gametaroo!

Linger In Shadows (the first PlayStation 3 title by demoscene stalwarts, Plastic) refused to sit comfortably within any particular genre. Was it a game, an interactive video, a tech demo? The answer to these questions is still open to debate, but what is certain is that it served up a series of remarkably striking and imaginative visuals. From flying beagles, cloud-faced babies, floating plants, smirking cats, swarms of cubes and a swirling black cloud of nothingness (all surrounded by a grimly realised cityscape), Linger In Shadows was imaginative and astonishingly good looking, even if it did leave you floundering to grasp what on earth was going on. For the follow up – enigmatically titled Datura – the developers at Plastic have retained the head scratching weirdness, but also aim to demonstrate a new found love for traditionally more gamey mechanics.

Read More

Foreword:

I picked up Escape Plan for the PS Vita just before I went on a week’s holiday to Lanzarote (which, incidentally, is well worth a visit…the landscape is like being in a Fallout game…but I digress), as I hoped it would be an ideal ‘playing while lounging by the pool’ type of game. It turned out that I was not wrong - despite its insistence on constantly punishing your characters, its slow, generally undemanding pace, makes for a game that for the most part doesn’t require your constant and intense attention (unless you’re going for a high score, that is).

While writing the review, it struck me that here is a game that highlights the shortcomings of having to plop a score at the end of the prose. Though I stand by the 3.5/5 awarded, there’s no escaping the fact that many gamers will see this and immediately categorise Escape Plan as a sub-par experience - 4 and 5 out of 5 scores are generally perceived as  ’excellent’ or ‘essential’ titles; 3.5 being more ‘play only when you have some time to kill/money to waste’.  

Escape Plan is definitely worthy of your time, but as a reviewer I ultimately have to make a judgement on the game’s inherent qualities and it’s position within the broader scope of the gaming landscape - and 3.5/5 just felt about right. Please don’t let that put you off trying the game for yourselves though….as there’s there is much here to be recommended.

Read More

Modern gaming is often plagued by the lure of feature creep, with gamers and publishers alike frequently expecting or demanding that a feature list as long as your arm (or, possibly, your leg) appears on the back of a game’s box.  Over time, we have been conditioned to expect an online component with virtually every game for example and, in fairness, at £40+ per title it’s not unreasonable to expect value for money.  ‘Value for money’ and good game design are not necessarily one and the same however, and just because you can include an extra element in your title, doesn’t mean that you always should.

This topic was recently brought to my mind upon realising that many of the games I’ve had most enjoyment from of late have been wonderfully single minded of vision and mechanic; titles that only attempt to do one or two things, but to do them extremely well and as a result avoid getting bogged down in the needlessly complex or distracted by side-quests or secondary goals.   Put more simply, they resist the urge to pad out their experiences, confidently walking their own path towards clearly defined goals, finding genius not by adding more but by focussing on delivering less.

Read More

(This review first appeared at www.dpadmagazine.com)

Despite the demise of Blackrock Studios and Bizarre Creations hanging over it like a black cloud, the arcade racing genre has been incredibly well served by this generation of consoles. The likes of Burnout Paradise,Split/Second, Blur, Driver: San Francisco and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit all being among the genre’s very best; and with Ridge Racer: Unbounded, Bugbear Entertainment is hoping to join them. But does this latest iteration of the much loved franchise throw the baby out with the bath-water or is it an inspired new beginning?

Read More

Having polished off Uncharted: The Golden Abyss (twice!) and finished Rayman: Origins, I decided to take a PSP game for a spin on the PlayStation Vita just to see how it would look on that gorgeous 5 inch screen.  Ready At Dawn’s God of War: Ghost of Sparta seemed like the ideal title for this, seeing as it’s possibly one of the best looking PSP games ever released. Playing it on the Vita, I was struck by how well the visuals stand up in comparison to the first crop of PS Vita titles. Sure, some of the textures can be a bit blurry and it might lack that pinpoint, high def sheen, but aside from that, Ghost of Sparta remains quite a looker - and I’m happy to report that the PS Vita’s screen does  it absolute justice.

Playing the game again also encouraged me to revisit my review of the game from November 2010 - which you can find in its entirety below - and this got me thinking: Is it just me, or would a PS Vita God of War instalment be a rather good idea? 

Read More

The Android and iOS App stores are littered with wannabes, fakers and barefaced rip-offs – titles that hop on bandwagons as if they were a form of public transport or even copy successful titles almost wholesale .  It’s unsurprising then, that a title as successful as Imangi Studio’s Temple Run should fall foul of such shonky ‘tributes’, most notably with Anton Sinelnikov’s Temple Jump, a title attempting to pass itself off as an official spin-off of the former - cloning its presentation and even its logo - to cash in on its success. The game itself was a barely playable mess. 

Read More

With the release of no fewer than eight titles across multiple platforms since its 2007 debut, the Assassin’s Creed series is nothing if not prolific. You can get too much of a good thing though, and it is not surprising that the announcement of Assassin’s Creed III has been met with as many jaded sighs of franchise fatigue as celebratory whooping and hollering. Despite this, the recently released teaser trailer for the third instalment proper of Ubisoft’s Assassins versus Templars epic contained enough intrigue to pique ones interest, and so it was with a cautious curiosity that we attended the unveiling of the first gameplay footage of the title. 

