I can see exactly how Just Dance (2009, Wii) has become the biggest-selling third-party title on the Wii. It keeps it extremely simple, but delivers on the formula of a dancing game, and is great fun. It really wears its low budget on its sleeve – the menus and the backgrounds have virtually no graphical [More]

Yes it is weird. Recettear (2010, PC), a new translation of an existing Japanese game, is part cutesy shop simulator, part Jrpg, part rogue-like – it’s vomit inducing one minute, and addictive the next. The full game isn’t out yet, but the 10-day demo has enough gaming crack in it to whet my appetite for [More]

Shigeru Miyamoto – legend of videogaming, 30-year veteran of the industry, the legendary creator of Donkey Kong, Zelda, Mario, Pikmin and Wii Fit/Music. He probably doesn’t have much to do with the daily nuts and bolts of game creation these days, but operates as a company-wide guru guiding Nintendo’s hand and the tone of Nintendo’s [More]

No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle (2010, Wii) is more of the same schtick that was so refreshing in the first NMH – a punky anarchistic feel that forever pokes fun at itself, the fighting genre, gaming in general, and just pretty much the whole of existence. The bad news is that it wears thin – [More]

I’ve had Super Mario Galaxy sitting by my Wii since Saturday. It’s probably the game I’ve been looking forward to more than any other for the past year. Super Mario Galaxy is probably my favourite game of this generation. Super Mario Galaxy 2 currently has a 98% metacritic score – it is simply one of [More]

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins Of The Moon (2010, XSeed, Wii). Eek what a title. Are we saying farewell to the ruins of the moon in this game? Doesn’t seem like it. It’s the ruins of the Earth – an overgrown post-apocalypse where weeds have grown but everything else seems empty and rather ghostly. A strong [More]

Super Monkey Ball: Step And Roll (2010, Sega, Wii) is the first of this series of games that I have played, yet I feel instinctively that I know these games inside out. You’re a monkey, in a ball, and you roll through bright and surreal obstacle courses to jolly music. What’s not to like? One [More]

Red Steel 2 (2010, Wii). A sword-wielding action game designed for motion control. It’s rather successful. It looks a bit like Borderlands – a bit of feudal looking Japan, a few wild-west tropes, and some ‘dirty future’ thrown in – dilapidated vending machines, modified bikes and trucks, bits of industrial tech. The desire to get [More]

A quiet week for me. I tried to spend it all non-gaming but I got bored yesterday and had a binge . Cursed Mountain (Wii, 2009) is a game that I very much wanted to love. Another Resident-Evil inspired creep-a-thon, this time at high altitude, it has a scary tone, and that slow methodical pace [More]

Here’s a dark, mysterious, story-driven game. It’s at times wildly inventive, and totally other-worldly. It goes to places that games rarely reach. It manages to deliver a strong narrative experience without drawing comparisons with cinema – it is 100% a game, to be played and experienced by a gamer. There’s no concession here to other [More]

Here’s my diary of what I played this week. I also played Forza 3, which has a post all of its own because I actually cared enough… With Dead Rising 2 set for August, I wanted to know what the fuss was about, having missed the original game. Boy was I surprised with Dead Rising [More]

Bioshock 2 (2010, PS3 / 360 / PC) is the sequel to a game that scored so highly on its original milieu, and the twists and turns of its game story – on that basis the decision to retrace the steps of the first game through a Rapture that was already fully explained in the [More]

Short of anything enlightening to say about the medium, this is where I just lump the games I’ve recently played into a list format as a monument to those countless wasted hours. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (2009, Wii) parades a brand of frenzied 2D combat and simple RPG system that seems somehow familiar, but this [More]

Mass Effect 2 (2010, PC / 360) has been an absolute pleasure so far, though part of me is wondering quite why. In design terms it’s a quite straightforward shooter with story elements, and significantly simplified (or dumbed-down) in comparison with other more customisable systems. What saves it is not the game at all as [More]

Dipped in and out of a few games this week – nothing grabbed me for more than a few hours. It’s the new year, and I’m hovering at the moment, waiting to swoop in for the kill when a game really grabs me . The MAG (Massive Action Game) beta, currently in progress on Playstation [More]

It feels almost like a act of treason to turn on the Wii’s supposedly dumbed-down version of sci-fi survival horror Dead Space. Dead Space: Extraction ports the environments and enemies from last year’s critically acclaimed third-person game, and puts them into an on-rails shooting gallery game for the Wii. With control of your characters movements [More]

The sales figures for Deadspace: Extraction are in. The game is an on-rails shooter for the Wii – think House Of The Dead in an alien-infested spaceship. It’s apparently a pretty decent game, but no classic. It apparently hasn’t sold particularly well – 9000 copies in it’s opening week. But why should we be interested [More]

Tiger Woods 10
[rating: 2]

Call Of Duty 5
[rating:3]

Resident Evil 4
[rating:5]

Little Kings Story
[rating:2]

MadWorld
[rating:3]

Zack & Wiki: Quest For Barbaros’ Treasure
[rating:3]

Tiger Woods ’08: All-Play
[rating: 2]

Been playing around with De Blob for the last couple of days, principally because my Xbox’s DVD drive blew up on Sunday. This is a classy game, fairly kid-friendly, but damned difficult at times as well – definitely the best non-Nintendo produced Wii game that I’ve seen. Basically the set-up is that the world has [More]

I had a great weekend with my daughter – the game of the moment is Endless Ocean on the Wii, which I finally managed to track down and pick up at a very reasonable £15. The game was overlooked on release, at least in the UK, and there have been no efforts to reintroduce it [More]

This extraordinary game may well be the very best of all time – a subjective judgement of course, but don’t forget that I am always right. Why get excited about a plumber with very questionable dress-sense? What is extraordinary about Mario is that his games have been genuinely revolutionary in videogame history at least three [More]