chips? Well, a process called "binning" sorts the processors into various quality levels, each destined for different end-products.

In the case of the NVIDIA graphics cards based on the new "Kepler" line, the best processors are reserved for the top-end product - the GTX 680, which received a rapturous review from Digital Foundry last month. Now, with the debut of the newer, cheaper GTX 670, we begin to see what happens with the rest of the production run.

The usual form for NVIDIA's tier-two product is to cut down the design of the flagship in every meaningful way: fewer active processor cores running at a slower speed, a more restricted memory bus, and slower RAM. In this way, more of the processors produced at the production facility become viable. In the past, enthusiasts and hackers alike have been successful in reactivating some of the disabled features - though often they don't work, since the chips are not of the highest quality.

Read more…

The first thing you see when you boot up 774 Deaths is a black loading screen with a tiny brown dog running in the corner. "Oh no!" I thought, considering the game's ominous title and stark monochrome title screen. "Don't kill the puppy!"

Well, I got news for you, kiddo; that puppy will die a horrible gruesome death a thousand times over. Fortunately, you'll likely never reach that point, as you don't unlock the pooch sprite until very late in the game. For most, he'll exist only as a spirit haunting the load screen, or a proud symbol of triumph starring in extraordinary YouTube videos by insane people who conquer the final stages.

Saying 774 Deaths is hard is an understatement on par with saying Hitler had some unpleasant qualities. The untamed brutality of the game makes Super Meat Boy's dark world look like My Little Pony. It's so hard that single stages will likely take well over 774 tries alone. In the fatalistic world of 774 Deaths, you have the life expectancy of a mayfly caught in a spider web.

Read more…

Final Fantasy has had a troubled relationship with recent Nintendo platforms. The slightly lacklustre Crystal Chronicles subseries was always a sideshow to the franchises' main offerings, never available on Nintendo consoles. No wonder then that the barely-pronounceable reveal of Theatrhythm, a rhythm-based Final Fantasy spin-off, did nothing to reassure fans that Square Enix saw the 3DS as anything more than another proving ground for more derivative experiments.

But Theatrhythm, perhaps tellingly, makes no mention of the series' Crystal Chronicles days. The game's jukebox proudly blasts remixes from the main Final Fantasy canon, with every core numbered release represented. Starting at the 8-bit chiptunes of Final Fantasy 1 and finishing with the orchestral masterpieces of Final Fantasy 13, this is the first time you'll ever hear Final Fantasy 7's 'One Winged Angel' on a Nintendo system.

Theatrhythm keeps a familiar dosage of RPG elements despite its musical focus and ignorable story. You recruit a four-man party from the game's huge cast of fan favourite characters, each redrawn in the game's chibi style. Each begins the game as a grumpy level 1 novice. "Get lost," berates pink haired Final Fantasy 13 heroine Lightning. "I'm no hero!" whines Final Fantasy 7's Cloud. Luckily these weaklings can be levelled up, increasing their stats and unlocking gameplay-aiding abilities.

Read more…

Eight months pregnant with her first daughter, Jade Raymond received a call from her boss requesting she come to work for a meeting. "I knew that Ubisoft was establishing a new studio in Toronto, but I never imagined they would offer me the chance to run it," she says. "I always thought eventually I would like to start my own studio, but presumed it would be farther down the line. So yes, the offer came as something of a shock."

That was two years ago, time that Raymond has spent assembling a team of over 200 staff, many of whom joined her in the move from Ubisoft Montreal to work on the new studio's first announced project, Splinter Cell. For some women, pregnancy is an opportunity to press pause on a career. But for Raymond, childbearing has only served to heighten her passion towards her vocation. As we sit down to talk in San Francisco, she's six months pregnant with her second child. Nevertheless, her opening, impassioned call to arms for developers to find new meaning in games belies that fact just as effectively as her slender frame.

"It's time for our industry to grow up," she says, in a quiet but determined voice. "Why is it that so many topics that are dealt with in other media are off limits or taboo in video games? Why can't we deal with the things that matter? I can think of so many examples of topics that could be interesting, issues that could be addressed in games or that could be integrated into existing big IP if we don't want to make them the centre of the experience. It's our responsibility; doubly so for people like me who can make a difference, or push for something getting funded."

Read more…

Solitaire has been pre-installed on home computers since the early '90s, so why everyone's decided to remake it all of a sudden is a bit of a mystery. If the timing seems unusual, however, it's easier to see why it's ripe for a makeover: it's a game that everyone's familiar with, that barely requires any instructions to play, and it has that all-important element of luck that adds just enough frustration to keep you wriggling away on the end of its hook.

And it turns out Solitaire's a pretty difficult game to screw up. Big Fish's smartly-presented Fairway Solitaire took it out on the links, forcing players to chip out of bunkers and clear water hazards to progress. Then PopCap's browser-based productivity killer Solitaire Blitz introduced power-ups and time limits, producing a game so dangerously addictive that I genuinely spent 20 pounds of real money to keep playing rather than wait an hour for the game's energy meter to refill.

Thankfully, Greenfly Studios doesn't plan on nickel-and-diming its players; the initial £1.99 outlay is all you'll ever need to play its game. It's closer to Big Fish's take on Solitaire than to PopCap's, trading fairways for powdery slopes populated by characters seemingly lifted from a long-forgotten wintry comic strip in the Beano.

Read more…

Games, so the argument's been going recently, are predominantly dumb, trapped in an eternal adolescence and forever fixated with smut and gore. Some games are dumber than others, and some don't seem to care too much about their lack of smarts at all.

That's certainly the case with Sniper Ghost Warrior 2, an oafish but lovable first-person shooter that's got all the intellect of a straight-to-video '80s action flick. Importantly, it looks like it's got all the charm of a VHS classic too. It helps, perhaps, that the expectations have been set low for a sequel to a poorly received original that went on to do improbably well.

The premise of the first Sniper Ghost Warrior was simple enough: imagine an entire game focused on the original Modern Warfare's undoubted highlight, All Ghillied Up, promising stealth, headshots and slick tension. The execution, however, left a lot to be desired.

Read more…

Editor's note: This review originally appeared in January, when VVVVVV was made available on the North American 3DS eShop. We present it today to mark the game's release on the eShop in Europe.

Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV is a game in love with being a game. The sci-fi tale of six space-dwelling scientists (whose names all begin with the letter V) getting displaced in another dimension is silly, but the bare-bones premise is fitting for the 8-bit retro aesthetic. This nostalgic presentation allows Cavanagh to look at common conventions with a deadpan sense of wide-eyed wonder.

When it's discovered that walking to one end of the screen causes you to emerge out the other side it's explained as "inter-dimensional interference". The first time a scientist sees a checkpoint he suggests it be brought back to the ship to be analysed. Where Atari games like Asteroids and Centipede seemed embarrassed by their stories, Cavanagh builds one to complement the medium's preposterous designs. These analytic musings and low-fi visuals brings to mind classic sci-fi yarns like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, from an era when computers were the size of apartments and even the most basic video games were the stuff of dreams.

Read more…

In a genre where momentum is built in an avalanche of annual iterations and regular DLC updates, the five-year gap between Warhawk and Starhawk, its spiritual sci-fi successor, might as well be measured in decades. Consider this: when Warhawk was released, Modern Warfare was still an unknown quantity.

How to adapt to a landscape so irrevocably changed? Developer LightBox Interactive has opted for the softly-softly approach. Starhawk is still a large-scale third-person combat game with a heavy emphasis on vehicles, more Battlefront than Battlefield. What has changed is the context. As the name suggests, this game takes the science-fiction brush strokes of its predecessor and expands them to fill the canvas.

