Jake 
In the ’80s and early ’90s, choose your own adventure gamebooks were quite the craze. There’s been a resurgence of sorts recently, both on paper and digitally, chiefly of the fondly remembered Fighting Fantasy series. Nintendo Adventure Books? Not so much. A remarkable 12 books were released in 1991-92, based largely on Nintendo Comic System, …
Trading cards are big business these days. Back in 1992, Sega and Panini released the Sega Super Play cards. Another case of Sega being massively ahead of their time? Some might say unprofitably ahead of their time. They might be right. The 120 cards were split into several sections. First, and most excitingly, were two …
I have very fond memories of Arcade magazine, but looking over the 24 issues now, it was a curious beast. As launch editor Matt Bielby put it in his first editorial: “there are two ways of looking at this magazine.” Those were “the culmination of years of videogame mags,” or “the first games magazine to …
I thought it was some extreme creative license, but actually an LMP1 prototype sportscar at Laguna Seca isn’t as far-fetched as I initially assumed. Nonetheless, the Audi R18 is quite a fun car to have included in the Forza Motorsport 5 demo. Certainly it was too much for me to resist when I spent some …
With Microsoft’s announcement yesterday, we finally know when and where Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will launch this November. So let’s have a look at the world according to Microsoft and Sony. The easy one first: Microsoft. Xbox One will be available in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, …
After a bumper crop of new releases last week, it’s Saints Row IV that’s come out on top in the UK chart. Deep Silver and Koch Media plucked the publishing rights from THQ’s ashes, and it’s become the company’s third number one of the year; the only other publisher to match that count is EA. …
This might have passed you by – the Internet was pretty restrained over it – but there was a bit of a fuss around the initial Xbox One reveal, and how Microsoft gave an awful lot of attention to non-games stuff. That wasn’t always the way though. Until recent generations, multimedia was little more than …
North America is still waiting for the boxed release of New Super Luigi U – we in Europe got it last month. Still, at least they’ve got this Luigi branded train to make up for it. It celebrates the curiously late launch of the game later this month, and the wider Year of Luigi. That …
If you’ve worked in an office over the last decade or so, you’ve probably been hit at some point by the deluge of Excel quizzes. They were fun! Sort of. Little screen caps from films or scraps of sweet wrapper or whatever, and you have to guess what they are. The whole office gets involved …
It’s The Last of Us atop the UK chart for a sixth week. Last week’s ‘big’ release, Dynasty Warriors 8 wasn’t desperately likely to depose it, but manages a very respectable #5. Nintendo will be hoping that Pikmin 3 does the deed next week. Back to this week though, Minecraft is up a few to …
You know when you’ve been playing a game of an evening, and you can still see it in your mind’s eye when you go to sleep? Match-three puzzlers have a habit of doing it to me. Well, Garfield isn’t an obvious choice for an endless runner, so Namco-Bandai have had to set Wild Ride in …
In a quiet week for the UK chart, The Last Of Us becomes the first game this year to take the top spot for four consecutive weeks. So well done to all involved. Minecraft holds steady at #2, then it’s FIFA 13 up a place at #3 and Animal Crossing: New Leaf down a place …
With a third week at the top of the UK chart, the public evidently loves The Last of Us as much as the critics. That means the Xbox 360 retail release of Minecraft misses out on the top spot, but #2 isn’t a bad start. Animal Crossing: New Leaf and FIFA 13 each drop a …
I bloody love a match-three puzzler, and the tile-swapping variety is that rarest of things: a game mechanic born on a controller that actually benefits from a touch screen. Certainly that’s one reason there are so many on iOS. And very nice they are too. Increasingly though games are playing with the formula – games …
The tech press is getting in a right froth over smart watches. Honestly, don’t they remember the Game Watch? The calculator watch had been around since the 1970s, and a decade later the next step was the game watch. US company Nelsonic Industries was at the forefront of this exciting technological frontier. The games were …