Posts By Mat Growcott

It's impossible to judge Deadly Premonition on any traditional scale. The graphics are laughable, the gameplay bland and repetitive, the basic mechanics borderline broken and the script filled with (hopefully intentional) cheesy lines. It is, by almost any measure, a terrible game. Except it isn't.

Penguin Party is a new PlayStation Mobile title available on PlayStation certified devices and Vita, and although a lot of core gamers will dismiss it based on its design and content, the child-friendly visuals and anthropomorphic penguins hide what's actually quite a challenging puzzle game, and a title in the same vein as old favourites like Chu Chu Rocket.

Square Enix have today released a fresh batch of screens for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Showing off some beautiful landscapes, you can tell XIV is a Final Fantasy game regardless of its MMO-status. If nothing else comes of A Realm Reborn and it releases to another round of "meh," at least those who enjoyed the original release and are looking to continue supporting Square will have some nice things to look at.

EU PlayStation Plus members may be getting something a little more strategy-based over the coming months, maybe as soon as in the July content update. As an IP that’s spent quite a while out of the limelight, it would make sense to expose as many people to the XCOM franchise as possible before 2K start pushing The Bureau towards its August release date, and releasing Enemy Unknown through the Plus service would be a great way to accomplish that. It…

FuturLab is a developer that, within only a handful of games, have gained a following for their dedication to creating fun, simple titles that are enjoyable, addictive and great value for money. From Coconut Dodge, through Velocity and onto the several titles they created for PlayStation Mobile, FuturLab are behind some of the very best titles available on PSP and Vita. This week sees the release of a Vita-specific version of Velocity, Velocity Ultra, that ...

On path to beating Bioshock Infinite for the amount of time it’s been in first place on the UK software charts, Dead Island: Riptide only needs to stay in first place next week for it to be the only game to last four weeks at the top in 2013. Bioshock Infinite itself has dropped down to number 6, with a lot of familiar faces filling the gaps between. Black Ops II, which had previously dropped out of the top ten,…

Have you ever been tempted to knock over a few mailboxes? How about whilst driving a tank and whilst dressed as Kim Jong Un? Mobile games need to be easy to pick up, easy to play, humorous (or at least accessible) and playable in short snippets over a long time. Mailboxing is all of those things. It's such an ideal mobile game, in fact, that it may just end up being the new must-play on the App Store.

With one of the funniest trailers of 2013 behind it, Leviathan: Warships was perhaps something that initially caught people off guard. Armed with an abso-boat load of terrible puns, people took to this game like a... well... a boat to water. The downside of this was that as soon as they'd bought and downloaded their new purchase, they realized that the voice in the trailer had been just that: a voice for the trailer. The jokes had been written to lure ...

Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter is one of the biggest free-to-play MMO games of the year, offering classic RPG elements within a massively multiplayer action environment. Developed by Cryptic games, the team that built Champions Online and Star Trek Online, and published by Perfect World, the beta received a lot of attention and impressed thousands of new fans. Whether you loved Dungeons & Dragons, dungeon running, online gaming or just classic RPGs, the balance ...

It's not unusual for a fan of video games to believe the industry is going wrong somehow. Through the use of DLC and the like, they feel the industry is losing what is most important to it: the games. With the likes of Game Dev Story giving these same fans the opportunity to do things differently, a new subset of the "Tycoon" genre has been born. Publisher Dream, a new title recently released for DSi and 3DS (via DSiWare), is one of those games, but how ...