The setting is now the cosmic frontier, where a gold rush of sorts has kicked off over a new power source known as Rift Energy. There's a downside, however. Exposure to Rift Energy corrupts and mutates, and early prospectors have turned into Outcasts, mangled monstrosities that crave more energy and will fight to keep it for themselves.

Read more…

Some genres are so saturated with class, and so large in the first place, that a new contender needs something special. A name as unimaginative as Jelly Defense doesn't help. Although, to be fair to its developers, the bleed of SEO tactics into the App Store's line-up makes such blandness almost a pre-requisite for success. What's that thing about judging a book by its cover?

Jelly Defense makes a good first impression by virtue of its gorgeously gloopy world - looping monochrome backgrounds dotted with bright, bouncy jellies and skittering enemies. It serves a purpose, too, as the key twist to the usual tower defence ruleset is in the form of colour-coded enemies. Red towers attack red enemies, blue towers attack blue enemies, and certain towers are half-and-half. Which sounds manageable, but is the reason behind almost every restart and failed level. It can hurt bad.

The goo-goo eyes and cute touches are there to distract attention from the fact that Jelly Defense is a monster. Things start off simply enough with a few levels featuring long curves and plenty of time to bosh the clueless jellies. Perhaps a little bit of over-confidence settles in - who knows? Then things turn ugly. Jelly Defense has balls of pure steel, and intends to take a hammer and test yours.

Read more…

You remember the launch of Kinect, of course. That half-a-billion-dollars marketing orgy during which America got formation pretend-gaming in Times Square, we got Leona Lewis wailing beside an ice rink and everyone bought one just to shut Microsoft up.

Remember the Move launch? Me neither. Like a strange form of anti-marketing, the PS3 motion controller arrived on the high street with all the fanfare of an underwater brass band. This was disheartening because Sony's device always struck me as having the greater gaming potential, certainly beyond what was on offer in the box-ticking, mini-game-heavy launch line-up.

Subsequently, we've seen Move support added to big first-party titles like Killzone 3, Heavy Rain and LittleBigPlanet 2; but what about games designed for Move?

Read more…

I can't say that Minecraft passed me by - how could it? It's a full-blown 21st century sensation, a hit indie game that changed all the rules, a perfect storm of internet fame. It's been pretty hard to ignore.

But Minecraft did happen without me. Somehow I never played it - perhaps because I was foolishly waiting for it to come out of its endless alpha test - and all of a sudden it was a thing that I wasn't part of and didn't get, even though I understood it. Like so many of the great online PC games, from Counter-Strike to League of Legends, it became a cult that I didn't know how to join.

Well happy day, because this excellent new version for Xbox Live Arcade is made just for me. Mojang, the company formed by Minecraft's affable creator Markus "Notch" Persson, has worked with Microsoft and port specialist 4J Studios to build a Minecraft that's slightly less advanced, much easier to get to grips with and perfectly tuned for its slick and friendly platform, while preserving almost all of the original game's unquestioned genius.

Read more…

Let's talk about social networking and driving. Chances are if you've got wheels and a smartphone it's likely you've been tempted. When bored and caught in traffic or waiting for a signal change there's no harm in a quickie status update or tweet, right? Even if you don't have a vehicle you probably know someone that does, and I'm pretty sure they're guilty. Despite the potential risks of such a silly thing to do, I know I've certainly been there.

It's funny then that Tweet Land conceptualises Twitter-bred vehicular calamity in such a literal way, materialising tweeted keywords from real users (who could very well be driving) as obstacles on a side-scrolling racetrack. Your aim is to survive from one stage to the next, avoiding collisions and increasingly ridiculous hazards as you rack up points by smashing into as many other drivers as possible.

In turn, objects or items are procedurally generated by whatever algorithmic magic the app employs to pick up certain phrases being used on Twitter. (Meanwhile, originating tweets are archived at the bottom of the screen.) It's kind of like a social media-driven Spy Hunter, only instead of Cold War automotive sabotage and Peter Gunn you have zombie hordes and Rebecca Black.

Read more…

It's the future! Or is it? And an apocalypse has sundered our world, but also time itself. Or has it? And evil overlords plot the world's downfall (again?), but that's OK, because benevolent, talking crystals safeguard humanity. Except humans are extinct. Um.

Arcen Games' A Valley Without Wind is a platformer with a randomly generated world, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it had a randomly generated plot, too. The above isn't even the half of it.

Within this scratched CD of a reality you control a "Glyph-bearer", or spell caster, with the (comparatively) simple task of improving your own, private settlement of people. 10 minutes, or an hour, or 10 hours spent with A Valley Without Wind will see you doing the same thing - jogging off into a wilderness of platforms, enemies and missions that has seen no human hand in its creation, and dragging items home to craft new spells, buildings, powers or items that'll propel you back into the world with yet more vigour.

Read more…

5th Cell's Scribblenauts allowed players to conjure almost any object they could dream up. The first thing I created? A jetpack, because let's face it, everything is better with jetpacks. It looks like someone at 5th Cell agrees, as they've applied this wisdom to their upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game, Hybrid. Add in one of the most peculiar control schemes out there, and the concept of a multiplayer third-person shooter gets flipped on its head.

Indeed, you spend much of your time in Hybrid hanging upside down, since your gravity-defying armour allows you to perch along cover lining the ceilings and walls. In most games this would be original enough, but that wasn't enough for 5th Cell. Instead, they've chosen to throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of ground movement altogether.

That's right - you can fly, but you can't walk. This nonsensical restriction reminds me of Bionic Commando's Nathan "Rad" Spencer, who could swing around like Spider-Man, but couldn't jump.

Read more…

Diablo 3 has been a long, long time coming.

After at least four years in development, it'll finally see release on May 15th and for fans of the series, it couldn't come too soon. Diablo 2 hit the shelves in 2000 and since Lord of Destruction, the expansion pack launched a year later, the franchise has lain dormant, producing nothing more than a few tie-in novels. That's 11 years of restless sleep, and it's 16 years since the original Diablo first sent gamers to the troubled town of Tristram. 16 years. Almost a generation away.

More than enough time for gamers to shake off the grim mantle of the series: a murky, Gothic tale of tragedy and corruption. For many others, the third Diablo will be their first experience of a universe that likes to end its episodes on a downer - either a terrible defeat or a crippling compromise.

Read more…

Poor Mr Legs, eh? Look at his bleached potato head, with those hollow eye sockets staring blindly. Observe that spooky, hovering bowler hat, and those weird stumpy flippers in place of arms. Most of all, though, what's up with the legs, Mr Legs? They're fragile, insect-thin filaments of gristle, and they can stretch so that your skull is pushed up against the ceiling, or squash, until your fat little body is touching the ground. What happened to you?

We'll never know, most likely. Mr Legs is the stuff of childish horrors, a vacant clown of a man, stumbling through a largely monochromatic world filled with ghastly dangers. Luckily, he's also the titular star of a wonderfully bizarre Android-exclusive arcade game by I Like James Games, so while you may never truly come to love this wretched, shambling monster, it's at least worth spending some time in his company.

Mr Legs is an auto-runner: a game about working your way through a series of ever-scrolling levels, collecting cherries and power pills (they boost your multiplier, I think) and ducking obstacles like crows and bombs. Crows and bombs are bad, it turns out: the former wants to fly straight into your face, the latter wants to explode, covering you in soot. Both of them need to be avoided, and here's where Mr Legs' unique gimmick comes in.

