The world’s biggest game show continues in LA with E3. It’s Sony’s turn to take to the stage and stake their claim for bragging rights for the next year of releases. 3D gaming is gets a real push and like Microsoft, motion control is going to be play a big part in the show. But will they be ignoring gamers in favour of the casual market too? We’ll tell you below while also looking at some proper games. Continue reading E3 2010: PlayStation Press Conference
Ubisoft seem to want a piece of the World Cup cash pie, not content with EA having the pitch to themselves. Ok, so this isn’t an official South Africa tie-in, but it’s international teams only and the final ends in South Africa. Coincidence? The hell it is.
Ubisoft are actually ripping off Fifa Street though instead. It’s five-a-side football with outrageous shots and tricks the order of the day. While the last Fifa Street was a bit meh, this is just bollocks. Continue reading Pure Football (Review)
The best fun to be had on two wheels so far this generation has been with Burnout’s hell-powered bikes, with Moto GP and the first SBK game missing out on the love, failing to please arcade or simulation fans.
SBK X has split itself into three modes (Arcade, Simulation and Multiplayer) right from the start menu to try and please arcade and sim fans alike. But have they spread things out too much? I’ll split the review into the same three parts to cover all bases.
Continue reading SBK X Superbike World Championship (Review)
‘What a difference a few extra months in development makes,’ was what we all thought when Arkham Asylum finally arrived. With an even bigger delay preceding the eventual arrival of Obsidian’s Spy RPG many gamers started to worry about the condition of the nevertheless eagerly awaited title.
The idea of being able to actively affect the story with your own choices in conversations and via your actions had minds swimming with possibilities of combining gameplay styles of the legendary JB trio of James Bond, Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer. Continue reading Alpha Protocol (Review)
Anarchy: Rush Hour is a plucky little PSN game that has quite simply waltzed up to Burnout in a bar, spilt its drink, snogged its girlfriend then ran outside jumped into a car and sped off. After backing into Burnout’s ride first for good measure.
For £5.49 you won’t find a more interesting racer on the store. It’s really rough around the edges but, there’s a lot of fun in here too. Continue reading Anarchy: Rush Hour (PSN Review)
It might have the Iron Man 2 movie poster for the front cover, but this is pretty far removed from the film, with only Iron Man, War Machine and Nick Fury putting in a decent day’s work. At least their movie-counterparts faces and voices have made it in.
The game takes place ‘beyond’ the movie with the Russians stealing some tech from Stark Industries to make their own robot armies and so on. Players have the choice of playing as Iron Man or War Machine which is a nice touch, but the lack of a two-player option feels like a missed opportunity. You can at least change character at the start of each mission. Continue reading Iron Man 2 (PS3 Review)
This is a collection of traditional Indian village games that range from kite flying to board games. The story mode features a young Indian man from America, coming back to his family’s village to learn about the culture. We say learn about their cultures, but he really just wants to mess around and learn how to play the local’s games. It’s a pleasant enough way to ease in western gamers who have no idea what the games are, but should also prove handy to players that already understand them as the controls get explained before each game.
You walk (so very) slowly between areas, talking to villagers about the games. The only real reason to play is for the tutorials on them. I’d advise quickly learning how to play then quitting out and playing them from the mini games menu where you can choose your sides and so on. Continue reading Desi Adda: Games of India (Review)
Expectations were low for this PSN shooter that’s old news for 360 and PC gamers. Oh look another space marine shooter on a distant planet. Wake up at the back though because Section 8 is actually pretty good.
The short single player campaign is pretty much an introduction to the controls and the game modes, which involve running to an enemy base, taking control of a module by pressing X, waiting around for a meter to fill then running off to another one, all while your AI teammates prance around doing sod all. Continue reading Section 8 (Review)
Approaching a new beat ‘em up name for the first time can be a tricky affair, with no familiar character to go for at the character select screen, your first impressions of the game are severely at risk. Do you pick the huge mass of muscle, the one with a sword, the one made up of a Studio Ghibli oil slick nightmare or simply the one with the biggest boobs?
Choose carefully my friends because you won’t pick up a brawler this year with such a diverse set of fighters. There might only be twelve to choose from, but any similarities are minor. There aren’t any Ken, Ryu and Akuma-style remixes of characters here. Pick the wrong one and you might get a rough start. However, things start to look up once you find a character that suits your own individual style. Continue reading BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (Review)
These are the final three episodes of the murder mystery / puzzle game. Solving random puzzles involving maths, logic and common sense helps bring you one step closer to finding the perpetrator of that episodes crime, with the episodes linking together for the grand finale.
