Rather than use missiles and the like to defend their city, these citizens have decided it’s easier to fly onto these giant approaching warships and saw parts off them until they crash out of the sky. Bizarre, but brilliant. It’s a bit like an inverted update of the retro game Qix.
The story doesn’t exactly grab you, but it’s charmingly animated and the mad gibberish language that everyone speaks may give gamers fond memories of Okami. It’s the gameplay that’s fantastically strong here though. It’s alarmingly simple, yet has that vital ‘one-more-level’ feel to it. Read more…
Deflector is a basically designed yet challenging puzzle game, similar to some mini-games you may have played in bigger titles before. The aim is to deflect a laser beam into a receiver on a complex grid with you looking at it from above.
This is done by placing mirrors on the grid and rotating them to bounce the laser off in a new direction. Before setting the mirror in place you must make sure -via a dotted line that indicates the resulting path of the laser- that it will not hit any environmental objects that will end the game. These objects include apartments, trees, bombs and explosive barrels. Take a quick look at this video for an example of the early levels. Read more…
Forget all thoughts of motorbikes and possible cheap Road Rash thrills right now. This is a game that has more in common with the Where’s Waldo books that everyone had in the 1990s, albeit considerably less congested. It’s actually pretty damn good too.
Instead of looking for people, you use a cursor to find eight objects cleverly hidden onscreen in a scene picture from one of the many locations along the eponymous Route 66. You scroll around the picture with the analogue stick and move a cursor with the d-pad, selecting items with X. The items can range from broccoli to Buddha’s, hazelnuts to harmonicas and pinecones to peace signs. They’re very specific too, so don’t go thinking boot means shoe or anything like that. Read more…
Old news for PC and 360 gamers, but Peggle has finally made its way to PS3 via the PSN service. If you enjoyed PopCap’s other games like Bejeweled 2 and Zuma then there’s every chance you’ll love this too.
The aim is to rid the screen of all the orange Pegs. You do this by shooting a ball at an angle from the top the screen, then simply sitting back and letting gravity take care of the rest as the ball bounces of walls and blue and orange Pegs. Pegs light up when touched and disappear a few seconds later, longer if the ball is still pinging around lots. Eventually the ball falls to the bottom of the screen, either into a hole or into a moving bucket which lets you use the ball again. You get ten balls to clear all the orange Pegs out, but more balls can be earned by saving them at the bottom or racking up a large combo by bouncing off lots of pegs. Once the last orange Peg has been hit the ball lands in one of five pits for an extra score bonus. Read more…
There are already a large number of 2D shooters on the PSN Store, but the genre hopping PixelJunk series from Q-Games has beaten them all with their first shot at the title. PixelJunk Shooter is a compelling game designed with a distinctive, simple, full-coloured style and perfectly balanced gameplay.
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Episode 1: Little Riddle’s Deadly Dilemma
Episode 2: The Mystery of Riddle Manor
It’s about time PSN got some murder mystery puzzles games going. Professor Layton on the DS has had his own way for much too long now. So the creators of the Buzz! quiz games whisk us off to the “Quintessentially quaint” countryside village of Little Riddle. Read more…
After becoming something of a cult classic on the PlayStation Network it was only a matter of time before somebody realised this would work even better on PSP. For those of you who haven’t played the PS3 version this is a tower defence game. You build defence towers out of trees, using a limited supply of money in order to defend your village’s twenty inhabitants from multiple waves of invaders.
The towers are designed to be effective for ground or air attacks with some of them spreading themselves thin to do both. There’s plenty to choose from if you can afford them. There are canons, freeze guns, Telsa (electricity spewing towers), mortars, flamethrowers, crossbows, anti-air guns, lasers and electric barriers. Read more…
This is an essential lesson in how 2D gameplay is still a force to be reckoned with. Trine’s levels are deceptively simple with the aim generally being to progress to the far right of the map like many past classics but with some physics based gameplay puzzles. This platformer looks far from retro though with some gorgeous fantasy realms inspired level design that sparkle with HD richness. Read more…
PopCap Games and Sony Online Entertainment have done it again and brought another fiendishly addictive puzzle game to the PSN Store following on from the success of Bejeweled 2.
Zuma has you controlling a rotating stone frog in an Aztec temple firing different coloured balls out of its mouth. So yeah, it’s a little strange. Bear with me.
The aim of the game is to get rid of all the coloured balls before they move through the course and get sucked down a hole at the end (if one goes, they all go). You do this by shooting out coloured balls to make sets of three or more of the same colour to make them disappear. This is aided by a line that shows where the ball will land. You’ll have to be extra precise when aiming from distance or at awkward angles. It’s a bit reminiscent of Puzzle Bobble in a “Not there you shit!” sorta way. It’ll make you angry sometimes but you won’t be able to put it down. Read more…