Read more…

If you're an Italian studio with a penchant for racing game simulations that deal with perfect riding lines and the art of flicking a rally car through traction-oblivious hairpins, what's the next logical step? Maybe you could make an impassioned takeover pitch for the Formula One and MotoGP licenses, or perhaps set the bar to seemingly impossible heights by taking Polyphony Digital and Turn 10 Studios on at their own game? If that sounds like too much of a challenge, however, you could always take the safe option - combine the virtues of your two main games into a fun racer that's lacking in ambition.

That's exactly what Milestone has achieved with MUD: FIM Motocross World Championship. Taking the two-wheel focus of the SBK series and meshing it with the off-road thrills of the recent WRC 2, the end result is a motocross racer in which you can drink a can of Monster Energy mid-race to give yourself a speed boost. And while that may sound like something you'd see in a quirky karting game, MUD is somewhere between a pure arcade racer like Speed Kings and a middle-of-the-road job like TT Superbikes.

The flow of a race is much as you'd expect. Hold down the brake and then release it as the gates open and you'll perform a burning start in traditional Mario Kart fashion, then as you learn the optimal riding lines for the individual tracks, it's a case of power-sliding through the corners with one foot placed automatically on the ground. There's no differentiation between front and rear braking and the bikes are more stable than an eight-legged table - to the point where you have to land a jump particularly badly if you want to see an unsaddling.

Read more…

In spirit, it was LittleBigPlanet Racing all along. United Front Games' 2010 DIY kart racer, Modnation Racers, was a charming if slightly unbalanced effort driven by the same 'play, create, share' philosophy that underpins Media Molecule's creations.

William Ho, design director at UFG, calls the studios "kindred spirits", beaming: "We love them. Hopefully they love us!" Ho loves lots of things. Karting, LittleBigPlanet, and LittleBigPlanet Karting, for starters, he gleefully tells a room of journalists. I kind of love his Tango-orange trainers.

Ho is infectiously, uncynically enthusiastic about everything in that American way jaded Brits cannot seem to muster unless they work in children's television. Or at Media Molecule, whose modus operandi is to find the little spark of joy in everything and share it with as many people as possible, joyfully.

Read more…

Sharks get a bad rap in video games. Clover Studios positioned them as bosses in Viewtiful Joe and Okami, they'd devour Tony Montana if we went for a swim in Scarface: The World is Yours, and more recently Batman punched one in the face in Arkham City. Even games that let you play as the toothy predators like New York Shark or the infamous Jaws Unleashed portrayed them as fiends terrorising the land. Thankfully, Shark Dash is here to er, dash expectations of sharks.

You see, when a shiver of sharks have been abducted by malevolent rubber duckies and imprisoned in enormous bathtubs, their salvation lies in doing what they do best; solving physics puzzles. Each stage tasks you with eating all of your waterfowl overlords by flinging sharks around like rubber bands.

In true Angry Birds fashion, a dotted line gives a rough idea of a shot's trajectory and power, but much is still left to your estimation. Extra medals (used to unlock chapters) are awarded for collecting coins and completing levels in a certain amount of moves. It's a bit like golf, only with sharks (which is the sort of thing I'd expect Bond villains would do if they ever succeeded at world domination).

Read more…

Is there a genre more resilient than the puzzler? Seriously, decades pass, fortunes wain, oceans rise and platformers give way to shooters, yet puzzle games are always just quietly getting on with things. Timeless to look at and effortless to pick up, whether you're shifting cubes, connecting lines or chaining colours, this kind of fun is never going to grow old. If it's true that every narrative is, on some level, a mystery story, perhaps every game is, from the right perspective, a puzzler. Maybe puzzles lurk at the very heart of gaming? Maybe I should have finished this paragraph much earlier, quitting while I was still, briefly, ahead? Who knows, eh? It's all so puzzling.

MacGuffin's Curse is very definitely a puzzle game, anyway, a block-puller and switch-flipper that will keep you plugging away for hours. It's a selection of one-screen challenges telling the story of a reluctant thief who's stolen an amulet that turns him into a werewolf whenever he steps into the moonlight.

In this hairy state, he can pull heavy crates and batteries around, break stuff, and engage in anything that generally requires a bit of oomf - but he can't interact with machinery, swim across water, or squeeze through gaps in walls. For that, he needs to revert to human form, and most of the game's puzzles emerge from reading the environment, and then working out when and where to pull off a transformation.

Read more…

Beneath my bearded, haggard exterior and receding hairline lies the soul of a 13 year old girl. I like my drinks neon and sweet, got teary during The Muppets and often emit high pitched squeals around fluffy creatures - cats in particular. Though the App Store has no shortage of adorable games starring felines, Kitten Sanctuary might manage to out-cute them all with its delightful mix of traditional match-three style puzzling and pet simulation.

The gist is that aliens have been abducting kittens. Why is unclear, but if ALF is any indication, it's probably not good. Your job is to rescue them from puzzle box traps, comprised of a series of cat-related paraphernalia on a grid. To open the trap you must clear a series of red tiles by matching three of the same type of items together over them.

Matching items converts them into resources. Gather enough and you'll gain a special ability allowing you to vanquish everything on a large section of the board. Kitten Sanctuary isn't a terribly challenging game on its default setting, but bump it up to "tricky" and this cat has claws.

Read more…

It's funny to think that Remedy, that most verbose of modern developers, actually started life building a grubby top-down PC racer. The original Death Rally boasted no existential angst, zero trench coats and even fewer spiralling monologues about the nature of morality, and thankfully nor does its glistening iOS remake.

No, this is unadulterated action from green light to chequered flag; a classy combination of car combat and drift-happy racing that sits very nicely on the shiny screen of an iPhone 4. After a brief comic book-panelled prologue (alright, perhaps Remedy can't help putting a bit of story in there), you're left with nothing more than a banger to drive and a handful of curious-sounding events to enter, ranging from straight races to all-out ammo-fuelled wars.

Death Rally doesn't explain much at first, but it doesn't need to. With each race, the ideas driving the experience reveal themselves. First of all, winning doesn't necessarily matter. Far more important is picking up money along the way (done by shooting other cars and hurtling over pick-ups), all of which allow you to upgrade your motor, kit it out with new weapons or even buy a new one if you find yourself particularly flush.

Read more…

Sniper Elite knows its limits, by which I mean its audience. It's not looking to hook the historical re-enactment crowd with a pedantic World War 2 simulation. Nor is it hoping to seduce connoisseurs of shooter fare with inventive, rarefied mechanics or an elaborate arsenal. Worthy plot and character development are a distant hope. What Sniper Elite V2 offers is a third-person duck shoot in which the ducks are Nazis with explodable testicles.

Set in and around the Battle of Berlin, its largely linear levels suggest stealth is possible, but nearly always fall back to the more reliable redoubt of mass murder, letting you plug brainpans and ballsacks as the beleaguered Wehrmacht smashes itself against your defensible position.

Nearly every killing shot in the game cuts to a slow-motion bullet camera, which peels away your victim's outer layers at the point of impact, revealing a cutaway rendering of bones and viscera which shatter and rip and pop as a half-inch of steel burrows through. Eyes are unseated as their sockets are sundered, teeth spiral out of a blasted jaw and, though it's tricky to land the shot, gonads burst into a gluey-looking red spray. That's really what people are here for, and the game delivers again and again and again, all other priorities rescinded. You can't accuse Rebellion of a lack of focus.

