15 public reviews
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Comfortably set in the year 19XX (it could be happening now!), Kojima’s baby Metal Gear – the real originator of the stealth genre – sees new recruit Solid Snake enter the fortified state Outer Heaven to rescue fellow operative Grey Fox and destroy the mysterious Metal Gear, a bipedal WMD. Convoluted? Sure, but by 1987’s terms, the plot was the videogame equivalent of War and Peace (with necessary emphasis on the…
Fans of Hideo Kojima’s confusing, complex and downright compelling Metal Gear series will lap up every last overly cinematic second of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, although newcomers to the series may have an adverse reaction to the series’ final instalment. It’s just over 20 years since Kojima’s first stealth game, and Guns of the Patriots is a worthy successor to the previous games in the series, and…
Read the full review Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve spent the past decade building up a hobby of writing and drawing comics into a self-sustainable business, with legions of fans worldwide waiting for your biweekly updates on penny-arcade.com. You have the power to ‘wang’ all but the biggest corporate servers, with a link, faint praise and a casual flick of the wrist. After the cataclysmic failure of the E3 convention to simply do…
Read the full review Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - Episode One
I was, admittedly, as excited as all get out for the downloadable re-release of Tim Shafer’s Psychonauts through the 360’s new Xbox Originals channel on Xbox Live. I’d missed the game when it released on the Xbox in 2005, and while I thought it would be a fantastic game, I’d never tried very hard to get hold of a copy. “Great,” I thought to myself, “Now I can dip my toes into a nice little action-adventure title I…
A real, honest-to-God Simpsons game has been a long time coming. Fans of the yellow-skinned family have suffered through more than twenty versions of licensed games, including the lamentable Virtual Bart, bizarre Krusty’s Funhouse, and GTA-clone The Simpsons Hit & Run. With the possible exception of Bart Vs the Space Mutants (an awkward platformer made better only with the benefit of nostalgic hindsight), there…
Let’s get this out of the way first – Bioware’s latest game was hyped up like nobody’s business. Early builds from the creators of RPG-heavy Knights of the Old Republic showed a surprisingly complex character whose responses to NPCs determined their future interactions with him or her, a solid over-the-shoulder combat shooter, as well as some pretty damn fine graphics. Luckily for everyone just waiting for another…
You know how Ratchet and Clank games work by now – start off hitting enemies with a spanner, collecting bolts along the way, work your way up to a range of ridiculously awesome guns and other weapons, level up said weapons, throw in a bunch of boss battles, prettied-up quicktime events, and spend hours in front of a television screen at a time, grunting incoherently at flatmates as you shoot novelty ammunition at…
Read the full review Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Directions for making a hit action-adventure game: take one lovable rogue as the main character, a shady, cigar-chomping second-in-command, and an increasingly useful (and attractive) female lead. Mix in some good AI for your NPC friends, a range of weapons, enemies, a third-act twist to rival any game you’ve ever played, and drop in a legendary golden treasure at the last moment. Remember to preheat the whole lot…
God of War: Chains of Olympus is set as a prequel to the existing games, at a point where all-around tough guy Kratos has already been saved by Ares. As the game opens, you’re defending the city of Attica from the Persians, a battle which culminates in the first boss battle of the game, against a basilisk. Still doing the dirty work for the Greek pantheon, Kratos soon finds himself mixed up in yet another god’s…
Let’s not mince words here – Gran Turismo 5: Prologue isn’t even a full game, but it’s flat-out, balls-to-the-wall gorgeous, to the point where you’d be forgiven for thinking that replays of races you just finished were actual live-to-air motorsport events. Despite its shininess, though, this scaled-back version of the PS3’s next banner title isn’t quite enough of a game in its own right to be worth your time.…
Magnetic Fields 1991 Way back in the early nineties, your choice of cars in racing games was very limited. Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 let you control either a Lotus Esprit (faster, skidded a bit too easily) or a Lotus Elan (slower, better grip on the road), although the game still chose the car you’d use for each level. For most people, though, the dream car was still the Lotus Esprit we remembered from the first…
Mistwalker Despite its impressive graphics, Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Lost Odyssey still doesn’t tick enough boxes to make the 360 exclusive a must-play game. It’s still a solid RPG, but odd camera control and stale combat systems hold the game back from its potential, despite small attempts to freshen up the latter. Sakaguchi, of course, shot to prominence on the back of the early Final Fantasy games, and with new…
Level 5 Nintendo DS Unless you’re running homebrew applications on your DS console (and you should, if only to re-experience old LucasArts gems through the magic of ScummVM), you may have felt the lack of point-and-click adventure games on anything resembling a current-gen console or handheld. With the same richly coloured and stylistic take on middle Europe that saw Dark Chronicle succeed, as well as by putting a…
Read the full review Professor Layton and the Curious Village
EA PC (MS-DOS) Demanding for its time (it refused to look good on anything less than a 33-MHz 386 machine), Michael Jordan in Flight is notable primarily because it’s one of the first 3D sports games, if one that didn’t quite have the licensing game down pat. Players picked a 3-on-3 team of no-names from Jordan’s hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, and pitted themselves against teams from other small towns. You…
Read the full review 3D? In a sports game? It'll never catch on.
SCE Japan Categorising Patapon is a pretty difficult task – the game has shades of almost every genre that’s been proven popular on the PSP. At its heart, though, it’s a God game with shades of real-time strategy, as well as a keen rhythm / action hybrid, with RPG aspects lightly blended in. Oh, and there are a few rhythm minigames thrown into the mix as well, although they back up the RPG elements more than…
