Posts By Mat Growcott

I’ve spent a hell of a lot of hours with Lara Croft this last month. What started in Shadow of the Tomb Raider as a cool action-adventure has turned into an endurance test: a tomb challenge of monotony. Throwing her off cliffs repeatedly only relieves the annoyance so much. When, oh when, did games like this stop being fun and start just being really big? Ah, I remember the heady moment I decided to platinum Shadow. I was younger then,…

Most of the news around coronavirus has been painfully negative. There has been one small glow of hope: the backlog has taken a bashing. Sunny afternoons with soft drinks, ice cream, a cool breeze and an afternoon playing a favourite game felt like a thing of the past, but 2020 has offered it in spades. I can only talk for myself – I’d still need another six or seven years of this to make a dent – but overall that…

Clint Eastwood walks out into the street, his whiskey-faced opponent staring him down from what seems like a mile away. The sun burns, but it’s not the heat that’s making them both sweat. Soon one of them could be dead. They stare at each other. And stare. Then there’s some more staring. Thirty minutes later, no shot fired, and everybody in the cinema has gone home. No film director would ever make such a mistake, but apparently major console ...

Fans of Sony’s Dualshock 4 controller will have to give up their device if they plan to play on PlayStation 5, the company has confirmed. The new console will drop support for the Dualshock 4 on all new games. The classic controller will instead be used for PS4 titles played via backwards compatibility. Sony confirmed gamers would be unable to take their equipment fully forward with them today. “We believe that PS5 games should take advantage of ...

Fingerboarding, along with having really, really good Pokemon, was one of the main ways of proving you were cool when I was in school. I remember it well – wearing a leather jacket and awesome sunglasses, armed with a stick used to beat off the girls, I’d flick my way through the schoolyard with my tiny skateboard. It wasn’t the size though, dear reader, it was what you did with it, and that sums up my experience with Skater XL…

Did you hear? Microsoft don’t see Sony as a competitor anymore. They don’t believe in generations. Hell, they don’t even care how many Series X consoles they sell. None of that is true, by the way, but don’t let that get in the way of a good dig at Xbox. It’s easier to pretend your most hated piece of plastic is a mess when you choose to follow carefully selected pieces of propaganda instead of, I don’t know, reading the…

We’ve seen 4k/60fps, we’ve seen raytraced lighting and ridiculously pretty textures – but if you believe the chatter on forums, we still haven’t seen next-gen. Why? Because armchair experts and fanboys would rather water down the medium with bitching than spend even a second getting excited. It’s happened all over again with the Xbox conference this week. The most rabid in our community have declared it ‘Not Next-Gen’ ...

Making choices in video games is a bit like a cool morris dancer or an ideal candidate for dealing with Brexit – they don’t exist. Even in games that pretend to offer decision after decision to affect your play, the reality is that you have only two choices. You can keep playing or you can turn it off. That’s it. That might sound reductionist, and in many ways it is, but think about it. Developers make a world that they…

Remaking Final Fantasy VII is like having a second stab at Harry Potter or taking a shot at Sgt Peppers. There’s something about it that just feels dirty.

Resident Evil is the franchise on everybody’s lips. Gamers are preparing to buy the second entry in their millions, Capcom is pushing the genre forward with every new title and fans can’t wait to see what happens next. The year is 1998 – and the bubble is about to burst. The reaction to the first trailer for the second REmake has been almost universally positive, and rightly so. It was different, but in a way that embraced both the old…