Read more…

Raspberry Pi: a complete, credit card-sized computer for just over £20. The concept is intoxicating, the possibilities endless. Potentially, what we are looking at here is a revolution in entry-level computing and programming, a completely open platform gifted by a not-for-profit charity to the next generation of coders, engineers, enthusiasts and innovators. Born in Britain, Raspberry Pi could genuinely be the next "big thing" for home computing and so much more.

So what's the big deal? What separates the "Raspi" - as it's colloquially known - from the multitudes of computing options we have at the moment? For a start, the amount of processing power at such a low cost is truly astonishing, and the unique set-up behind the project helps make this miniscule price-point possible. The Raspberry Pi foundation isn't out to make money - its trustees offer their time and expertise for free and any profits made are ploughed back into the charity. There are no sales targets to achieve or shareholders to appease; the team has its vision and that's the only focus.

Keeping costs to a minimum is the fact that there are no licensing costs to pay on the operating system either. Raspberry Pi will run whatever OS is available and compatible. The older ARM architecture it hosts won't run the forthcoming Windows 8, but a couple of versions of the free, open source Linux OS are already supported, while Google's Chromium OS is also in the process of being ported to the fledgling computer. Buy your Raspberry Pi and all you need to get going is a keyboard, mouse, display (monitor or TV) - and an SD memory card on which to host the OS.

Read more…

I don't think I ever used the word 'asynchronous' before iOS took over the world, but it seems you can't escape it these days. What happened to good old 'takey-turny' multiplayer, eh? Why do we have to have a fancy new word for it? And while we're at it, what ever happened to 'skill' as a term of appreciation?

Of course, back in the day we didn't have games like Disc Drivin', so thank goodness for progress. It's a game where you compete with up to three online opponents - or seven if you're playing a pass-the-iPad game - across a number of courses with hairpins, bumps, boost pads, oil slicks, ramps and assorted other racing game clichés.

In truth, it should probably be called Disc Flickin', as there's not really much drivin' involved. For each turn, you drag your finger left and right to aim your circular vehicle, before swiping briskly upwards to propel it in the appropriate direction. It doesn't automatically follow the intended trajectory, however: if you don't keep your flicks straight, then you can find yourself veering off course. Most of the time you've got barriers on the sides of the track, but in some places the walls disappear and you're at risk of falling off and losing valuable ground on your rivals.

Read more…

Since time began, Piranha Bytes' RPGs have always had one thing in common. They are "interesting", much as Oblivion was less "interesting" than Morrowind, and sipping coffee is less "interesting" than drinking Mr. Muscle. A peek at Piranha Bytes' releases reveals games that are ambitious, rickety and, above all, kind of a dick.

Their attitude is that players should be set free not just to explore, but to make their own mistakes or tell their own story at the expense of the plot. Most recently, 2009's Risen dropped you like an amoral alka-seltzer into a world full of competing factions, where you could not only pick a fight with any NPC, but if you defeated them, you'd get to make that final, fatal call of whether to help them up or deliver a lackadaisical killing blow (which returns in Risen 2).

In the end, Risen wasn't a wise purchase due to writing, voice-acting, balance, combat and bugs that meant it was about as stable as a three-legged giraffe - but like that same giraffe, it had heart. It was the same story in the slightly more hardcore Gothic games before that - which, among other things, made Orcs a faction with their own culture and motives that you could actually side with. Talking to the monsters! Good stuff.

Read more…

In comedy, they say, timing is everything. And so, too, in gaming, if you're Giant Sparrow's Ian Dallas.

"Some of my most powerful experiences growing up were games and I thought I was going to go in as a writer," he says. "Coming out of college there weren't really a lot of interesting jobs as a writer in games and I figured that, five or ten years later, that might be different."

So he started writing comedy instead. "I worked in TV, which is super-fun - you're just in a room with a bunch of other guys trying to make each other laugh for 40 hours a week or often much more. But one thing led to another and I discovered programming."

Read more…

When Eurogamer first went hands on with Sorcery, Sony's magical motion-controlled adventure, we described it as "one of Sony's first titles for Move". That obviously didn't happen. After an eye-catching debut at E3, where it was a centrepiece of Sony's Move presentation, Sorcery completely dropped off the radar, prompting speculation that it had been scrapped. Not so. True to its name, Sorcery magically reappeared earlier this year in a puff of PR smoke, having been retooled and reworked as the vanguard of Move's second wave of titles.

The gameplay, however, hasn't really changed at all since its original aborted debut. You still control Finn, a cocky young sorcerer's apprentice with a typical disregard for sensible advice, as he battles a variety of fantastical monsters and supernatural threats, using the Move wand as a wand.

The motion-controlled spell casting is delightfully intuitive as well. A flick of the wand sends your spell on its way, with an obvious touch of automated aiming helping to bridge any gaps between your intentions and the hardware. Context sensitive moments add new tricks to your arsenal - an upwards flick to levitate obstacles out of the way, or a flamboyant swirl to repair broken bridges - without cluttering up the controls with too many arcane movements.

Read more…

Scaling down a game where scale is a large part of the appeal has pitfalls, but Total War Battles: Shogun gracefully avoids them all by inverting itself. Instead of the sweeping view of a battlefield, cavalry poised and archers ready, this is like looking into a box of toy soldiers sprung to life. The massed ranks are replaced with units that occupy one segment of the board and consist of four dinky little men or less.

Basically, the object is to walk your men from left to right and kill whatever's there. The game field is divided into six lanes, each of which is segmented. Once units are set off they move ever-forwards, one segment at a time, unless in battle or stopped. With the right buildings you can produce everything from peasants (rubbish) to Samurai (ace), and setting them down and off feels a bit like winding something up and letting it go.

Constructing a base now means squeezing buildings of different shapes into an allotted space, after which they gather resources on autopilot and can be used to build units. This is Total War reduced to its bare elements, with unit strengths and weaknesses painted in broad strokes. But all sorts of factors play at the margins, so even though much is simple decision-making about what units counter X, pressure can build and burst through carelessly-maintained defences.

Read more…

At first glance, Activision's Battleship feels like a high-concept satirical joke aimed at the video game industry. It's not only a movie tie-in, but a game based on a movie based on a board game based on a pen and paper game. More than that, the original game, which is world famous for its guesswork and mild strategy, has been transformed into a first-person shooter. A first-person shooter that plays out like a low-rent Halo, and lazily indulges every genre cliché you can think of.

So it comes to pass that you are an anonymous explosives expert, trapped on a Hawaiian archipelago when aliens invade Earth. It's your job to tromp from waypoint to waypoint, shooting these aliens and occasionally holding down the X button to activate things, deactivate things or place C4 charges to blow things up. In gameplay terms, it's about as thin and rudimentary as an FPS can get while still retaining the right to be called a game.

Control is a tad sluggish, aiming is a little skittish, but neither are ever bad enough to become a persistent problem. They peck at you instead, reminding you of the game's obvious rushed development and cost-cutting production. This cheapness of intent is apparent throughout.

Read more…

Often, ahead of a multiplayer game's release, reviewers are offered a scheduled time to meet with and compete against members of the development team online in order to approximate the general public's experience. It's never quite a 'true' approximation, of course, as the developers have the benefit of months, perhaps years of experience with their creation - and all of the intimate knowledge of strategies, shortcuts and cheats that come with it.

The reviewer, meanwhile, arrives at the game fresh and inexperienced, groping through the systems, always playing catch-up. Shrewd developers account for this disparity, handicapping themselves in order to level the playing field and allow the newcomer to feel a sense of progress. After all, even the least petulant player eventually tires from repeated losses at the hands of an expert.

"Will you please stop rushing the enemy and giving them free resources. Heal more."

