What would you expect from a mix of Shin Megami Tensei, where demons battle for you, and Fire Emblem, where armies fight godly dragons? Idols. Riding pegasi. That fight demons for “Performa”, an essence abounding in talented humans.

Most probably not your first idea, but that's what Atlus and Nintendo thought when they crossed their two series in Genei Ibun Roku #FE, an RPG for the WiiU that will be known as Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE outside Japan.
The game's setting was m...

After two massive entries in the series where Intelligent System crammed in as many old and new features as they could, the fifteenth Fire Emblem scales it back to a more bare bones experience. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows Of Valentia is a remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden. Originally published on the Nintendo Famicom in 1992, itself a spin-off of the original Fire Emblem. This remake not only updates the technical side, but adds several features, including five new characters, skills for special wea...

The Switch is quickly becoming the platform of choice for many Indie developers. Nintendo have clearly caught on to the fact that the bedroom coder is making a comeback, and with growing cynicism surrounding many AAA releases and their funding models, Indie developers have begun to pick up the slack with a dazzling amount of titles appearing across major platforms. Human Fall Flat is developed by No Breaks Games and released back in 2016 for the PC. Its success meant the team has joined other indie...

Sega have been guilty of multiple cases of mismanagement over the years regarding the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. From releasing clearly-unfinished games with Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 to farming out their prized asset to a third party developer with Sonic Boom, Sega have made some pretty questionable decisions over the years. This time, Sega are guilty of extremely poor timing. Not only is Sonic Forces releasing in the wake of a certain Italian plumber's Nintendo Switch debut, the game is being...

It’s difficult to imagine the thought process behind the design of the PlayStation Vita when development began in earnest in 2011. Nintendo’s DS range of consoles was an unexpected success against the mighty PlayStation brand, yet Sony still managed to carve out a sizeable market for themselves by positioning the PlayStation Portable an explicitly gamer-orientated handheld, rejecting ‘gimmicks’ such as the DS’s touchscreen in favour of replicating traditional console experiences. The brief...

When Sonic & Knuckles was released in late 1994 to critical acclaim, it seemed certain that Sonic the Hedgehog would continue to challenge Nintendo’s moustached plumber. Sonic Team had once again stunned the industry with its innovative lock-on technology and there seemed to be no limits to what the unquestionably talented studio might do next with the blue insectivore. Surely Sonic Team would impress us all again with the inevitable new Sonic game for the upcoming Saturn console, we thought....

The survival horror genre was one of the big casualties of the last generation. Many of the genre’s most prominent features such as fixed camera angles were born mostly from technical necessity in the mid-90s and the infamous tank controls were conceived before games such as Mario 64 and Tomb Raider cemented the fundamentals for controlling a character on a 3D plane. Nevertheless, Resident Evil established itself as a big-hitter in the late 90s by embracing these limitations as defining features....

The story of Hatsune Miku is a strange one. Originally designed as a character to accompany a piece of text-to-vocals “Vocaloid” software in Japan, nobody took much notice. Then, a video of a super-deformed Miku twirling a spring onion and singing a song created using the software appeared on a Japanese video-sharing website. Millions of views later she just sort of... caught on. Indeed, caught on so much that the super-deformed “Hachune Miku” became a character herself, even making an appearance...

The thought comes unbidden that for a long time, Go really has been the final frontier for video games - creating a servicable AI for playing the thing, that is. In spite of the fact that there is practically only one rule (surround as much territory on the board as possible) and one possible move (place one stone of your colour anywhere legal on the board), Go is the most mathematically complex game ever created by humanity. There are over twenty five thousand ways just to play the opening gambit,...

Let’s face it. Rally games on the Xbox 360 / Xbox One generation have been lacking. The initial Dirt series was fun, and excelled at what it did (constant drifting), but as far as real rally stage racing goes, the stages were too short. The WRC games had a go, but most people would never get beyond trying the demo. Now at the start of 2016, there is the prospect of 2 new contenders. Dirt Rally has already proven itself on the PC, but at the time of writing, we don’t yet know if the console port...