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Karateka – Review
Mariko, just like every winsome princess trapped against her will in a castle, longs to be rescued. But being rescued isn’t her only longing. There is, of course, the delicate matter of the rescuer. Salvation is all well and good, but the specifics of the saviour are just as important. Who’s the face behind the ...
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Fable: The Journey – Review
Motion control cannot be recalled. It cannot be uninvented. But, like the fake plastic guitars of the past, the stereoscopic 3D of the future and all those other tech gimmicks that sizzle in and fizzle out, it will in time be removed from our video games. In that sense Fable: The Journey feels like a ...
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Resident Evil 6 – Review
“I can’t believe this is happening again. It’s just like Raccoon.” Leon S. Kennedy’s reference to the first town overrun by zombies in Capcom’s long-running survival horror series is pregnant with meaning. At face value, it’s the eye-rolling incredulity of a zombie-thwacking protagonist thrown into the familiar peril of a sequel: ‘This again? Really?’ But ...
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Rhythm Paradise – Review
Did Nintendo’s Wii drown under the weight of its mini-games? If that’s true, then the unwitting architect of its destruction was Yoshio Sakamoto, creator of the Metroid series and Nintendo’s Dark Mario to the primary-coloured innocence of its better-known star designer, Shigeru Miyamoto. It was his game, WarioWare Inc. – a rudely creative reduction of ...
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Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy – Review
At first glance, Square Enix’s decision to celebrate its treasured fantasy series’ 25th birthday with a rhythm action game appears a curious one. The company has no experience making music games, while Final Fantasy itself, in its heft and epic sprawl, has nothing in common with a genre built upon three-and-a-half-minute pop foundations and an ...
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Pixeljunk 4AM – Review
Neither music game nor music software, PixelJunk 4AM is perhaps best described as a music toy. Somewhere buried beneath the ambient visuals and arcane interface, Q Games’ latest is built upon the well-worn fundamentals of multi-track mixing. But rather than providing players with faders and channels and the other familiar features of the mixing desk, ...
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Game of the Year: Portal 2
It’s gaming’s oldest trick: the mute protagonist, allowing us to project our own thoughts, words and humanity onto the blank slate avatar. But Portal 2′s silent heroine Chell invites us to identify with her in deeper ways. She is the white-collar worker in all of us, awakened to the corrupt, abusive system in which she ...
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Game of 2011: Dark Souls
A hazy myth, an elegant contraption, an eccentric vision, an unforgiving mistress: Dark Souls has many sides. All bear the fingerprints of creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, who in 2011 established himself as the most interesting designer working in blockbuster games today. Not that this, sequel to Sony-born Demon’s Souls, has much aside from giant sales figures ...
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Sonic CD
Sega is a shadow of its former self. Its star developers are scattered to the four winds while treasured series hang cracked and dry from so much tireless, often unsympathetic milking. The company is perhaps the greatest casualty in the collapse of the arcade scene, once the fertile breeding ground for its most daring ideas ...
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Gears of War 3: Raam’s Shadow
If Gears of War 3, for all its impressive refinements, had become predictable, the chance to play as this final boss in this downloadable add-on is anything but.
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Fractal: Make Blooms Not War
Puzzle games that trade in honeycomb hexagons crowd the gaming landscape. But Fractal: Make Blooms Not War (from Auditorium and Pulse developer Cipher Prime) shares only a few strands of DNA with the tired match-3 genre, instead asking that players clear seven like-coloured hexagons in a game of block shunting of often confounding complexity. The ...
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Trauma
An esoteric point-and-click adventure in which you navigate dreams rendered in Polaroid snapshots, Trauma borrows the ambiance of sombre European cinema. It combines lingering night photography of Cologne, Germany with CGI motion graphics to haunting effect. Its lead character is voiced by a Björk-ish woman who wouldn’t sound out of place in an Ingmar Bergman ...