Genres

Final Fantasy VII is a classic. Its story, its score, its mechanics - for many this was the game that defined what RPGs should be. With another re-release, this time on Steam, Square Enix proves time is no barrier to a decent game, although a little polish might serve to get rid of the dust.

Painkiller: Hell and Damnation is an arena shooter not entirely unlike Unreal Tournament or Quake. It's a corner of the FPS genre that's been ignored in mainstream shooters for the vast majority of this generation, with the exception of Unreal Tournament 3, which VGChartz tells me only sold around a million units on consoles, and Serious Sam, a franchise which has evened out at around the 60-70 mark on Metacritic.

Contra Evolution Introduction Remakes are a finicky endeavor; nostalgic gamers might enjoy updated graphics and sound with their favorite old titles, but messing with classic gameplay elements is a big no-no. For others, remakes are an opportunity to make an old game better, taking the framework and name of the original and dressing it up with modern game mechanics. Contra: Evolution – which finally released in the App Store this week after debuting in China a few months earlier –…

Garfield has eaten too much - as always - and has decided that he needs to take a nap - as always. He's not likely to get an easy sleep, however, because as soon as his head hits the pillow, he's transported to a mysterious dream world where he can fly by flapping his arms, collect flying lasagne, dodge UFOs and pay exuberant prices for costumes that don't actually matter. Welcome to Garfield's Wild Ride.

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is perhaps Sierra's most notorious adventure game. While it's not as crafted as their later work, creator Al Lowe managed to make it and its sequels cult classics in the eyes of the many that played the series of adventure titles released in the late 1980s and throughout the '90s.

I love when great games are born from mods. Take Day Z for example, originally a mod for Arma II and is now getting its own standalone title because of its popularity. Cry of Fear is a mod of Half Life 1 but, unlike Day Z, it has its own complete style. What I mean by that is Team Psykskallar, the developers of the game, only used the Half Life source engine and basic code to make Cry of Fear. Everything else in the game (textures, sounds, models) are all made exclusively by Team Psykskallar making the game a very unique experience. If no one told me, I would ...

It would be hard to argue that Magic: the Gathering was not the most popular CCG on the planet. It's been going strong for 20 years now because of the excellent tactical gameplay. While many card games end up being pay-to-win affairs, Magic is balanced in such a way that a good player will nearly always beat a player who has simply spent more money on good cards.

Never a fan of torturous hardcore platformers, Ravenous Games' League of Evil stole my heart in 2011 with its magnificent controls and pixelated graphic style. Not only did it kick off the well-loved (and hated) "retro" trend that captured the App Store for the next year or so, but it also showed that iOS was a serious gaming platform, one capable of precise controls and infectious, original ideas. After ditching the pixel art style and dialing down the difficulty with last year's League of Evil 2, Ravenous returns to the well once again with League of Evil ...

Poor design choices and a fundamentally broken experience leave a queasiness-inducing taste, making this a game should have been tested behind closed doors and never released to the public.

It seems like every game they release these days calls itself a 'survival' game. How many of them actually are? To me, if you are calling a game a survival game, that implies consequence. If you are playing a game and the only consequence of failing to survive is that you have to go back to the last checkpoint, then what you are playing is not a true survival game, in my opinion. I can say one thing with absolute certainty: Don't Starve is a survival game.