Read more…

On the Wind is an enticing mobile side-scroller from ex-Rare developer David Buttress. It's also impossible to describe without mentioning Flower, thatgamecompany's brilliant first-person adventure that allows you to craft vibrant gardens of colour by controlling the wind.

Like Flower, On the Wind allows you to control nature through the creation of gusts and flurries. Flower's influence is evident from your first swipe of the touch-screen, but there are enough differences to keep things fresh.

On the Wind places its world in a third-person perspective. Gone, too, is Flower's ability to soar around levels at will. Gameplay is transferred to a fluid 2D side-scroller, with Flower's sedate pace cranked up to arcade-like levels as you fight to keep your gust of wind alive.

Read more…

While this was a wet weekend for most people in the UK, my own windows liberally speckled by rainfall, the skies over Divinity's Reach remained a beautiful hue of blue throughout. The weather was perfect for a short break in the city and allowed me to enjoy some sedate shopping on the promenade, a carefree visit to the carnival and even a chance to marvel at the engineering extravagance that is Uzolan's Mechanical Orchestra. Of course, while the charming land of Tyria has a lot to see and is ideal for a quick getaway, many of you will be wondering whether it's worth a lengthier stay.

Well, before I can go on I absolutely have to get something out of my system, something I desperately want to blurt at you: Guild Wars 2 is gorgeous, at least sometimes. Quite often it's content to be a gently handsome game, but at certain moments it can just bowl you over. Even in a world saturated with HD graphics, high-res textures and triple-buffered VSync, it still boasts some truly splendid moments and it's not even supporting DirectX 11 yet.

This is as much a triumph of art and design as it is any technical achievement. The city of Divinity's Reach, the focal point for the humans, is the highest of high fantasy, with its thrusting towers, shining causeways and winding, leafy suburbs, all populated by uncommonly good-looking citizens. The jewel in this crown is a splendid greenhouse-cum-orrery chamber, where enormous golden spheres circle lazily about the ceiling in a wondrous aerial ballet. It is, quite simply, grandeur.

Read more…

If you think about it, Fable's an unusual choice for a spin-off. It's a game that covers so much ground - its myriad distractions ranging from rhythm action to town building, from gambling to Sims-style housekeeping and socialising - that it would seem to leave little room for any further asides.

Yet here is Fable Heroes, a four-player brawler spawned from Lionhead's annual Creative Day (an event that, in typical Lionhead fashion, actually lasts 48 hours). The idea is pretty straightforward: you and up to three chums - playing as Fable's hero dolls dressed up as familiar characters - romp around a puppet-theatre take on Albion. Your job is to whack hobbes, balverines, beetles and the like, collecting the money they drop when they drop. At the end of each level you choose a fork in the path, fight a boss or play a mini-game, the coins are tallied up, and the winner stands proud atop a wooden podium while the loser's played off by the sad trombone.

Fable's moral choices are represented by a pair of adjacent 'good' and 'evil' treasure chests in each level. Pick the former and a random party member will benefit from a new temporary power, such as a cloud that hovers above them, regularly dropping coins. Choose the latter, and the cloud may instead zap them with lightning - at least until they tag another player to transfer the curse. Standard chests scattered more liberally throughout the levels convey various other transient abilities to the player who collects them. You can grow or shrink, receive the assistance of a doppelganger, become invisible, or you may just find some cash or a score multiplier instead.

Read more…

When I last met Gareth Wilson three years ago, we were sat in the offices of his previous employer, Bizarre Creations. The designer, a veteran of the Project Gotham Racing series, was talking up his next game Blur, telling me how Bizarre wanted to escape the simulation niche and make racing games mass-market again. "I think we should be going back to the reason people play racing games," he said.

It didn't work out that way. Blur was a good game but it didn't find its audience, and a year and a half after we met, Activision shut down one of Britain's best studios for good. But the story - for Wilson, at least - might still have a happy ending. He might yet hit that populist racing jackpot. And he might do it with Sonic the Hedgehog.

This time around, Wilson and I meet in the plush screening room of a London hotel. Wilson now works for Sheffield's Sumo Digital, an unpretentious jack-of-all-trades studio with good racing game pedigree and a good relationship with publisher Sega (both exemplified in its wonderful console versions of Sega-AM2's modern classic, OutRun 2). He's the design director on the freshly announced Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, a sequel to 2010's mascot racer, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing.

Read more…

It's a brilliantly executed reveal. The first live demo to the press, I mean. Not the one that happened the previous week when, faced with more holes in its hull than it had PR fingers to poke in them, Sony gave up trying and rush-announced God of War: Ascension to stem the swelling tide of tittle-tattle.

The bit that was always supposed to be the actual reveal, though, taking place in a private theatre in Hollywood - "Welcome to one of the worst kept secrets in the industry!" chortles game director Todd Papy - opens with a superbly crafted piece of drama.

A brooding warrior, whom we are supposed to think is Kratos, is revealed by a retreating camera to be another muscular, Mardi Gras-attired brute entirely. Soon he's scrapping with a bulging, barmy cyclops and we're in familiar territory: classical hack-and-slash action of murderous beauty.

Read more…

A recent block-pushing puzzle games I played was Catherine, which also happened to be a psychosexual horror drama about a man tempted by a lithe, young seductress. Curiously, it parsed its tutorial out over the duration of the game. You never gained new powers and the rules remained the same, yet plenty of techniques were so obtuse that a little guidance was appreciated for us lost little lambs.

Cubis Creatures is another game about shifting blocks, and though it's aimed at a much younger audience with fluffy characters that resemble cousins of the Viva Piñata cast, it offers less instruction than Catherine on how to best navigate its deceptively complicated systems. It starts off easy enough, but don't let that fool you. The challenge swiftly increases, and by the midpoint it becomes the equivalent of an abusive father pushing their offspring into a lake to teach them to swim.

The game opens with a cute little amateur magician accidentally lulling his animal friends to sleep. Your goal is to awaken them by solving block puzzles inside their mouths (naturally).

Read more…

Game of Thrones is a big licence, and without wanting to be unfair to Cyanide, it's been matched with a developer whose stature doesn't quite match up. They're a patchy bunch at best, this French outfit; a handful of years back they delivered a competent if uninspired update of Blood Bowl, and recently they've focused firmly on simulating professional cycling.

While that world is at times full of deceit, double-crossing and dark politics, any comparisons with the mature backdrop of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones stop there. It's the kind of fantasy universe you'd imagine CD Projekt, already a purveyor of naughty worlds and nipples in a time of sword and stone, could revel in. Cyanide - whose one other dalliance with the fantasy genre came with the instantly forgettable Loki - though? Not so much.

But Game of Thrones, the developers' second attempt at the licence after last year's well-meaning but ultimately flawed real-time strategy game, sees them trying, and trying very hard indeed. Work's been going on with this action RPG for over three years, starting well before HBO's adaptation turned Martin's series into a broader cultural phenomenon.

Read more…

Did you know that BP gets angry if you call it British Petroleum? Because, get with it grandad, that company is now Beyond Petroleum! This new marketing line and the accompanying sunflower logo in crisp green and white is typical of a large-scale corporate branding exercise; where a company that doesn't want to change its planet-ruining ways instead does the equivalent of slapping a smiley face on its HQ. Perception, rather than reality.

Async Corp has more than a whiff of this, being a puzzler that's gently themed as a corporate box-ticking exercise: it feels almost prophetic, to the extent you expect a popup congratulating you on "service excellence" after an especially good run. The game's all about making 'packets' out of two grids filled with colour squares. You can switch any single square with one from the other, and when four of them form a cube, or even more make up a rectangle, they pop together instantly into a single packet.

