Review Archives (All Reviews)
You are currently looking through all reviews for games that are available on every platform the site currently covers. Below, you will find reviews written by bloomer and sorted according to date of submission, with the newest content displaying first. As many as 20 results will display per page. If you would like to try a search with different parameters, specify them below and submit a new search.
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Rule of Rose review (PS2)Reviewed on February 27, 2012While coming on strongly like a survival horror title, Rule of Rose nods to some of the genre's mechanical demands in an almost obligatory fashion, being basic at the basics and downright bad at combat. The game's power and meaning are instead invested in atypical areas; in a weird and chronologically difficult mystery story, in its transgressive subject matter and in the wide range of moods the game is able to conjure up. |
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Dracula review (C64)Reviewed on December 10, 2010Dracula is an exciting, garish and highly confounding 95% text adventure which was released for the Commodore 64 by CRL in 1986. It was the first of a series of similarly themed horror adventures by Rod Pike (and later, other authors) including Frankenstein and The Wolfman. Dracula broadly follows the events of Bram Stoker's novel and remains highly regarded in C64 circles to this day for a multitude of reasons, sensationalism amongst them. The non-text 5% of the game consis... |
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The Lurking Horror review (APP2)Reviewed on September 27, 2010Infocom released more than thirty Interactive Fiction titles in their time, setting the standard for sophisticated text adventure game parsers in the process, but only one of these games declared itself as belonging to the horror genre. That one was 1987's The Lurking Horror (TLH). In this adventure you assume the role of a student at the fictional GUE Tech whose essay on the topic of 'Modern analogues of Xenophon's Anabasis' is due tomorrow. The game begins with you sweating away at your essay ... |
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BloodRayne review (GCN)Reviewed on May 15, 2010... "Half human. Half vampire. All woman." |
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Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem review (GCN)Reviewed on January 13, 2010Eternal Darkness (ED) arrived for the GameCube with a fearsome aura about it. In common with Resident Evil Zero, this horror opus was originally slated for release on the Nintendo 64, before that console's premature exit prompted ED's migration to the next console generation and its entering into an even more drawn out development period. When the game finally emerged, it commanded immediate awe from anxious GameCubers, who had heard that it was going to be the next killer app, yet... |
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Kukulcan review (APP2)Reviewed on June 14, 2009Kukulcan (1984) is an educational graphic adventure game set in 1519. The player takes the role of an Aztec scribe summoned by Montezuma to seek knowledge of the Feathered Serpent, in hopes that this knowledge may stave off the arrival of evils portended by recent omens. The Aztecs were right to have been worried around this time; the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez was soon to invade Tenochtitlan (the future site of Mexico City), arrest Montezuma and bring an end to the Aztec Empire. Thus ... |
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Resident Evil review (GCN)Reviewed on May 02, 2009Conventional wisdom says that Survival Horror diverged into two broad schools in the decade following its widespread inception via Capcom's Resident Evil (RE). There was the Resident Evil school, which presented the player with a reality filled with physical threats and horrors, and there was the Silent Hill school, which toyed with the player's engagement with reality itself. Or; Silent Hill was about dreams and nightmares. Resident Evil was about trying to avoid being torn apart. |
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Aztec review (APP2)Reviewed on April 28, 2009Aztec, the classic Apple II platform adventure game of tomb plundering excitement and bizarre glitchiness, was released in 1982. 'Nothing like it before. Nothing else like it now!' screamed the hectic looking ads in Creative Computing magazine. They were probably right. 1982 was the year after the arrival of Raiders Of The Lost Ark in cinemas, and was the same year in which the original Pitfall came out for the Atari 2600. Pitfall Harry presents as a colourful stick figure of girth... |
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Silent Hill 4: The Room review (PS2)Reviewed on November 12, 2008The Silent Hill series moved from episode two to episode three on the back of new imaginative content alone. The technicalities of gameplay barely changed. Silent Hill 4: The Room (SH4) comes on not unlike the prison guard who, caught nodding off, wakes suddenly and starts cracking his whip at everything in sight. This is an arduous game, and I came out of it feeling more unhappy than not about the experience, even angry with the game's conclusion and my inability to alter it without resorting t... |
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Resident Evil: Outbreak File #2 review (PS2)Reviewed on October 08, 2008The Resident Evil series' supposedly exclusive move from the Playstation to the GameCube kicked off in 2002 with the arrival of the cripplingly good Resident Evil Remake and Resident Evil Zero. Resident Evil 4 was still three years away, but in a 'so much for that Nintendo exclusivity clause' series of events, the gap was filled by the appearance of the two Resident Evil Outbreak games back on the PS2. By way of explanation, Capcom muttered something about the Outbreaks not ... |
