Defend Your Castle, one of the first titles released in North America through Nintendo’s newly minted WiiWare service, is less a game than it is a distraction, a simple and clever-looking novelty that baits you with some simple strategy that ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere. You might call it a time-waster, but not a complete […]
There’s something to be said for knowing your limitations and just doing what you do well. While it has taken a few forays into the polygonal realm, it seems that the Castlevania series has found its home on handhelds, having had success in recent years on both the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. […]
Konami showed off a fair amount of Silent Hill: Homecoming (or as I like to call it, SHH!) at its press event last night, and as a bit of a Silent Hill outsider, the differences between SHH and past entries weren’t immediately apparent to me. Running on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware will […]
You may not realize this, but Konami actually invented this whole Guitar Hero/Rock Band craze around a decade ago with a pair of Japanese games called Guitar Freaks and Drummania. Outside of some occasional arcade appearances, the two games were usually only known to importers and crazy people back then.
As an importer, and an occasionally […]
The best thing about the way everyone involved with Gears of War 2 keeps calling it “bigger, better, more badass” is that it makes me think we’re all talking about the Neo Geo, which everyone knows is “bigger, badder, and better.” After all, it’s 24-bits. I have no segue here. Let’s talk Gears 2.
You’ve probably […]
I had convinced myself that Viva Pinata was going to slowly fade away after Party Animals, a minigame collection that I managed to completely avoid, came and went extremely quickly. So I was pretty excited to see word of a true sequel to the original game. That game, known as Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, […]
People have been speculating about what a third Banjo-Kazooie game would look like, and some of the guesses got pretty wild. But I don’t think anyone was quite expecting this. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts seems like it’ll have plenty of actual, honest-to-goodness on-foot platforming in it, but the series is going in a pretty different […]
Good evening, party people! If you’ve listened to the podcast already, then you know that there was a Microsoft event today, known as the “2008 Xbox 360 Spring Showcase.” I have returned from said event and am about to start writing articles about the games I saw. Actually, I’m about to blow my nose, then […]
We give ourselves heart murmurs with too many energy drinks as we discuss the nuts and bolts of Banjo-Kazooie, the mashup potential of Guitar Hero IV, Super Mario Bros. 4, Lego Pulp Fiction, the semantics of Hell, and more!
Boom Blox is one of those products that blurs the line between game and toy. While it has the levels and general structure needed to provide you with a clear sense of progression through its challenges, there’s something to be said for just tossing bowling balls into huge towers of blocks and letting physics take […]
So yeah, we got a copy of The DOG Island for the Wii in the mail today. Apparently it’s pretty good.
So I saw this on Joystiq this morning, but after clicking through all of the “we saw this on this other site” links it traces back to a UK game site called DarkZero, who apparently did some actual listening during Activision’s quarterly earnings call and discovered that the company is giving Tony Hawk the year […]
In some weird alternate dimension, arcades still matter in North America and the classic quarter-sucking games of the 80s and 90s are still absolving us of our pocket change while simultaneously keeping us out of the house under the guise of “going out and doing stuff.” In that reality, Target: Terror came out and was […]
During my time with Mario Kart Wii, the theory was proposed to me that Nintendo has ceased trying to evolve its franchises, opting instead to simply remake their trademark games for each new generation of players, and I think the Mario Kart franchise serves as a powerful Exhibit A for this argument. In my experience, […]
We found this WORLD EXCLUSIVE footage of Fight Night Round 4’s all-new Classic Interview mode… OK, whatever, I can’t keep up the lame joke. This amazing Mike Tyson footage speaks for itself. But keep in mind that it frequently speaks in shocking slurs and filthy curses before you hit play on it.
So, given that this […]
Some portions of the Internet are ablaze today, as the news of how the protection schemes used to stop people from bootlegging Mass Effect and Spore on the PC will work has come out. Most of the reporting sites are tracing the news back to Derek French, a technical producer at BioWare, who posted the […]
We hit the redline with the latest from Sony, a treatise on Card Sharks, free Rock Band songs, modular solutions for virtual modern living, the future of X-COM, Dr. Dre Kart Racing, and plenty of GTA4. That’s how you play the game!
In your first several hours with Grand Theft Auto IV, it’s easy to want to approach it with a checklist of expectations and start comparing it to what you think a “next-generation” Grand Theft Auto game should be.
- New carjacking animations? Check.
- Improved gunplay? Check.
- GPS on the map? Check.
- Corny-yet-still-somehow-funny jokes? Check.
It’s natural […]
The things about Polyphony Digital’s driving simulation series that have kept me at bay over the years–the self-serious tone, the unapologetic driving model–seem to have been softened up a little bit with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, at least enough to allow me to appreciate the painstaking detail that goes into making what is essentially a […]