Sonic the Hedgehog – Retro Repetition

After playing the atrociousness that is Sonic and the Black Knight I thought that Sonic was dead to me. I had given him a chance and Sonic had used that chance shoot himself through the temple and fall with a splat right into his own coffin which was also on fire. But now, after the dust has settled and most of my memories of sheer aggravation are no longer at the forefront of my every thought, I have decided to give Sonic another chance.

Mirror’s Edge – On the Brink of Something

Mirror’s Edge seems to be one of those games that I spent so much time umming and ahhing over whether to buy I’m surprised my bones hadn’t turned to dust. You’d hear someone talking it up like a new religion or fad diet and then you’d get another person, almost always two metres away from you who would should quite loudly that it was about as enjoyable as listening to Rebecca Black’s Friday on repeat for ten hours. So fairly mixed reviews then.

The Fall – I Must Not Misrepresent Reality

Well the leaves are descending, the barometer is going low and my interest in this analogy is plummeting like a tiny pebble into a vast watery abyss. So with those autumn allusions out of the way, let’s get into the Indie Kickstarter game The Fall.

Fez – Retro, Puzzling, Brilliant

For those of you that are perhaps uninitiated in the world of gaming, Fez may have passed you by and that is forgivable. For those who do consider themselves gamers and have not at least heard of Fez, then shame on you. For Fez is, for lack of a better description, wholly immersive.

Fez, a retro-styled puzzle platformer, is the story of Gomez, a little blob person with a head that really shouldn’t be supported by his body, lives in a peaceful 2D village with other blob people. However, Gomez sees the breakup of a massive golden hexahedron which causes the very fabric of his world to begin tearing itself apart.

Gunman Clive – Watch Out! There are Ducks About!

It’s hard not to love platform games. Growing up as we have, or at least I have and quite sporadically at best, with Mario, Sonic, Donkey Kong, Mega Man and all those other retro games, it is hard not to get a pang of nostalgia when a side-scrolling platformer comes along, even if the game is a one man production.

Gunman Clive, a standard side-scrolling platformer set in the Wild West pits you in that all too familiar setup. Ms Johnson is captured by bandits and you, Gunman Clive, must battle bandits, wildlife and a fantastic array of fantastical bosses to rescue the damsel in distress. Sound familiar? Well don’t worry, if you decide to flip the stereotype, you can play as Ms Johnson and save Clive instead. And who said games don’t have gender equality?

Serena – Something for Valentine’s Day

So February has arrived upon us once more and the waft of surface deep romance begins to blow in our direction. The TV tells us it is time to buy chocolates and flowers for our loved ones; the radio plays “Love is in the Air”, “I Will Always Love You”, and other brain deadening ditties that will leave you foolishly believing in love’s brilliance and splendour to such an extent that you may even find things so wholly contemptible in other circumstances enjoyable, like walking through a sewer, having your thumb sawn off or listening for any amount of time to Ricky Gervais.

Deadlight – Guess What? Zombies… Again

So yeah, here we go with another zombie game. I sometimes get the feeling that games studios just have huge meeting where they try to create something wonderful and completely imaginative on the Monday, but by late Friday afternoon they just don’t care anymore. They’ve run out of jokes by Tuesday, coffee by Wednesday, someone’s thrown a chair at someone by Thursday, and by Friday everyone in the room have their heads slumped on the desks in despair at their un-creativity, much like me with this analogy.