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Doom 3 review (PC)Reviewed on September 18, 2008When a group of artists labour for months or years on some magnificently coded and presented piece of gaming software, I can't help but feel uncomfortable about kicking their hard work – but Doom 3 is unfortunately boring and there's not much else I can do to it. I remember being pleased when id software announced they were going to switch their focus back to the single player experience with this title, coming as it did after a string of deathmatch oriented games, but the result is claustrophob... |
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Alone in the Dark review (WII)Reviewed on September 05, 2008The new Alone in the Dark (AITD) is the most original videogame I have played for years. This makes it exciting to talk about, even if the title is not an unqualified success. It bears very little relation to the survival horror games it grew out of, or to previous AITD games, or in fact to anything else around now. AITD consists of a series of dynamic action set pieces which seek to play out as episodically as did the scenes in old laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair. The game throws away nearly... |
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Silent Hill 3 review (PS2)Reviewed on September 02, 2008The astonishing quality of the original Silent Hill was of a nature so weird that it seemed unlikely to be replicable in sequel form. Silent Hill's logic was that of an abstract nightmare, its methods of sensory, emotional and intellectual disorientation most damaging when you had no clue that they were coming. This kind of lightning tends not to strike twice in the same place, but Konami have resolutely continued to fling bolts towards the same patch of ground – with surprising results. It's a ... |
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Fatal Frame review (PS2)Reviewed on July 30, 2008The Project Zero series (Fatal Frame to Americans) takes survival horror into Ju-on / Ringu territory, pitting the player against vengeful Japanese ghosts and dark familial curses from the past. The films which inspired the series depict a world in which ghosts are all around us, if only we'd make the effort to look for them. To attempt to help a ghost find peace involves engagement with it, but this is also the way of greatest danger. The scene in which a character finally locks e... |
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Alien Syndrome review (WII)Reviewed on July 23, 2008My Arcade Action Extra magazine from 1988 features an Alien Syndrome spread packed with gameplay tips and outrageously exciting screenshots for what was the then new coin-op from Sega. Two decades later I find myself playing a makeover of this outer space answer to Gauntlet on a motion-sensing console made by Nintendo. How times change. |
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Endless Ocean review (WII)Reviewed on July 01, 2008Endless Ocean is indeed potentially endless as an experience, though the oceans contained within the game are only endless if we say that they don't 'end' relative to some starting point. In literal terms, they end everywhere they touch a sparkling beach, which happens to be in a lot of places. All I'm saying is that nobody should bring a Lionel Hutz style lawsuit against this game based on its title, because the title is a lovely and evocative one. |
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MySims review (WII)Reviewed on June 27, 2008If you found Animal Crossing to be a hugely addictive work of genius and cuteness – or even if you just thought it was pretty good – and you’d like to have a similar experience on the Wii, MySims will supply that experience. It’s not as deep or longevous as Animal Crossing, but the basic setup is the same (uncharitably you could say it’s a ripoff) and so are many gameplay details. |
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Cold Fear review (PS2)Reviewed on February 26, 2008The phrase 'Resident Evil on a boat' has cropped up more than once over time to describe particular survival horror games. Whether you find the phrase cute, pithy or dispassionately accurate when applied, the trouble is that the handful of games attracting this description have yet to bring enough new stuff to the table (apart from the boat) or to do the old stuff as well as the bedrock titles did it, to be able to escape from their shadow. Cold Fear is excellent in its boatiness, perhaps the ze... |
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Aeon Flux review (PS2)Reviewed on December 17, 2007I have studied the histories, and the moral of the Aeon Flux videogame saga is apparently this: There's nothing like the advent of a spin-off film starring Charlize Theron for getting things done when it comes to turning a super-crazy sci-fi animation into a videogame. |
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Echo Night: Beyond review (PS2)Reviewed on December 05, 2007Outside the mainstream there's a tradition of slow, simply made horror-adventure games whose gameplay has barely developed for a decade or more. These are the D's, the Notes, the Hellnights, the Echo Nights, etc. The raw stuff of Echo Night Beyond (ENB) is nothing that an original Playstation or something even older couldn't run, but this is a genre where atmosphere goes a long way, and ENB does generate a detailed, restrained outer space creepiness befitting the PS2's graphical capabilities. Th... |
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