HMV Presents GameOn! London

HMV have been making very deliberate moves to strengthen their position in the games world recently, having already launched their Re/Play trade-in service to rival Game/Gamestation/CEX, they have now joined forced with UKeSA (the United Kingdom eSports Association) to bring GameOn! to the London Olympia this summer.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories confirmed for Wii!

For the past couple of months, rumours of a Wii remake of the original Silent Hill have been flying around. Ironic, then, that the article by Nintendo Power magazine confirming these rumours was published on April Fools’ Day. I didn’t believe it myself, especially after seeing Kojima’s ‘Metal Gear: Pensioner’ video, but some helpful souls have posted a few photos of the article – an interview with Silent Hill producer Tomm Hullett – by way of some proof.

Those of you fearing yet another rubbish remake can relax though, as it would seem the only thing that will be giving you sleepless nights will be the game itself. “This is a reimagining of the first Silent Hill, it’s not a remake or a port,” explains Hullet. “That’s an important distinction. It really feels like a new game.” Welcome words, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Review – Dinosaur King (DS)

Educational games always feel that little bit… peculiar. They’re slightly strange and alien, and not always in a bad way, but there’s always something not quite right. It feels a little like your first kiss (and given most of the target age-group of educational games won’t have had one of those yet, allow me to qualify that analogy a little for you) – it feels nice, and everything seems to be working quite well, but deep, deep down is that innermost fear that whispers up from the butterfly-filled pit of your stomach – “you’re not doing it right, something must be about to go wrong”. You didn’t poke her in the eye with your nose, or get your tongue caught in her braces, or bash foreheads and knock her out cold, but that deep-seated paranoia is still eating away at you (and let me tell you, kids, it doesn’t get any better later in life, you just get better at repressing it). This is how educational gaming feels. You’re pretty sure you’re playing it right, and it looks like the developer has done a good job, but you’re learning at the same time as enjoying a game. At the same time! Not thirty minutes of fun, followed by a fifteen minute lecture to keep your studies up to date, but actual, simultaneous learning and fun. 

Review – Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift (DS)

There used to be feeling among the hardcore Final Fantasy fans that you weren’t truly hardcore unless you had played Final Fantasy Tactics. The main Final Fantasy series was widely available and spin-offs such as Mystic Quest and the SaGa/Legend series were considered watered down. Tactics was just plain hard to get your hands on and so it became a badge of honour to have a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSOne on your shelf, especially in Europe – Final Fantasy Tactics was never released outside of Japan and the US, so ‘mod-chipping’ your PlayStation to play NTSC format and importing the title (or obtaining an illegal copy) were the extreme lengths that European gamers had to go to in order to get their next hardcore Final Fantasy fix. Was it that good? Was it worth breaking the law over? That remains to be seen, but such mystique and power over the fans is potent, so when Square-Enix agreed a licensing deal to bring games back to the Nintendo formats, it would have been an opportunity squandered not to bring Tactics to the party. This was an opportunity they did not miss, releasing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the Game Boy Advance in 2003, and now in 2008 its sequel (of sorts), Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift.

Review – Pool Party (Wii)

Everybody knows that looks aren’t everything. We also know that we’re not to judge a book by its cover. This are very good philosophies and excellent values to be teaching the younger folk in society, yet however hard we try not to, every now and again we do it automatically. I did it with Pool Party – and I’m not proud of myself for that.

Review – Dragon Quest: The Chapters of the Chosen (DS)

Do you ever get the distinct feeling that you’ve been somewhere before, even though you know there’s no chance you ever could have been? It’s like a kind of déjà-vu, only a little more unsettling, because while it’s entirely plausible that the same black cat that crossed your path two minutes ago could have gone the long way around and crossed your path again (probably just to freak you out and give you déjà-vu on purpose), you know it’s physically not possible to remember the interior of someone’s house when you only just met them and have been invited over for the first time. Dragon Quest: The Chapters of the Chosen feels like a very familiar place to be; it’s a little unsettling at first but it’s not horrible, just a bit old fashioned. I never played the original on the NES way back in 1990 and I’m almost completely certain that nobody reading this has either (it was never released outside of Japan) but still, every minute of it feels like a stroll down memory lane, like the sum of every other RPG to emerge in the early Nineties.

Missing in action…

I seem to have disappeared for about a year. I’m awfully sorry, it wasn’t supposed to happen. If it makes it sound any better, I was being held against my will by an evil foreign government who were torturing me for national secrets? No, I thought not – I’ve just been a bit busy, really. It took me forever to get the pre-mentioned ISP issues sorted, and since then I’ve had a new job, so that’s taken over my life somewhat.

I hadn’t forgotten, though, I’ve still been writing bits and pieces where I can, I have a few reviews to upload (there will be an initial flurry of activity), I’ve just joined www.gamerlimit.com as a contributor, and all is shiny and nice in the garden. And so I’m back, and we begin again.

Review – Namco Museum Remix (Wii)

Unfortunately, I have been having some issues with my ISP recently (the issue being that they are completely unwilling and incapable of actually providing me with internet service – makes me wonder what they actually do at all) so unfortunately I’ve not been able to get online frequently or for very long, ruling out frequent updates to this blog as I’d hoped. Hopefully in a week or so I should be back up and running again with my home connection and can get back on top of things.

Here’s a fresh review to keep things going in the meantime:

The world of business is a funny one. A world of people in bad suits gathered around desks bigger than my house, shouting out numbers and showing flip-chart graphs that look like (and make about as much sense as) a Jackson Pollock painting. I don’t remember exactly when the games industry turned into just another ‘big’ business, but I imagine it roughly coincided with the release of the first ‘games compilation’, the console equivalent of those damn awful Now That’s What I Call Music… albums. The main difference between games compilations and those evil blights on music is this, however – the music compilations have the ‘best’ of whatever tat is around at the time, the games compilations do actually contain classics. The problem, though, is that they were classics before the majority of the gaming public were even born.

Take Control Of Your Life…

No, I’ve not started writing self-help (although I hear there’s good money in that), I’m talking about HCI. That’s Human Computer Interaction, and to most of us, that broadly ranges from mice and keyboards to our favourite game controllers. We’ve come a long way from the blinking command prompt, and we’re now firmly entrenched in the realm of the GUI (quite wonderfully pronounced ‘gooey’, standing for Graphical User Interface) but where do we go from here?

Grand Theft Auto has a lot to answer for…

Well, actually, no it doesn’t. Or at least, not the things that we’re lead to believe.