Posts By Mat Growcott

It’s Sunday afternoon in the summer. You’ve just eaten a big meal and you’re settling down to an hour in front of the TV. Battletoads. You blow the cartridge and put it in. Maybe, just maybe, this’ll be the time you make it past the second level. But probably not, because frankly you suck at this game. Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. If it wasn’t Battletoads, it might have been Mario, Punch Out, Ninja Gaiden or any ...

Once upon a time, games were made to work as well as possible, and any janky physics or annoying glitches were the result of mistakes or oversights by developers. Today, as with Brunch Club, janky physics and annoying glitches are the game. Apparently it’s fun. We’ve seen it time and time again. Goat Simulator and Surgeon Simulator put their awfulness front and centre. The only reason to buy into it is the memes. Brunch Club isn’t that bad, ...

This week’s deep dive into the Xbox Series X has proven what a lot of us already know: this console is going to be a beast. Edging out the PS5 in terms of raw power and with the potential of things like machine learning on top, this could well be the greatest generation for Xbox fans. But don’t take my word for it, it’s Microsoft that has to prove themselves. But that’s where all this falls down, because thus far…

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’ ...