Posts By Charles Battersby

Badland might be crammed into the category of an “Autorunner”, the genre of gaming where characters zoom along the screen and players just need to hit a jump button at the right moment. But the character in Badland doesn’t actually run; it’s a weird furball that flies, and players have to tap the screen of the iPhone to flap its wings and keep it afloat. It’s an “Autoflapper” if you will, but that doesn’t even begin to describe this unusual and engrossing ...

When Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater came out in 2004 the world had gone past fear of a Third World War and shifted its focus to the War On Terror. Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles were passé, replaced by thoughts of Dirty Bombs. So instead of setting Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in the near future, Kojima Productions chose a Cold War setting filled with quaint talk about the good old days when people only feared mutually assured destruction. Now, nearly ...

When Braid hit the Xbox, it was a wake up call to indie developers. Smart and simple games could flourish in this new generation of high-powered graphics. The Bridge is an indie 2D puzzle game where players control time and gravity to guide a man through a distorted world of M. C. Escher geometry. The Bridge owes much to Braid, both for paving the way for other indie games, but also for the quiet thoughtful tone that both games share.

Saints Row III seems like a hard sell. It’s essentially “Grand Theft Auto… But More OUTRAGEOUS” and it’s easy to imagine consumers thinking that GTA is already sufficiently outrageous. However, while the GTA franchise uses satire as a form of comic relief, that series is really a gritty crime drama at heart. Saints Row The Third is actually the opposite of Grand Theft Auto. Saints Row The Third is almost entirely focused on comedy with just a pinch of ...

Chivalry Medieval Warfare released at the end of last year as a surprisingly good sword- fighting game from an independent studio. It successfully captured the finesse and brutality of hand-to-hand combat in the middle ages, but it had a few clear flaws. The handful of maps and game modes grew repetitive, and highly-skilled players often found themselves besieged by swarms of button mashers. The developer, Torn Banner Studios has released a large, free patch to ...

When Super Mario Bros. arrived, beating the game was a source of pride for most players. Those with poor reflexes or a low threshold for frustration would fizzle out before finally finding the right castle and saving the princess, but more tenacious players would stick it out, replaying the levels over and over until they could zoom through Mario’s adventure with perfect precision and timing. Eventually, merely beating the game wasn't enough, and the question ...