Valve doesn’t just do original game-play. The game-play may make a game good, but the experience and overall package make it great. Valve have created a breath of fresh air using many ideas from Half-Life. The protagonist remains quiet and can only be seen through portals, and the ambience of a science facility draws many parallels to Black Mesa.

Realism is overrated. So many games strive to be realistic and claiming so is an exhausted marketing cliché. Arcades have decayed into an out of fashion commodity, where once an experience unseen in home consoles and arcade-quality graphics were a common marketing mantra. Since 3D graphics we’ve been able experience racing, flying, sports and battlefields almost for real almost leaving side-scrolling beat-em-ups and platformers passé.

No game has portrayed bombs in a more novel fashion than Hudson’s Bomberman series. The balls on dynamite haven’t done any favours to my mental perception of a bomb, and they certainly don’t just send a blast in a four directions. The games have hardly been famous for epic saga’s; the original NES version featured Bomberman growing tired of making bombs in a factory and attempts to become human. This time the evil forces of Bagular have invaded and destroyed the five coins that unify the ...

You’re walking through a dark hallway. The antiquated stones look grim, its damp, and you’ve only got a whip at hand. The only form of light is from the small candles and the large moon gleaming outside, and there’s bats everywhere. Take a few steps and the pillars begin to animate. A few more and a mummy or skeleton will as well, and at the end of the corridor it turns out you can only go up. The castle master Count Dracula, has been unsealed by Camilla, and yourself, Morris (a veteran Vampire ...

The next generation of Grand Theft Auto could’ve hardly arrived at a worse moment. Two months prior to its release the 9/11 attacks changed the face of the world forever. War was no longer just about fighting uniformed troops on a battlefield, but against guerrilla terror that could erupt at any moment. As thousands of workers in the World Trade Centre discovered, working in a white collar no longer meant you were safe.

Come 2006, the Xbox 360 had just been released, the PlayStation 3 had been announced, and Sony fans are eagerly not waiting for one as it costs a billion quid to purchase it. So what’s the best way for Sony to drown the fans financial sorrows? They could keep the hits rolling when the PlayStation 2’s contemporaries have declared themselves dead, or they could push the hardware so much that fans can almost convince themselves they’re playing a 360 game. Or maybe they should focus on the future an...

Friday evenings aren’t what they used to be on British national television. Years ago, the good old BBC brought us a double-dosage of The Simpsons followed by half an hour of the almighty Robot Wars. Nowadays we have to watch The Simpsons with adverts on Channel 4, and if you can’t remove yourself from the couch you have to endure the rubbish clean soap-opera that is Hollyoaks. Cookie-cutter relationship problems with alpha males on anger management instead of...

It’s not every day we see a movie-licensed game that’s actually any good. Traditionally, they’re manifests of cash-in mediocrity when developers are contracted to (quickly) produce a title on every console available and hope it will sell. Generally they often do. Brand recognition prevails over genuine quality as these games chart highly, yet do well to even achieve a 6/10 score. The situation has improved somewhat through the ages, but the likes of Goldeneye and certain Star Wars ...

Why another Sonic release on the antiquated Master System? The 16-bit Sonic series was selling the Mega Drive faster than you can say “Nintendon’t”, and the SMS barely tapped the dominating NES. However its strong user base in Europe and Brazil still flourished, and with games being made on the technically equivalent Game Gear handheld, there’s no reason not to release another Sonic on the SMS.

Tony Hawk’s is probably one of the most ubiquitous franchises of the last decade. It’s appeared on every format made since ollie-ing into the PlayStation park in 1999, and when each game is designed to be built better than the last, playing this eight-year old title is like skating backwards into a time machine.