These can be tapped to be 'sent', which is how you score, or left in an attempt to add to their dimensions, the ultimate size being the eponymous Async. Simply doing this for its own sake is a pleasure, both for the way squares instantly gloop together into bigger packets and the satisfying chunk as one's sent off and the replacement squares fall into the new gap. It's all about how well your thumbs and brain work together, as you work out future switches and coax the grid into the kind of setups that a few quick changes will turn into packet heaven.

Read more…

In an age of cross-platform development, console exclusives are somewhat thin on the ground, and especially so on Xbox 360, where Microsoft has scaled back first-party studios, occasionally paring back on in-house engine development in favour of third-party middleware - so much so that the next Fable title is running on Unreal Engine.

A glorious exception to the trend is RedLynx's phenomenal Trials Evolution - a game designed from the ground up for the 360 hardware by some of the most respected developers in the business and available now on Xbox Live Arcade, and earning an impressive 9/10 Eurogamer review score.

In this special deep-dive Digital Foundry tech interview, we go head-to-head with RedLynx's Sebastian Aaltonen (aka sebbbi) to discuss the lessons learned from Trials HD, to get the thinking behind the ambitious Track Central editor, and to uncover the full story on the rendering improvements that power one of the most technologically advanced titles we've seen on the Xbox 360.

Read more…

If video games had existed in the Old West, I like to think they would have looked like Gunman Clive. A sepia-toned 2D Western done up as a platform shooter, its scratchy, hand-drawn aesthetic resembles early 20th century animation.

Its basic move/jump/shoot controls would have ensured young bucks gallivanting about town could easily manoeuvre their gunslinger alter-egos, while its often fiendish difficulty would have eaten up plenty of hard-earned coins. Lucky for us, Gunman Clive is priced more generously than the change-eating parlour games of the time. Heck, it doesn't even have micro-transactions. No daylight robbery.

Rather than focusing on the grit of the era, Gunman Clive provides a cleaned-up view of the West with a shooter that resembles Contra by way of Roy Rogers. In true shooting gallery fashion, bandits pop out from behind crates, windows and trapdoors in the ground.

Read more…

Judged strictly as an adventure game - which is, after all, what you may have been expecting, given developer Telltale's lineage - the first episode of The Walking Dead seems to be pretty disappointing stuff. The environments are only sparsely interactive, while the hot-spot interface is constrictive and sluggish to navigate with a mouse-and-keyboard set-up. (Click on the control menu and you get a picture of an Xbox pad, incidentally, which probably explains it.) More importantly, there are only a few genuine puzzles in the entire game, most of which aren't particularly well crafted. It's nowhere near as dismal as Telltale's recent Jurassic Park offering, perhaps, but it falls a long way short of the company's better work.

The thing is, though, I'm not really sure that the weird kind of fanfic brand extension that Telltale's engaged in these days even counts as adventure games anymore. If you take The Walking Dead as (sorry about this) a piece of interactive storytelling, it's actually a lot more successful.

The writing team is pretty good at mimicking the simmering human psychodrama and shocking flare-ups of hyper-violence that characterise both The Walking Dead comic and its TV spin-off. Meanwhile, the Borderlands-influenced biro-and-watercolour art means that Telltale's lumbering tech can just about deliver the stylised expressiveness needed to keep endless scenes of talking heads visually interesting. It's a buggy journey, filled with random freezes and poor audio quality, but it's not boring like Jurassic Park was, and the thrill-free quick time events have been kept to a minimum.

Read more…

There's almost something refreshing about the way Bloodforge proudly wears its lack of originality or ambition on its sleeve. Essentially an off-brand God of War, with Greek myth replaced by Celtic, it barely sets a toe outside of genre boundaries that have been in place for years.

So you are, inevitably, a furious bundle of muscle and resentment, carving your way through waves of disposable foes. Your name is Crom (the actual Celtic legend that inspired Conan's deity) and you've been tricked by the gods into killing your own wife. This is a tragedy, though as the game doesn't show you Crom's face, preferring to keep him glowering behind a deer skull mask, any emotional investment will have to be supplied by the player, unaided.

So you plough through wave after wave of identical enemies in order to reach gigantic boss encounters, in which you dodge such familiar hazards as giant fists that pound the earth and eyes that blaze fire. Patience is rewarded with carelessly revealed openings which you can then exploit to inflict grisly damage, stabbing them repeatedly in the soft squishy bits with a spot of entry-level quick-time button matching.

Read more…

An angry mass of pink projectiles swarms from the top of the screen, surrounding a small craft near the bottom. Overwhelmed, the player guiding this avatar desperately attempts to manoeuvre between these deadly bullets. Time and again he's hit, a shriek piercing the air with every death.

Cave games are too hard, right? I mean, look at this. How are you supposed to manage that? Ridiculous.

That's conventional wisdom, right there. On the highest level, yes, Cave titles are punishingly hard. Exclusive. Elitist, even. But since when were games judged purely on their uppermost difficulty level? It's like watching a video of Modern Warfare on Veteran and writing it off, or watching Daigo Umehara in action and giving up multiplayer Street Fighter for good.

Read more…

So, yes, it's Super Smash Bros. for the PlayStation generation. And why not? "We're fans of fighting games - it's not something we shy away from," says Omar Kendall, game director of mouthful-of-a-title PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

The game, which indie studio SuperBot describes at its formal unveiling this week in LA as "a light-hearted, fun mash-up brawler," is 18 years of Sony-sponsored iconography remixed as a frenetic character fighter in the same vein as the series that has served Nintendo platforms so well for over a decade.

"We're taking the best of what the genre has delivered over its storied history and we're adding our take on it as well," Kendall adds. "We're proud to exist in the same space as these games. We don't mind [the comparisons] at all - our game has a very unique and interesting gameplay feel to it."

Read more…

The Cat House is a high class brothel, a dramatic white building sat far above the city of Dunwall's harbour. Your mark is a regular customer, and he's currently cavorting with a masked lady of the night in its lavish penthouse - you, meanwhile, are crouching unseen on a window sill, peering through ornamental glass.

What next? Well, I guess you could stab him or shoot him. If you don't mind making a mess you could also pause time and hang five separate crossbow bolts in front of his face. That way once normal temporal service resumes he'll be very dead indeed.

Alternatively, you could get creative. Why not leap into control of his body and steer him towards the white marble balcony that overlooks harbour? Then simply jump backwards out of his body and, while he retches up his guts in panic and confusion, spend a little more magical Essence on a Windblast. As he ragdolls into the wild blue yonder it'll feel like the perfect crime, if it weren't for the dainty witness screaming behind you.

Read more…

Did you ever play Donkey Kong Country? If not, go correct that now. If so, you'll no doubt remember that game's fondness for barrels that acted as cannons. Donkey or Diddy would jump into a barrel and then you would press jump to fire them in whichever direction it pointed. Sometimes the barrels moved up and down, or side to side. Sometimes they rotated, and progress from barrel to barrel often meant dodging through bouncing crocs or buzzing bees. Success was all about timing.

Cannon Cat is basically those bits, except you're a cat.

It's better than it sounds. (And it actually sounds very nice anyway, thanks to a memorable backing tune that's reminiscent of Sonic the Hedgehog and other 16-bit platform ditties.) Cannon Cat leaps into a barrel and you tap the screen when you want to fire him in the direction of the next one. The barrels spin and rotate and there are flying ducks to avoid. Later on there are turtles to use as bounce pads (the belly side is your friend, the hard shell is not). After you pass through enough barrels you reach a glowing circular portal, and once you've fired Cannon Cat into that it's the end of the level.

