Posts By Mat Growcott

The yearly average spend for gamers has dropped over the last five years, a survey from VoucherCodesPro has revealed. While a little over a quarter of the gamers questioned still claimed to buy at least one game a month, over half of those surveyed said they are buying less games now than they were five years ago. Only a fifth said they only bought titles that really interested them, and 1% claimed to buy games weekly. Now there’s a one…

One of the biggest things missing from the Virtual Console on Wii and 3DS has to have been Earthbound. The classic RPG, called Mother 2 in Japan, is constantly named one of the best games of the SNES era, and western players needed to either pay exuberant prices for an original copy or turn to piracy. That’s why one of the most exciting announcements to come out of yesterday’s Nintendo Direct had to be the fact that Earthbound is heading…

It was a fantastic day to be a Zelda fan yesterday, especially if you've been waiting for something new to play on your 3DS. During the Nintendo Direct, a couple of classic portable Zelda titles were announced to be coming to the 3DS Virtual Console, while those after a purely new experience got their fill as well.

Sand Slides has a very simple premise. Coloured sand will fall from the top of the screen, and you must make sure that that sand falls into the right coloured funnel. You do this by creating slides, using the touch screen to direct the grains as they drop. This starts off fairly easy - some of the sand drops right down into the right funnel - but it's not long before you're having to crisscross slides and collect sand in "buckets." It's both ingeniously simple ...

Saints Row 4 is coming out in a few months, and today we got a small hint at what we can expect from the title when it’s released. Although hidden in the Steam client and on the website, you can use SteamDB to go through the Steam registry and find a page for Saints Row Episode 4. In the past few days, the achievements for that game have been added to that database entry. On top of the usual “complete…

Bioshock Infinite, the critically acclaimed sequel to 2007's Bioshock, remains in first place in the UK sales charts this week, although sales have dropped 44%. That gives you some indication of the state of the chart, with older games dominating the top 10.

If you’re not the sort of person who believes in fair play, there’s another reason you probably shouldn’t start searching for hacks on the internet. AVG have this morning released a press release warning that up to 90% of game hacks contain (or just are) malware.  From the press release: “Even if we assume that just 0.1% of the gamers playing the top five titles go looking for a hack – a highly conservative estimate – that means 330,000 ...

If you're interested in Kameo, RARE or game development in general, you won't be able to pass up the golden opportunity of swimming through over 5 hours of music from Kameo: Elements of Power. The original composer, Steve Burke, has released well over 250 tracks for absolutely nothing. Although some of the music made it to the eventual Xbox 360 release, much of it is from earlier in development, from the time the game ran on Gamecube and on the original Xbox. ...

Artwork for Assassin's Creed Duel, an unannounced, unreleased 2.5D fighter from Ubisoft, has surfaced, showing off what such a game might just have looked like. Alongside some of the biggest names from the Assassin's Creed series, Duel would have apparently had a few other famous Ubi faces as playable characters. It would have been a digital release on the PlayStation Network and on Xbox Live Arcade.

Digital Chocolate, the company behind Kings and Warlords(the producer of which we interviewed at the beginning of this month), launched a new game this week. Blackjack! Buzz, with its slightly quicker edge, is a more social game than the Blackjack you know and love. Taking a cue from the likes of Draw Something, Blackjack! Buzz pairs you against strangers who you must out-score. The higher the cards in your hand are worth, the higher your score when you decide ...