Posts By Charles Battersby

Dennis is having a bit of a bad day. The world has been frozen over, he's all alone, he has nothing but a creaky bicycle to make his way through the frozen hellscape and, on top of all that, some video game player keeps dressing him up in silly clothes. Dennis is the unfortunate fellow who stars in Icycle: On Thin Ice, and over the course of the game he will be crushed, impaled, exploded, and forced to suffer the indignities of being treated like a Barbie doll ...

The problem with Dungeons & Dragons was that it could only be played with a group. Desktop PCs in the 80s had a few text adventure games that mimicked the D&D experience as a single-player adventure, but PC's were rare and pricey back then. A cheap, portable alternative were Gamebooks that used printed text and images to replace a live dungeon master. They also had simplified D&D style rules to govern variable and give players choice over how their adventure ...

“Too crazy for Saint's Row.” That's how the developers at Volition describe the new DLC pack Enter The Dominatrix. Or rather that's how the characters in the game describe their new adventure. Fans of the series know that parts of Saint's Row IV were originally intended to be a DLC pack for Saint's Row III, but there were still a few missions and characters that never made it into SRIV. These scattered missions and incomplete cutscenes have been released in ...

Batman has been adapted into dozens of games, but the one franchise that has made players feel like they ARE Batman is the Arkham series. The first title in the series, Arkham Asylum, dropped players into a fully realized Gotham continuity. That game wasn't intended to cash in on the latest film or TV show, it was its own world. No origin story either; it assumed that the Player was already a bat-fan before they even picked up the controller.

If Minecraft-style sandbox games have taught gamers anything, it's "Build a shelter quickly!" In Darkout, players control an unfortunate astronaut who crashes on a hostile planet full of shadowy creatures, forcing players to build a primitive shelter fast, then begin scrounging for resources to survive on the hostile world. They'll mine minerals, chop lumber, harvest plants and then use all of these resources to craft the tools and equipment they need to thrive ...

It's a bit odd that the Resident Evil games have become synonymous with Survival Horror. After all, they're about heavily-armed police officers who kill zombies by the hundreds. Real fear comes from facing an army of unstoppable monsters and not having any means to fight them off. Outlast locks players inside an abandoned mental institution, arms them with just a camcorder, then leaves them to creep around in the darkness, thus combining a horror storyline with ...

The Saints Row series started out as a free-roaming criminal rampage game that was very close to Grand Theft Auto, but by the time Saints Row The Third showed up the developers had pretty much abandoned the idea of edgy crime drama and made a game where gamers could drive around on the Light Cycle from Tron, shooting people with a Shark Gun while their pal Burt Reynolds helped them beat up zombies.

Defense Grid has been around for a few years now, but many gamers have discovered it because it's one of the free games that came with a Gold subscription to Xbox Live. Those who missed their chance to grab it for free should still take look at this old gem because, much like its main character, it withstands the test of time rather well.

Calling a game “Jane Jensen's Anything” means that people are going to buy it. And for good reason too. Jensen designed and directed the classic Gabriel Knight adventure games; still considered some of the best in the genre. She also designed the underrated Gray Matter a few years ago, and she consulted on the recent indie adventure series Cognition. Her new game is Jane Jensen's Moebius, a spiritual successor to the Gabriel Knight series that lets players ...

Saints Row IV is everything you might expect if you're a fan of Saints Row The Third. Take a trip through Steelport with our hand's on preview.