Genres

To say the Monster Hunter series is big in Japan is an understatement. These third-person action RPGs are positively huge in the Land of the Rising Sun, so much so that they played a major role in popularizing the PSP. However, Monster Hunter Fever hasn't quite found its way to the West. It does have a devoted cult following in North America and Europe, but their numbers aren't large enough to make Capcom's beast slaying franchise a household name. Regardless, Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate (MH3U), the latest installment, has been generating some buzz and might ...

Introduction Zombies. Not only a plague on humanity but also a plague on the entertainment industry. They’ve become pretty popular in recent years. Why? Did it start with the addition of the Zombies mode in the COD games or do we have the Resident Evil films to thank for it? No matter the reason, it seems killing mindless zombies is going be around for a while yet.  As someone who has never seen the AMC TV series, nor read any…

Star Command is easily some of the most fun I have ever had on iOS and is a game that you almost have to have if you play on your phone or tablet. If you've heard of Star Command at all, you will likely understand the appeal straight away. Take a starship and build all the rooms inside, then hire a bunch of crew members and take to the stars while looking at some interesting planets (always from a distance, unfortunately) and destroying strange and hostile aliens.

Cyberpunk RPGs aren't very common in gaming, so I'm always intrigued when I hear about a developer taking the genre for a spin. Mars: War Logs is the most recent post-apocalyptic RPG to surface, but the game's developer, Spiders, decided to throw a future Mars colony into catastrophe instead of Earth civilizations. This gives War Logs some unique qualities compared to most other games of its ilk, and the change is refreshing. However, despite all of this, it's held back by some unfortunate flaws.

In general terms, if you've played one LEGO title, you've played 'em all. Though each series features different, property-specific mechanics (like the spells in the Harry Potter titles), the concept never changes. Watch a cut scene, enter a room, smash and bash everything in sight, solve a puzzle, repeat. There's certainly nothing wrong with this; when it comes to simplistic third-person platformers, LEGO's created a specific niche that only collecting golden nuts and bolts can fill.

Since the original ‘Luigi's Mansion’ released for the GameCube in 2002, fans and enthusiasts have been yearning for another opportunity at ghost hunting. Nintendo’s E3 conference in 2011 left gamers in awe after the unexpected but welcome announcement of Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon, a sequel to the original game, for the 3DS. Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon does a great job, not only with improving the ghost hunting mechanics but also by adding quirky personalities to ghosts and allies alike, making for an incredibly charming experience.

Have you ever been tempted to knock over a few mailboxes? How about whilst driving a tank and whilst dressed as Kim Jong Un? Mobile games need to be easy to pick up, easy to play, humorous (or at least accessible) and playable in short snippets over a long time. Mailboxing is all of those things. It's such an ideal mobile game, in fact, that it may just end up being the new must-play on the App Store.

With one of the funniest trailers of 2013 behind it, Leviathan: Warships was perhaps something that initially caught people off guard. Armed with an abso-boat load of terrible puns, people took to this game like a... well... a boat to water. The downside of this was that as soon as they'd bought and downloaded their new purchase, they realized that the voice in the trailer had been just that: a voice for the trailer. The jokes had been written to lure people in, and those same people didn't actually watch the trailer for the game they were so desperate to buy.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have had a rough run the last two decades; what began as a mid-80s comic book grew into a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s. Most kids I grew up with had the TMNT lunch box, the action figures, we watched the cartoons... and then over time, with a few bad studio film sequels and a failed live-action TV show, the pizza-loving turtles slowly disappeared from the public eye, save for a few attempted reboots (including a well-received cartoon series, and the recently announced Michael Bay film) over the past fifteen years. So ...

It's not unusual for a fan of video games to believe the industry is going wrong somehow. Through the use of DLC and the like, they feel the industry is losing what is most important to it: the games. With the likes of Game Dev Story giving these same fans the opportunity to do things differently, a new subset of the "Tycoon" genre has been born. Publisher Dream, a new title recently released for DSi and 3DS (via DSiWare), is one of those games, but how effective is it in allowing you to make your publisher dreams come true?