Hideo Kojima is the video game industry’s big auteur. The Stanley Kubrick of games. The guy who somehow gets a big budget to make his strange experiments, even when they defy the industry best practice, and as we all know, the games industry is very best practice orientated. It’s all well and good to say these things, but ultimately, they…
Hideo Kojima is the video game industry’s big auteur. The Stanley Kubrick of games. The guy who somehow gets a big budget to make his strange experiments, even when they defy the industry best practice, and as we all know, the games industry is very best practice orientated. It’s all…
Read MoreRaidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army was originally released before Persona 3. That was a very different time for Atlus as a company and this entire property. Before Persona 4 and, particularly Persona 5, took the broader Shin Megami Tensei name to the mainstream, SMT were these dark…
Read MoreIt’s been a difficult few years for Level-5, from the highs of the likes of Professor Layton, Ni No Kuni and Yo-Kai Watch a decade ago to the lows of… well, everything that it’s done with those properties in recent years. Level-5 just hasn’t been the same company since the…
Read MoreIt’s easy to understand why Elden Ring Nightreign exists. The multiplayer side of Dark Souls and, later, Elden Ring has been enormously popular over the years. So too are games designed around an endless gameplay loop, whether that be Fortnite, roguelikes, or anything in between. Nightreign will be loved a…
Read MoreLook, I don’t know who decided that King Arthur worked well with grimdark, but I’m going to convene the Round Table of artists and put a stop to this nonsense. The actual fantasy of King Arthur and his knights should be flowery bastions of virtue doing good things for the…
Read MoreScar-Lead Salvation is very close to being a very good game. The creative energy is good, the aesthetics are appealing, and the action is tight. Unfortunately, while it was clearly inspired by Returnal, it misses the mark in several critical areas. You play as Willow, who is either a woman…
Read MoreOnimusha 2 is the finest in the series. Yes, Onimusha 3 had Jean Reno, and that remains objectively hilarious, but if you’re looking for the heart of what the Onimusha team has tried to achieve with the series, it’s here. Now, with the remake in hand, we’re able to revisit…
Read MoreLike its predecessors, Death end re;Quest: Code Z looks like it should be a pretty standard Idea Factory JRPG. You’ve got cute anime girls, most of them with very large assets, and magical girl-style transformation screens that make full use of those assets for maximum impact. Then you have long…
Read MoreAFL 23 grew from a shaky start to become something that most fans of the sport could love. It followed Big Ant’s usual MO of, shall we say, responsive patching post-launch, as the feedback rolled in and the ever-vocal sports game community made it clear what they liked and didn’t.…
Read MoreI prefer playing games on consoles, as a rule of thumb. I’ve said this often enough, but to repeat the reason for it: I spend so much time working on PCs that I struggle to sit down and play games on them without something kicking in my brain and telling…
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