Been on a retro kick on Thunderbolt...

Review - BurgerTime: World TourTour

Review - Halo Combat Evolved: Anniversary:

Remembering... Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!

Retrospective: Legacy of Kain

Saints Row 3 also ready for next week. It'll be nice to have things slow down some this month.

The result may not feel like a revolutionary update, but it’s exactly the right way to pull off a quality Trials sequel.

The combat itself is barebones. Much of it is based on typical fighting convention stuff: position, sequence and timing. It’s all very basic. What’s important is to launch well and to use special attacks frequently. Each Beyblade has an associated power animal which factors into some combos and can be called upon for a seven-second cutscene in battle. There’s no option to turn these off (or even an options menu at all) and they’re never very good. They don’t even show the animal attack; allies j...

Following the closure of his last case, Nelson Tethers is racked with guilt over the string of unsolved disappearances in the eerie, insular community of Scoggins, Minnesota. And so, after taking vacation from his job as an FBI Puzzle Detective, our protagonist fires up his snowmobile and treks back to tie up any loose ends.

It’s all about the contrast. The best way to describe the appeal of film-noir, as I find it, is in the stark dichotomy between black and white – the dissimilarity of things. The most striking aspect of the films is in the way the lighting might reflect the softness of the female lead in juxtaposition to the rigid features of her male counterpart, the way the lines of their faces are more defined than the films that came before. On the verge of being overproduced, L.A. Noire takes strides in brin...

With its retro aesthetic and punishing difficulty, Super Meat Boy is the type of release that shakes things up and gets people’s attention.

The Sims 3 is everything casual games strive to be. Whether you’re a fan of the wildly popular virtual life simulation series or not, there’s never been a better time to jump in than now. There’s something for everyone here, all presented in the attractive signature style that made the series so popular in the first place. The Sims isn’t a series that necessarily caters to any one type of gamer specifically. Instead, it makes a far more ambitious appeal to society as a whole, offering an unrival...

With the first-person shooter market drowning under a relentless flood of like-minded brands trying to emulate the top dog, the entire genre is turning in on itself. There are the rare gems which come through in a big way and attain universal appeal. The Bad Company and Modern Warfare games, in particular, are refined console shooters which have totally spun the age-old argument that shooters are best experienced on the PC in the opposite direction. While the Medal of Honor series may have faded...

As a front-runner in Sega’s Dreamcast launch lineup, it’s only reasonable that Sonic Adventure would be the first Dreamcast game that Sega would port to Xbox Live Arcade. Serving as something of a tech demo for the fledgling console, the visuals stood above any game on competing consoles at the time. There’s definitely a sense of nostalgia that comes with running frantically down a pier while a killer whale gives chase in the Emerald Coast, or playing a game of NiGHTS Into Dreams pinball in the ...

The decaying carcass of Red Dead Revolver casts a foul odor. Gutted of its linearity and naïve handling of the American Old West, Rockstar San Diego have skinned the aforementioned less-than-stellar elements of the otherwise promising homage to the West, creating an exemplary sequel in the process. Not only have the developers redeemed themselves for the last outing and fledging also-ran titles which followed, but they’ve also set an impressive new standard for open worlds and sequels to try and...

In its present form, the game merely comes across as an unnecessary mess of well-intentioned ideas made only slightly more amusing by the vague cultural undertones from India.

Juxtaposed against the bright and cheerful hillside of Spiral Mountain is an expansive lair, violently contrasting a local which is otherwise brimming with joy. Plotted amongst the lower-lying fields of flowers and stretches of grass is the colorful home of our protagonist. Meet Banjo, a heroic bear who comes to find that his sister Tooty is being held captive by Gruntilda, an evil witch who plans to drain Tooty of her beauty in order to become the fairest of them all.

Crazy Taxi Company has picked up shop and relocated to New York City. However, other than heading for the east coast and replacing the four drivers from the original, Crazy Taxi 2 does little to differentiate itself.

Recreating board games is tricky in that developers generally need to give their target audience incentive to purchase a digital copy of something they already have stuffed away in their closet somewhere. Spyglass Board Games includes all of four different types of board games straight away. Checkers, chess, reversi, and mancala are all displayed in the most primitive of forms. The subtle premise of the game is certainly nice enough, but do any of the board game variants hold water?

An aura of decadence tends to pervade anything that’s free. When people are given a game without paying anything – their incentive to play the title is gone. This can create reasonably low expectations, meaning that there’s likely not going to be any middle ground. Aegis Wing happened to be a humble success, proving to be one of the best Live Arcade titles. While AW’s amateur developers seemed to have put their hearts into the game, genuinely catering to the hardcore gamer in all of us, it’s unf...

3 on 3 NHL Arcade is a great idea. The latest EA hockey game, NHL 09, has shed some pounds over the winter with a diet that cuts out all of the realism and simulation that devoted fans have come to expect from the perennial franchise. Our overall roster weighs in at a slim 40 players and two teams. There’s no room for stats, or much in the way of personality, here. That’s not to say that 3 on 3 NHL Arcade forgets to include any new content.

It’s irking to see a series with plenty of untapped potential fail to claim what’s rightfully made possible through the immediate gratification of a platform such as the Xbox 360‘s Live Arcade. Although perhaps we should be thankful that the developer’s didn’t over-exert themselves over another broken platformer nightmare, such as so many Xbox titles. Sticking to your guns sometimes is the most appropriate move you can make, although the achieved end result might not be spectacular. While I don...

Have you ever sat on your couch, Wii Remote in hand, wishing you could use it to scrub the dirty hind end of a cow? Probably not. But WarioWare: Smooth Moves allows you to do so. Even after playing the rather enjoyable GameCube incarnation of WarioWare, there seemed to be a lingering feeling that this series should have remained in GBA/DS form. Smooth Moves is bold in it's assertion that you'll enjoy the large number of extremely strange tasks it asks you to perform.

In the 2020's, terrorism is a bitch. Within the army, a frothing rebel front amasses due to inaccuracies in the regular army's intelligence reports. Circa '96 this branch of the army is lead under the supervision of one General Morden, fighting off patriots with an ultimate aim to assassinate the President of the United States. Falling short on the attempted assassination, the rebel army turned their sights upon attacking the regular army soldiers in an intense civil war. The 1st and 2nd Lueite...

Dead or Alive 3 relies heavily on the structure of its predecessors. Somewhere along the line, Team Ninja made a compromise. In their assertion that fans of fighting games didn't need any more content than what was available to them in the last entry. There are only two fresh faces aside from Hayate's alter-ego, EIN. If you haven't tried the other DOA games, there is a singular cross-over from Team Ninja's only other gaming property, which is enough of a reason for any self respecting Ninja Gai...

Since the beginning of mankind, anyone who has told a story, has furthered the idea of the Hero. In the 1940's, Joseph Campbell wrote a book called "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", in which Joseph claims every story has already been told and it is necessary to continue to retell these stories. He went on to detail the Hero's Journey and the Characters who accompany the hero. So we are telling the exact same story as our ancient ancestors. Campbell's book his inspired one of his best friends to ...