Author: Dean B

  • Gaming Unplugged

    I love games and I don’t just mean video games. When not sitting in front of the halcyon glow of my TV with a joypad (yes I still prefer that term to controller) surgically grafted to my hand, I regularly enjoy gaming unplugged in the form of card games and board games of all descriptions:…

  • Venetica

    Venetica is an RPG set in a fantastical version of 16th century Venice in which you play Scarlett, the daughter of death, attempting to save her father and the entire world from a secret society of necromancers. On paper it certainly sounds like it could be a more individual entry into a genre famed for…

  • Heart of Darkness

    I’d gotten into the habit of checking under ‘S’ in the PS2 section in CEX on an almost religious basis for one particular game, which I fully believe to be the greatest RPG ever made. Sure I could have got it on eBay — but where’s the fun in that? So imagine my excitement when…

  • The Glitch That Can’t Be Scratched

    Is it just me or doesn’t anyone bother testing their games anymore? I’d been playing Mafia 2 and loving every second of it, but one chapter from the end I came across a massive glitch that almost ruined the whole experience. Joe and I were being held by the Vinci family on top of a…

  • Castlevania:Lords of Shadow

    In 2009, J.J. Abrams dared the unimaginable with Star Trek; travelling back in time to the origins of one of the most beloved Sci-Fi franchises and kicking out it’s foundations, reinventing it from the ground up with a new hard-boiled tone and even going so far as to make Spock’s race an endangered species. Any…

  • Harder, Better, Stronger, Faster

    One of the biggest choices a gamer faces on loading up a game for the first time is the difficulty setting. Being an indecisive person anyway, this has always been an issue I’ve agonised over, often restarting a game after a few levels because it just wasn’t feeling right. The advent of achievements has made…

  • DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue

    DeathSpank, hero of the downtrodden; such an absurdly named protagonist could only come from the questionable mind of Ron Gilbert, the man who brought us the Monkey Island series and its star, Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™. But since his creation of the legendary SCUMM engine (central to almost all of Lucas Arts best loved games)…

  • We’ll Sleep When We’re Dead

    Once upon a time, when the world was still made up of pixels, a cowboy, a priest and a judge met in the desert… This would be a good opening to a story told on Sleep is Death, a weird hybrid yarn spinning game developed by Jason Rohrer and currently attracting a lot of attention…

  • R.U.S.E.

    For years the real-time strategy genre (RTS) has been mired in the turgid, tiberium soaked legacy of Command & Conquer. Once a pioneering game, it’s regular as clockwork sequels have done little to improve the series beyond the occasional graphical overhaul and a handful of new units. The formula always remained the same: build base,…