Read More

Foreword:

The first time I ever laid my eyes on a Street Fighter II arcade cabinet was when I was about 10 years old and on holiday in Spain with my parents. We were walking down noisy street (heaving with tourists and market traders attempting to flog all kinds of cheaply made tat) when I suddenly spotted two wonderfully animated sprites bouncing up and down in preparation for a showdown (as I would later learn, it  was Blanka and Ryu).  I was hypnotised, and have been a huge Street Fighter fan ever since.

My experience with the Tekken series has been a little more muted but I’d still consider myself a fan; so, it was with a large degree of excitement that I met announcement that the two franches were going to meet in Street Fighter x Tekken (and, later, Tekken x Street Fighter) .  Thoughts of the possibilities washed over me - Ryu Vs King? Yoshimitsu vs Blanka? Yes please! Soon after this however came the questions: how would would this eclectic collection of character and fighting mechanics come together to make a cohesive whole? Could this even be done?

Well, the finished game is now upon us and we can see just how Capcom got on - has the developer delivered a shoryuken or more of a yoga nugi? Read on to find out.

Read More

(This review originally appeared on www.dpadmagazine.com)

The opening level of Drinkbox Studio’s first game, Tales From Space: About A Blob, saw the titular blob squidging around under the noses of humans oblivious to the alien being in their midst. In some ways this could be seen to be analogous with the game itself, which launched on the PlayStation Network with relatively little fanfare and, although receiving solid reviews, remained something of an underdog. Those who did take the game for a spin will no doubt have fond memories of its 50’s sci-fi inspired aesthetics and consistently strong game design. The game might not have garnered the attention it deserved, but you can’t keep a good blob down and so it is that the gelatinous mutants strike again on the PlayStation Vita.

Read More

David Jaffe - founder of Eat Sleep Play and Director of Twisted Metal (PS3) - isn’t shy of a little controversy. In fact, he veritably thrives on it,  sprinkling even the most mundane of interview responses with F-bombs as if to keep up that particular pretence .

In an interview in the latest edition of the UK’s Edge Magazine he was on usual form, espousing (amongst other things) the benefits of browser-based games and the importance of interactivity in game design.  It was one particular response however that was quickly snaffled up for headline-duties by Edge’s sister website, Computer & Videogames; a move that suggests that game-journalism isn’t quite as distanced from the practices of tabloid newspapers as one would hope. 

Read More

The arrival of a new piece of gaming hardware is a special moment for any gamer. They may just be plastic boxes filled with microchips, diodes and (more recently) tilt sensors and wifi, but they symbolise a gateway into a whole new world of gaming goodness.  The latest entry into the hardware wars is the PlayStation Vita which hit UK shores on the 22nd February 2012. Much has been written about Sony’s latest attempt to crack the hand-held market, and much has been made of its bumpy start in Japan; but now it’s finally in our hands, how does the PS Vita stack up?

Read More

Foreword:

My initial introduction to Asura’s Wrath was when the demo was released for PSN and though the visuals did impress me, I came away utterly underwhelmed - ‘So,’ I thought, ‘what we have here is a modern day Dragon’s Lair; an asynchronism, a title using fancy modern visuals to deliver an outdated experience’.  

As the following review shows, my experience with the finished game was far more positive, but I think this little tale demonstrates  the dangers of releasing an isolated snap-shot of the full game in advance of its release. Though the Asura’s Wrath demo was plenty long enough, and did actually do a great job of showcasing how bonkers the full game is, I’d argue that the levels included just didn’t work in terms of promoting the joys of the final product.  

Asura’s Wrath is a game that you need time to immerse yourself in, to adjust to it’s idiosyncratic production. Isolating any of the games elements does a disservice to the whole, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the demo put people of purchasing the full game, which is a real shame, as Cyberconnect2 and Capcom have done a sterling job.

Now, read the review…and then go buy a copy of the game!

Read More

The lack of posts recently on gametaroo! may well give you the impression that either I’ve given up this blogging nonsense or something awful has happened to me, and I’m unable to post. Or, maybe I’ve found a new hobby; one that doesn’t involve waggling my thumbs quite so much.

I am pleased to write that none of the above are the case.

Read More

(This review originally appeared on www.dpadmagazine.com)

As versatile as touch-screens are, they arguably close as many doors as they open, with the lack of analogue control making it difficult to represent the joys of more traditional gaming fare.   Even the humble platformer, a genre built on simplicity and accessibility, often ends up feeling compromised, as horrid virtual-controllers are thrown at the player that are at best workable, at worst borderline unusable. The dilemma that this state of affairs poses is one that developer Kumobius has attempted to tackle head-on in Bean’s Quest for iOS.

Read More

It’s been the best part of four months since gametaroo!’s last round-up; in that time, I’ve seen Mario mosaics in Elephant & Castle, had my eyes opened to how the younger generation perceive videogames, experienced the joys of surround-sound headphones and been sucked into the wonders of ultra-violence in Gotham city.

If you have no idea as to what I’m talking about, then the following links shall enlighten you!

Read More