Posts By Joe Ryan

What's makes a good horror game? Does it need monsters? Does it need to be set in the dark? Is The Last of Us a horror game or does the genre exist beyond its separate elements? These are just some of the questions that Joe Ryan, Allison Hill and Mat Growcott try to crack on this week's GRCast. Scary games used to be ten a dime, but times have changed and now they're mostly coming from indie publishers. Can they make a full come back, and will Oculus Rift play ...

In our first franchise week, we're looking at Mario Kart. Joe is joined by Adam, Allison and Dakota to discuss the nostalgia of the biggest driving series ever. We'll talk about favourite characters and tracks, battle mode, features we'd like to see added, things they should get rid of, DLC, track building, Reggie's body and Ganon's tiny bike.

Like everyone, I looked at Disney Infinity when it was announced and saw only a money grabbing rip-off of Activision's popular Skylanders series. ANOTHER game where I have to buy overpriced toys to unlock some on-disc DLC? Ridiculous.

So let's say you're a knight. Sweet gig, huh? You own your own land, have a squire to attend to all of the boring and trivial nonsense that you don't feel like dealing with, and all those medieval ladies think that you're just the cat's pajamas. But what do you do when some disgusting monster grabs all of the local Princesses and relocates them to some giant monster infested tower?

If you follow mobile games at all, you'll probably have heard of The Drowning. It's the latest first-person shooter to be brought to iOS and the one that the developers have promised us will revolutionize the control scheme for shooters on touch screens. On top of that, it's a game about some sort of crazy water zombies coming from the ocean to drown all human life.

Le Vamp is another in a seemingly endless run of endless runner games on the App Store. Where many games put you in direct control of a character who has to run, jump, and/or fight for as long as possible, Le Vamp has you acting as the tiny vampire's protector, removing obstacles from his path as he runs from a crowd of angry villagers.

These days, it seems like everyone is trying to breathe new life into the zombie genre. Most developers are looking for the angle that nobody has done before, trying to make zombies terrifying all over again and forcing people to sneak around in the darkness lest they find their tender brains being chewed. What happened to all the fun we used to have with zombies, where we were the ones with all the power and they were just rotten targets, ripe for the ...

Have you ever wanted to manage a company of interstellar mercenaries? Sure, who hasn't? Have you ever wanted to distill the act of managing that company of interstellar mercenaries down to a card game, complete with blind booster packs and rare cards? That...might be a harder sell. However, Rivals at War: 2084 does just that, and manages to be quite fun and engaging for a game that you don't actually play.

Eternal Descent: Heavy Metal Heroes is yet another in a long line of endless runner games that have come to iOS. It's s bit of a stale genre at this point, but everyone is trying to liven it up and find the magic formula to keep gamers coming back for one more go. Eternal Descent tries to hook people in with a screaming heavy metal soundtrack and a number of real metal musicians. Is that enough to hook people who feel the endless runner style is getting a ...

Every spoiled little rich kid has wanted to grab a slingshot and destroy his house while shooting at all the members of his family, right? Okay, so I guess I have no idea. The creators of Naughty Boy decided that this seemed like a decent premise for an iOS game, and they went for it. It's completely ridiculous, but who doesn't want to destroy a mansion armed with only a slingshot?

Pester is a top-scrolling shoot 'em up where you fly your ship against tons of enemy fighters, dodging an occasionally absurd amount of enemy fire, grabbing power-ups and wiping out as much alien scum as you can before you lose all your lives. It's as simple a concept as it ever was, with the arrow buttons controlling your movement.

It would be hard to argue that Magic: the Gathering was not the most popular CCG on the planet. It's been going strong for 20 years now because of the excellent tactical gameplay. While many card games end up being pay-to-win affairs, Magic is balanced in such a way that a good player will nearly always beat a player who has simply spent more money on good cards.

It seems like every game they release these days calls itself a 'survival' game. How many of them actually are? To me, if you are calling a game a survival game, that implies consequence. If you are playing a game and the only consequence of failing to survive is that you have to go back to the last checkpoint, then what you are playing is not a true survival game, in my opinion. I can say one thing with absolute certainty: Don't Starve is a survival game.

Have you ever dreamed of piloting an attack helicopter, loaded up with huge machine guns and enough missiles to level a major metropolitan area? I...have not. And if I had, Thunder Wolves may have turned me off to the whole exercise. Thunder Wolves is a 90s style arcade helicopter game. If you are looking for some sort of helicopter simulation, you'll want to look elsewhere. This is a game about easily piloting one of the most complicated vehicles on the ...

State of Decay is the zombie game that is taking the world by storm, after seeming to come almost out of nowhere. With a distinct lack of marketing dollars spent on the game, it's incredible to see how word of mouth has sold so many people on surviving a zombie apocalypse. But when you actually play the game, it's easy to see why the word of mouth is so positive. Despite a few issues, State of Decay is essentially the zombie game that people have been asking ...