Once in a while, a gem of a game is released that largely gets over looked due to it being away from the mainstream. Whilst games like Final Fantasy arrive to a fanfare parades, others meekly slip by, and this is real shame. Disgaea is such a game and deserves your attention. Disgaea is a Tactical RPG, a genre that is not uncommon, but has somewhat of a niche market. A TRPG concentrates its game play on the combat, and less on the storyline and character interaction. That said, in Disgaea the s...

Phantom Brave is the third strategy RPG game from Nippon Ichi to get a release in the US within the last twelve months. You play the part of Marona, a thirteen year old girl who is able to summon spirits. She is joined by the phantom Ash who was killed along with Marona’s parents and has now sworn to protect her. Unfortunately her gift is very much misunderstood; society calls her ‘The Possessed’ and it doesn’t help that the local press uses her as a scapegoat for every problem that happens...

Tallon IV. Once, a peaceful retreat for the benign Chozo Empire, now a world infected with a dangerous organic compound called Phazon. Though uninhabitable, Tallon IV was abandoned by the Chozo with only the relics of their society left as echoes of their achievements. Many years later, and the planet has new inhabitants: the vicious, nomadic Space Pirates – breeders of the nigh-unstoppable Metroid creatures – determined to harvest the dangerous Phazon to fuel their war machine.
An or...

Perfect dark is regarded as perhaps the finest console FPS of all time. Members of the team that produced Perfect Dark and of course, seminal classic Goldeneye, have departed from Rare interactive and in turn formed Radical design.
Their first effort as a solo unit is the particularly intriguing Timesplitters, which was naturally one of the more highly, anticipated of the PS2 launch titles due to its heavyweight backing.
Perfect Dark veterans will notice the similarities between the...

Just as Shigeru Miyamoto probably has a room full of Disney characters and Fischer price toys to try and get inside the head of a ten year old, Rockstar games probably have a room full of Al Pacino gangster movies to try and get inside of the head of a 17 year old. They disappear in there, listen to "Fire starter" by the Prodigy over and over again and then come outŠ With an idea for a game that involves being chased by the Police. Again. This time Rockstar's attempt to horrify the Daily Mail and...

Thick mist covers the island and the sky is tinged blood red. Mamoru Itsuki and Yuri Kishida are walking across Yamijima when they run into two members of the Japanese Self-Defence force. Blinded by the torches, Yuri hides behind her manly protector and then the siren begins; the noise is ear-splitting and emanates from a vast metal radio tower in the centre of the island. Seconds later, the wave comes, a blood-red tsunami which knocks all four people off their feet and into unconsciousness. ...

Space Reporter Ulala once again battles cosmic ne'er do wells using the gift of dance and a sassy attitude, in her second adventure, Space Channel 5 Part 2. This time round the stakes are higher: much loved crooner and political leader Space President Peace has been kidnapped by a unknown group of cute robots called the Robo, lead by the mysterious Shadow. Good times are placed on hold until his rescue, and there is only one reporter fit for the job... no matter how much rival reporter and image-conscious...

BattleTech has an history of electronic videogames almost as long as the tabletop original, beginning with Crescent Hawk's Inception (1988). While the source tabletop game was able to continue without major interruptions even when the franchise went through several owners and licensees, BattleTech videogames remained dormant for several years after MechAssault: Phantom War on the Nintendo DS (2006), with only MechWarrior Online (2013) able to bring them back from slumber after a number of...

Doom made a revolutionary impact when it hit PCs in 1993. One that few games can credibly claim to match. This wasn’t simply because it was a technical showcase, but because it changed the makeup of hardware going forwards. It’s heavy reliance on the strength on 486 processors dealt a fatal blow to the Amiga and Atari ST whose hardware couldn’t be much less suitable, as well as pushing 16-bit sprite-pushing consoles aside for the next wave of hardware. This wave of consoles would see numerous...

Good and bad games, at least from a reviewer's viewpoint, have one thing in common: they make for easy writing. It's easy to put in words what a game put you through when game mechanics, graphics, music, and story come together to form a pleasant experience or crash and burn like a vehicle from '80s action movies. Average games on the other hand are just what they are: they might have one or two standout points but even those never reach any tip of the scale and there aren’t many ways to say a...