Posts By Mat Growcott

It was a rough start, but gambling is now hugely popular in Canada. 65 per cent of Canadians old enough to gamble will place an online bet in the coming year – a percentage that explains the $15m in sports betting. It’s true that until relatively recently, gambling within Canada was no easy feat. Premises had to be run by or licensed by the provincial government. Naturally, you could play online on sites meant for other country. But that just…

Since slot machines have existed, there have been people who have tried to trick them. Hint: you can’t. Groups of wannabe cheaters were certain that if you just held the handle in the right way, pulled at the right speed, that you could play the system. With just a gentle touch, you could beat the machine. There have always been people willing to put fantasy ahead of reality. Slot machines can’t be cheated, and that’s even more true for ...

The wait has been enough to drive a person crazy, but Psychonauts 2 is finally available to play. The beloved indie darling has lost none of its charm being developed by a now fully-fledged Microsoft studio. Instead, it’s a must-play platformer that justifies itself over and over again. Because realistically, a sequel to Psychonauts could have been a disaster. Reviving any classic is tough, especially when there was only ever one entry. But Double Fine ...

In a world of difficult customer support processes, jargon-filled FAQs and oblique policies, Steam feels like a breath of fresh air. If you’ve played a game for less than two hours within 14 days of purchase, you get your refund. You literally can’t say fairer than that – unless you’re an indie developer. Because the system is absolutely ripe for abuse if your game is less than two hours long, and customers are frequently taking ...

2021 isn’t going to be a good holiday season for Sony now that Horizon 2 has been delayed. With blockbusters looking few and far between, a lot of the talk about “the power of exclusives” has aged like milk. This year the viability of the PlayStation 5 will hinge on third-party exclusives and older games, such as Spider-Man: Miles Morales. If you want to play Battlefield or Call of Duty, you can do it here. Albeit, probably at a slightly…

There’s a reason New Jersey is so often one of the first places online casinos open their doors in America. Their gambling laws are some of the least restrictive in the US, and that means they’re always a good choice for companies looking for a new base of operations. There’s a long history of gambling in New Jersey, going back hundreds of years. That’s a tradition that is still going on today, with online casinos starting their ...

In this modern world, the days of putting actual physical coins into a machine feel long, long gone. We’re used to instant pay using credit cards and Paypal, next-day delivery and 24/7 customer support. And with all that, we always expect to be able to pay in ways that are easy and convenient. That’s true in gambling, too. The good news is that casinos are quick to keep up with changing trends, and there are no endless ways of paying…

It doesn’t take much to find a casino on the internet. There’s hundreds of them. But the biggest players have so much control over Google via advertising that it can make finding a casino that’s local to you quite difficult. Finding one that meets all your needs AND is local can be even harder. So what can you do? You can either cave in and just use one of the big international players or you can be a little more…

Kingdom Hearts is a mess of mixed genres, overlapping storylines and convoluted writing, and yet we still love it. Its cheesy optimism and tight gameplay – not to mention the much-loved cameos – makes it a must-play for anybody with a heart (sorry, Nobodies). Melody of Memory takes all of that and basically just dumps it in the bin, replacing the best of the franchise with a self-indulgent Theatrhythm clone. And that’s not to say it’s ...

Be warned: if you want to go in fresh with Halo Infinite this November, you’ll want to be very, very careful. Parts of the story have leaked and, as usual, trolls are trying to ruin it for the rest of us. Test flighting for the game’s multiplayer mode has been going on for the last few days. But developers accidentally included story points within the file. Of course, it didn’t take long for them to get out. Now people are…