Posts By Mat Growcott

The CMA in the UK has given its initial verdict on Microsoft’s purchase of Activision – and it’s not necessarily good news. But it isn’t bad news either. The CMA has basically said that the potential of removing Call of Duty from PlayStation could cause harm to consumers, and the purchase would make it difficult for other companies to break into the cloud gaming market. These don’t really stand up to scrutiny. That’s okay, ...

Add this to the list of reviews I didn’t think I’d be writing in 2023. Goldeneye 007 was a killer app on the N64, and is legendary in the console FPS world. But how does the new remaster hold up? 007 played by Pierce Brosnan makes an unexpected (and difficult) return to our screens in the guise of a slightly improved emulation of the original game. That’s not to say that it isn’t improved. The control scheme makes it immensely…

It has been over a year since Microsoft announced its intention to buy Activision. And it’s been a long year. Well, this week may well be the beginning of the end. Here’s where we are now. The FTC in America has opposed the deal, in a move that shocked analysts and fans. In an effort to reel-in Big Tech, the body created its own “high-end” gaming market that excluded PC and inadvertently turned the Nintendo Switch into a monopoly of…

Today reports have hit saying that Halo is having something of a reboot. It’ll change engines, staff have been laid off and focus is more on multiplayer for now, rather than additional single player content. That’s according to Bloomberg. And while job layoffs are never a good thing, a deeper look at the future of Halo definitely is. And I say that as someone that thoroughly enjoyed Halo Infinite for a little while there. It’s not that it ...

Goldeneye is still the incredible game we always knew it was. That confirmation, as if confirmation was needed, came with its re-release on Xbox and Switch this week. But with every re-release, there comes the shocked voices of those who miss the obvious. Old games are old. There aren’t quality of life features. The controls are a little more complicated than they need to be. The textures look like someone threw up in gravel and smeared them on the ...

With all the talk about The Last of Us, and the popularity of “film-like” games, it’s got me to thinking. When is a game a game? What basic elements of interactivity create something that just can’t be chopped up and placed into another medium? Ironically, the game that made me start thinking of this was Telling Lies. On the surface, it’s about as filmic as you can get. You scrub through actual video, clicking words in the ...

The Last of Us is a TV show now, and a million websites have declared it the end of the Video Game adaption curse. But at this point it’s just a talking point. This article won’t touch on The Last of Us – I’m not watching it until the series is finished – but instead on the hype around every new video game adaption as finally “breaking the curse”. It happened with Sonic, it happened with Mortal Kombat and it…

Survival horror has returned. Resident Evil isn’t a punchline anymore, and there are any number of big and small games for genre fans to sink their teeth into – some of them might even be pretty good. Nightmare of Decay expertly uses this to take us back to a simpler time. It’s first-person, but don’t read too much into that. This is a love letter to the old Resident Evil games, where you would explore sprawling buildings, fight the ...

Sonic Frontiers is the best Sonic game in a generation. If you’re running faster than the blue blur to tell me that isn’t saying much, congratulations. You win Internet Original of the Day. But believe me when I say this is a new direction for the former console mascot. Do you remember the Saturday morning cartoon Sonic? He could seemingly run on any surface, leaping from one area to another in a blue line, impossible to see. That was the…

My round-up of 2023 glossed over third party support. In a year that’s going to be dominated by first party bighitters, it seemed like there just wasn’t the space. But here we go: a closer look at some of the third party games that we’ll be talking about this time next year too. Some of them we’ll be talking about positively, others not so much. Some will surprise, others will disappoint. I’ve tried to avoid timed exclusives ...