Posts By Mat Growcott

A Final Fantasy VII speed runner this morning missed out on the world record by only a few minutes. After a few random attacks cost him minutes during his run, he finally died in one of the final boss battles and he was forced to give up. It had taken him only a little over seven and a half hours to get there.

Santa Monica have teased a God of War announcement of some sort via Twitter. Is it a big announcement, or is it something tiny? A map pack or a new game? All we know at this point is that it's on its way. The Instagram link is of a short video that shows a group fighting in a coliseum of sorts. The rest is entirely a mystery.

The Last of Us has now spent longer at the top of the UK charts than any other game of the year. Naughty Dog's latest has now been top of the list for six weeks, equalizing with records held by Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and FIFA 14. While this is definitely great news for fans of the game, that it has set this record says more about the games that are releasing alongside it than it does The Last of Us itself.

Painkiller definitely isn't in the running for best game in the world, but it can still be quite fun, when crippling slowdown and constant repetition aren't getting in the way. Even so, you'll need a lot of patience if you plan to get all of these. It'll require you to play a lot of online (almost impossible with no one playing) and do absolutely everything the single player offers (more than once), but that platinum trophy can be yours. Especially if you use ...

Namco Bandai have announced that they’re bringing back one of the most popular fighting games of all time. Soulcalibur II was originally released for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube. That was ten years ago, and for its anniversary it’ll be seeing a HD port to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and will be available for purchase in the autumn. It won’t only be improved graphics, however. With any modern fighting game, one of the most important ...

If you've been watching gaming communities over the last few months, you'll have noticed a mantra of sorts beginning to form. It tends to be some variation on "if you give us what we want, we'll buy it." It's a noble idea, but one that's not quite true.

A publisher is looking for freelance writers who are willing to dish the dirt on Apple. They're looking for someone who has, preferably through a child, "lost a fortune" on games purchased from the App Store. The publisher is willing to pay $1000 to anybody willing to tell the story, so long as there's proof to go along with it.

Dynasty Warriors 8 isn't a huge improvement over Dynasty Warriors 7, but with its remained focus on a cinematic form of story telling, and with a far more technically sound gameplay, Dynasty Warriors 8 manages to be the best, most accessible game in the franchise so far.

007 Legends was released on Wii U at the end of last year, and if it had been the only first person shooter available on the system, it might have been enough to kill the genre entirely. It's not that it's actively bad - not when compared with the likes of Ride to Hell: Retribution - but it might be the very definition of generic shooter. The Bond licence has had some stinkers attached to it, but this one is something else.

A page on the Square Enix website has people asking whether Final Fantasy XIII’s Lightning might just end up making a cameo appearance in the newly remastered Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD. The Final Fantasy Go There page (which seems like a 30 Rock joke, I know) describes several of the crossovers coming to upcoming Final Fantasy titles. Already mentioned are Lightning Returns and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, both of which have bonus cameo costumes. The ...

Deadly Premonition is coming to PC. Offering a heady mix of terrible controls and gameplay, silly scripting but deep characterisation, Deadly Premonition is the very definition of a community-splitting game. It'll be the director's cut as well, so there's the new scenario, "enhanced" graphics (which bring it up to PS2 standards) and the reworked control scheme (which still sucks).

Ubisoft have announced that 40 of the levels from Rayman Origins will end up in Legends. Not only that, but they'll each recieve a graphical update so that they look as good as the original levels of Rayman Legends. There were 66 levels in Rayman Origins, and if you take away the bonus and mosquito-focussed levels, that's probably the whole game.

Forza 5 will not be finished when it ships, Turn 10 has revealed. Instead, users will have to download some of the content before they're allowed to play. Users that hate big patches and launch (and nobody can really blame them) will be unhappy to learn that the developers behind the latest Forza are taking as much time as they have available to build and polish the content. While this means an inconvenience to the end user, it also means that the product ...

There seems to have been a lot of confusion on this one, but Microsoft have confirmed that you will be able to play from a partial download on the Xbox One. The PS4 can do it too - it was a feature they explained quite heavily. This is a rather important feature for those that plan to buy digital (and it's one that I hope Valve are working on for Steam), so it's nice to see that everybody is on an even field.

SEGA, in a new trailer unveiled yesterday, have announced that Sonic: Lost World for the Wii U and 3DS will have shape-shifting power-ups, not entirely unlike Sonic Colors for the Wii. These new powers allow him to transform into a bird, into a musical note, and into the drill that first made its appearance in Colors. This will cause mixed reaction amongst fans, as some (those who didn't play it, mainly) weren't impressed by this particular feature.