Read more…

Sometimes when you're reviewing downloadable content, you're not really reviewing the content at all - you're reviewing the business model. UEFA Euro 2012 is a prime example. The content itself is actually very good - some new modes that have been well thought through and packaged up nicely - but the price tag overshadows all of that.

It's a shame, because there's a lot of good stuff here, starting with the Euro 2012 game mode itself, which goes about its business in cheesy and obvious fashion but remains pleasantly atmospheric throughout. You can work your way through the tournament as your preferred nation against the AI or online against other players, and if you choose the latter then each of your fixtures is fulfilled by a real person (and if they rage-quit when you're 5-0 up then you're awarded the victory).

You get to tour the real stadiums, while injuries and suspensions persist throughout the tournament and commentators Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend reel off anecdotes about previous championships. UEFA has come up with a rather fetching set of flowery tournament graphics for the real-life Euro 2012 competition in Poland and Ukraine, which means the content is all colourfully wrapped and nice to look at too.

Read more…

If you can't be original, at least be excessive. This seems to be the design principle guiding Activision's wonderfully schlocky Prototype series, and while it holds the entire enterprise back from true greatness, perhaps, it at least means your thumbs are in for a decent workout as blood, brain, and all manner of unidentifiable viscera are smeared across New York in the name of - what? Justice? Revenge? Who cares, frankly. I just punched a helicopter into the Chrysler Building.

In Prototype games, you can do that sort of thing all the time, just as you can run up skyscrapers, swallow people in order to assume their form, and turn your body into a kind of fleshy penknife, producing everything from huge blades to rocky hammers (penknives come with hammers, right?). It's a series in which your powers define the fun, and in which both story and setting take a backseat as a result. This is handy, because - even though Prototype 2 has improved things somewhat - the story and the setting still aren't particularly brilliant.

Radical's sequel takes the action back to New York City, which is now known as New York Zero - presumably because it doesn't have any calories in it anymore. There's a new virus turning the place into puddles of squelchy gristle and there's a new main character, too, in the shapeshifting form of James Heller. Heller's objective is to stop this latest toxic outbreak in its tracks and hunt down a heavily infected weirdo named Alex Mercer.

Read more…

If you're in the business of turning a beloved TV series into a video game, it's best to start with the very essence of what you're trying to capture. Going after HBO's take on Game of Thrones? You'll want politics and consequence as well as a downtrodden world (and good luck to Cyanide, which is taking on that very task, but it's hard not to wonder what the likes of CD Projekt could have done with the premise). Doing EastEnders? You'll want to preserve the misery and the improbable melodrama (sounds just about perfect for David Cage, in fact).

And if you're doing Doctor Who, you'll want to preserve the lovable if slightly wonky heart of a show that's endured for coming up to 50 years. Sadly, that's something that recent attempts have failed to acknowledge. Recent DS efforts seemed to have forgotten completely that they had the good Doctor to hand, while Sumo's adventure games, for all their charm, fell a little short on quality.

So offer a warm welcome to Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock, a new venture from the BBC that's doing its very best to avoid the mistakes of its predecessors. It's one of the first fruits of a new approach to gaming from the BBC. Outings such as the adventure games were a product of the public service part of the corporation, whereas this is the product of a new commercial arm, and it's one that's very serious about getting games right.

Read more…

Read the small print carefully, OK? Botanicula sells itself as a point-and-click exploration game as opposed to a point and click adventure game. What kind of difference can that single word make? Plenty, actually. Come here looking for the puzzles, for instance, and you may find yourself feeling quietly disappointed. Turn up with a bit of a rambly micro-safari in mind, however, and you'll probably be in a state of complete rapture from the word go.

Botanicula's the latest game from Amanita Design, the Czech studio that previously gave us Machinarium, amongst other treats. Machinarium was a lovely, lonely adventure starring the world's most huggable robots (second-most huggable if you've seen Silent Running, obv.), and while Botanicula's not a sequel by any means, it feels like a sort of companion piece. Here, the previous game's rusting scrap metal landscape is replaced with its exact opposite - a muddle of moss and twigs and creaking bioluminescent branches - while the cast of malfunctioning droids has been swapped out in favour of a gloopy selection of grubs, beetles, snails and spiders.

One of those spiders is responsible for what little narrative the game possesses, after it pinches a crucial seed from the huge home tree that provides Botanicula's setting. I think that's what happens, anyway; it's all a bit vague. No matter. It seems there's a dark force of corruption spreading across this natural paradise, and after a few lavishly pretty and endearingly skippable cut-scenes, you're off to save the day, in the form of a tiny rabble of unlikely heroes.

Read more…

Got Cow is colourful, playful, and - on the surface, at least - ever so slightly heart-breaking. It's the debut solo release from Dave Miller, who spends his days working as an artist at Relentless, in good old Brighton. About a year ago, Miller decided to start teaching himself Unity, and Got Cow is the end result: a neat leaderboard rattler in which you fling rockets around gravitational fields to take out a series of UFOs.

It wasn't the first game to use this kind of mechanic, of course, and it won't be the last, either. That's the problem, in fact: Angry Birds Space, which was announced about a month before Miller planned on releasing Got Cow is all about - that's right - flinging birds around gravitation fields to take out a series of pigs.

Look at screenshots, and the games seem very similar indeed. Here's the three-star rating system beloved of almost every smartphone hit; there's the cartoony space backdrops and big, chunky characters. In truth, though, there's plenty of room for both games to coexist.

Read more…

There's a section in Lone Survivor where you find yourself in an old arcade, shrouded in darkness, a series of cabinets against the wall. As you pass each one, your character comments on the game on-screen. It's a game about guilt," he says. "It's about a boy and a girl." "It looks kinda retro." "It's just another zombie game."

Really, he's talking to us, not himself. And he's talking about the game we're playing rather than the ones he's looking at. Lone Survivor is extremely self-aware, revelling in its own sense of mystery. But where such fourth-wall-breaking might leave lesser games feeling pretentious, Lone Survivor weaves it into its darkly fascinating, open-ended plot.

It's a survival horror game of sorts, and about as indie as they come. Played in a fixed resolution of 160x90, although scaled up to fill the screen, it's drenched in muddy, pixelated atmosphere. It operates on a side-scrolling pane, each room or corridor a different screen, and you'll spend most of your time moving left or right and pressing X to interact.

Read more…

When Crysis has been great, it's been Predator. When we surveyed Korean encampments from a distance, planned our assault and attacked from the trees we were essentially Arnie and his travelling band of musclemen. When we cloaked, pounced, cackled and clutched enemies in our oven-mitt hands we were that super-powerful Predator, toying with our prey. For the sequels to both Predator and Crysis, however, a transfer to an urban setting left some feeling that pig-faced tusk-alien and Nanosuit had lost something special.

"We changed the recipe a bit for Crysis 2," admits Rasmus Hoejengaard, Crytek's Director of Creative Development. "Some people liked it, some people didn't - which is how it always is, right? What we want to do now is to take the 'likes' of each, and combine. We want to have the breadth of Crysis as well as the verticality of Crysis 2, while at the same time not opening it out so much that it alienates players. It needs to be fed in digestible chunks..."

Crysis 3, then, frames its hero Prophet as a hunter - hunkering down on the predatory nature of the nanosuit, and presenting him with a Rambo 2 bow and arrow. Our new surroundings, meanwhile, are the best of both worlds. Crytek is taking the jungle of Crysis and the New York of Crysis 2, putting them in a Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker, switching on Maximum Speed and winding that handle...