For those of you not familiar with the series you can pick up a bundle with all six episodes for £19.99 on the PSN. You play as one of four detectives (another three people can play along too) from the Blue Toad Agency. As you interview villagers and suspects you have to complete a puzzle before they’ll talk. Most of them have very little to do with your investigation. Continue reading Blue Toad Murder Files: Episodes 4-6 (Review)
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. Continue reading Patchwork Heroes (PSP Review)
This is more like it. After recent incarnations of the more realistic (dull) plane combat games like Tom Clancy’s Hawx or Blazing Angels, it’s good to see a more fun-minded arcade game return. You won’t find a more fondly remembered fighter plane game than After Burner either.
Rather than succumbing to modern pressure, the series still seems to play in its familiar style of blasting towards the horizon, with players concentrating on avoiding enemy gunfire in a relatively 2D space. Continue reading After Burner: Climax (Preview)
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. Continue reading Deflector (PSP Minis Review)
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. Continue reading Route 66 (PSP Minis Review)
If the likes of Final Fantasy XIII and White Knight Chronicles haven’t been hardcore enough for you as JRPGs, then this game from Tri-Ace would love to dominate you in a cruel way that your sick mind will love.
The cutscenes are nice to look at despite large amounts of foppishly designed miserable emo teens and them not really explaining anything well at all. The towns of the game world make a decent effort of cramming in a lot of detail too. The dungeon or linked arena levels are very sparse and repetitive though. Continue reading Resonance of Fate (PS3 Review)
Kratos and God of War III have patiently sat atop Mount Olympus watching the likes of Bayonetta, Darksiders and Dante’s Inferno clamber their way upwards in their efforts to usurp him. He’s let them get tantalisingly close, before stirring and smiting them from the mountain in amused rage at their audacity.
The end of the trilogy begins where GOWII ended, with Kratos clambering up Mount Olympus with his new Titan buddies for the climactic war to kill Zeus and any gods that cross his path. There’s seemingly nowhere for the Olympians to hide anymore seeing as he’s dispatched pretty much every mythological monster they’ve thrown at him already. Continue reading God of War III (Review)
How to describe Yakuza 3? Well it’s an RPG beat ‘em up stuffed with a huge variety of mini-games to distract you from the games story that involve multiple Yakuza gangs and government conspiracies in Tokyo and Okinawa. Oh and you look after an orphanage too.
Players new to the series are welcomed by detailed compilations of cutscenes from the first two games that make a decent effort of bringing you up to speed. Long story short, Kazuma (that’s you) climbed the ranks to become the 4th Chairman of the Tojo Clan of the Yakuza, didn’t fancy it and went to start an orphanage on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Continue reading Yakuza 3 (Review)
This should get your retro skills up to scratch before the release of Sonic 4 which is making a return to Sonic’s 2D roots. Put simply this compilation collects the best four Sonic games out there. Pure, 2D, Sonic gold.
These are the best Sonic games to be released on the Mega-drive System in the ‘90s, before it all went wrong with his steps into third dimension adventure platforming. This package contains Sonic 1-3 and Sonic & Knuckles. Unlike past Sonic compilations we’ve seen over the years, this one allows you to play through Sonic 2 and 3 as Knuckles. Which, as anyone that owned the original Mega Drive cartridge of Sonic & Knuckles knows, makes this an unmissable purchase. Continue reading Sonic Classic Collection (Review)
Set in Feudal Japan you star as an injured Samurai, regaining consciousness on a battlefield surrounded by corpses of other warriors after a bloody battle. From here on in you get to decide how to shape the story in this sedately paced Samurai-sim.
The series, which started on PS2, has always prided itself on the amount of choice it provided to gamers with multiple endings being a key selling point. This time there are over twenty of them. Players are allowed a degree of freedom in shaping their adventure by selecting from multiple dialogue options, usually based around being nice or nasty. Continue reading Way of the Samurai 3 (Review)
Yes the original game is barely a year old, but countless editions of Street Fighter games are something we’ve come to expect from Capcom over the years. Some offer minor tweaks of gameplay and other subtle changes that only the hardcore or most avid completist may care for while others may throw some extra content into the mix.
This first addition to the Street Fighter IV universe may well be worth a look to all types of fan though. Almost definitely an essential purchase if you haven’t got around to picking up the first one yet. Continue reading Super Street Fighter IV (Preview)
The No Sleep Gamer 