Read more…

After the brilliant Binary Domain reminded me how wonderful shooting robots could be, I happened across EPOCH on the App Store, which promised further mech-blasting fun. One problem: it was a third-person shooter.

Third-person shooters on iOS tend to fall into two categories: clunky and slightly less clunky. So it was with some surprise and more than a little delight I found that EPOCH has a control scheme I'd almost be tempted to describe as elegant.

Rather than forcing you into awkwardly manoeuvring your avatar with virtual sticks, developer Uppercut has opted for a system of taps and swipes. Slide your finger downwards and you'll duck behind the obligatory waist-high wall - or reload if you're already crouching. There are pillars at either side that you can glide to with lateral swipes. Then, when those robotic fools are reloading, you slide your finger up to pop out of cover and tap them to lock on, with your shots automatically heading towards their titanium target.

Read more…

Wargame: European Escalation prioritises information over all else on its battlefield. Knowing where your enemy is, and what company they're keeping, is tantamount to victory - provided you know how to act on that information.

A tank without a recon unit nearby is all but blind, their poor optics barely making out a squadron of T-72s in an empty field let alone the Marden Tank Destroyers hiding in the tree line a kilometre away. But with a recon helicopter flying overhead relaying enemy positions they become deadly cannons, blasting expensive tanks into burnt-out husks.

Wargame's from Eugen Systems, the makers of Act of War and RUSE, and it takes the latter's macro approach to the RTS. You're set in the hypothetical world of the Cold War gone hot, and provided with a battle-map whose size is daunting at first. Fields, towns and giant, turgid rivers all break up the landscape, offering a mix of cover, insurmountable terrain and a sense of terrifying agoraphobia.

Read more…

Within the hundreds of hours of content an MMO offers, a million different stories can be told. But behind every MMO there are hundreds of stories often left untold. They are the stories of the makers.

Five years after work first commenced, Guild Wars 2 is in its year of release. Fans will soon savour a game they've waited half a decade for. And as the curtain begins to raise, I was invited to to spend a beta weekend alongside developer ArenaNet at its Seattle base, to live and breathe development of a game that's consumed the lives of its developers long before it's had a chance to consume the lives of its future players.

I went there for a snapshot of a company making a landmark video game, and I came away with emotional tales of sacrifice, teamwork and pride. Guild Wars 2's got what it takes to better World of Warcraft, but right now it's just potential - and five years of life and labour for its 270-strong crew.

Read more…

With Zen Studios' Pinball FX 2 still dominating Xbox Live Arcade, it takes a bold developer to step into the arena with another - superficially similar - offering. Yet that's exactly what FarSight Studios has done with The Pinball Arcade, a pinball simulation platform that offers four tables in its basic form, with two more to be added as downloadable add-ons each month.

Both games use pretty much the same control scheme, and FarSight also uses similar systems - such as the countdown after pausing - to ensure the flow of the game isn't impacted by its digital form. The crucial point of difference comes in content - and it's here that FarSight has managed to create a title that complements, rather than competes with, its hugely successful rival.

Unlike the increasingly dazzling tables on offer in Pinball FX, where reality can be put on hold to allow characters to roam the tables and balls to be set alight, Pinball Arcade is pitched at the pinball purist, with painstakingly accurate recreations of the most popular real-life tables from the most prolific manufacturers. So we get Stern's Ripley's Believe it or Not from 2004, the 1996 Tales of the Arabian Nights table from Williams and Bally's Theatre of Magic from 1995. The outlier is Gottlieb's seminal Black Hole table, which dates from 1981.

Read more…

I can pinpoint the very moment that my appreciation of Coconut Dodge changed from bloodless admiration for an elegant, economical design into a helpless, wide-eyed joy. That's because it was the exact same point at which I was given a hat. Not just any hat, actually: this was a kind of golden Viking helm deal with huge tusks and other sharp bits.

The golden hat's a power-up that grants you a period of invulnerability in an arcade game that can otherwise be rather relentless. More importantly, though, it's also a golden hat. A sartorial embellishment that sits wonderfully well on the head of your scuttling crab avatar. It conveys a sense of power, nobility, and steely-eyed integrity. Priceless, really.

There's much more to the game than that, of course. FuturLab's iOS debut is riddled with clever ideas, although it initially seems so simple. At first, this appears to be nothing more than a 2D dodge-'em-up: you're a crab, wandering over the sand, avoiding the endless rain of coconuts that falls from the sky.

Read more…

A virtual world about a virtual world of virtual worlds. The gamer playing a virtual character playing a virtual character. The MMO conversion of Tad Williams's book series has an audacious, indulgent concept, but back in 2008 the stars seemed to have aligned in Otherland's favour. Oli was the last to see it, in a 2008 trip to RealU's Singapore base and, quite frankly, he was blown away.

"It must be one of the most original, thought provoking and intellectually exciting games in development anywhere," he said, "and, although you might be a fool to bet on its success, you'd be a churl to be against it. Because, in the all too-conservative world of MMOs, Otherland is exactly the kind of unlikely story we need."

Then, Otherland vanished.

Read more…

From a studio as stylish as Helsinki's Housemarque, Furmins might come as a bit of a shock. This devious little puzzler brings none of Outland's chic or Super Stardust's sheen to the touch-powered land of iPhone gaming. No, this is the world of the Furmins; little fluffy balls with eyes, presumably the bastard offspring of Furbys and Gremlins, and about as appealing as a kick in the ribs.

Thankfully, you won't actually be spending much time with them, and you certainly won't be interacting with them. They're a means to an end, Lemmings by another name, and they only exist for you to show off your own aptitude at constructing creaky Rube Goldberg contraptions using a combination of trampolines, chunks of stone and whatever other fancy stuff happens to be lying around the game's 75-plus levels. Moving these bits and bobs around is as simple as dragging them with your finger and placing them where you want them (which is a bit easier on an iPad but still perfectly feasible on the iPhone's smaller screen).

Once your masterwork is in place, hit 'play' and watch as the Furmins drop out of their hatch and tumble their way downwards, then pray that your construction is robust enough to get them to their goal - another hatch that's guarded by a really odd-looking bird. (Seriously, it's like the cool guys at Housemarque were on holiday and their mums snuck in and designed the characters.)

Read more…

Released over in the United States late last year, the PlayStation 3D Display launched in the UK this week without much of a fanfare. The delay is puzzling, and doesn't do Sony many favours bearing in mind how much the market has moved on in recent months: bigger 27-inch PC displays with HDMI 1.4 and dual-link DVI support are available for the same ballpark price while the cost of large screen 3DTVs has also tumbled.

With those factors in mind, you have to wonder whether releasing a 24-inch 3D monitor for nearly £450 is still a worthwhile proposition, especially when Sony's offering lacks some of the features found on many PC screens and offers up far less functionality than most of today's smart TVs. Well, the good news is that having tested this unit for the best part of five months now, we think it's still an excellent product that it's well worth considering.

One thing to establish straight away is that the PlayStation 3D Display isn't an HDTV as such: there's no aerial socket and no on-board TV tuner. Instead this is a monitor with connectivity designed to target a range of external multimedia devices while offering up an affordable small-screen solution for those wanting to enter into the 3D arms race without the space for a gigantic HDTV. At £450, the price for such a small screen is rather high when compared to some of today's lower-end 3DTVs (a 40-inch display can be picked up for around £500), but up against monitors in comparable sizes it is potentially very good value for money, especially when you consider the amount of high-end technology packed inside and the overall performance on offer.

Read more…