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Doctor Who – Cold War Review
What happens when the TARDIS acts up with one of its occasional bouts of having a mind of its own? The Doctor and Clara end up trapped on a Soviet nuclear submarine at the height of the Cold War with an old enemy who just happens to be hell-bent on destruction. Don’t you just hate it when you have a day like that?
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The Organ Trail Review: Better than The Walking Dead Finale
I should have written this review before I saw the season finale of The Walking Dead. You spend the majority of the season building up this inevitable confrontation between Rick and the Governor, the prison and Woodbury. What we end up getting is just an awful pay-off that doesn’t make sense. Presumably, this was Glen Mazzara’s revenge for getting fired.
And that brings me to the Organ Trail. No, not The Oregon Trail. The Organ Trail is an homage to the classic Oregon Trail and the zombie survival genre of movies that sees you try to traverse from Washington, D.C., to a safe zone on the west coast while fighting zombies, eluding bandits and just trying to make it in one piece.
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Doctor Who – The Rings of Akhaten Review
This week, we got our fourth Clara adventure. Well, it’s technically only her second as a proper companion. As such, she gets her first trip in the TARDIS and gets to see what life with the Doctor is really like and how he operates. Not only does changing companions allow for a change alongside the Doctor but it gives the opportunity for him to tweak some habits too. But the one thing that really didn’t change was what the format of the first off-world adventure for a new companion.
What immediately grabbed my eye was how the first adventures with both Donna and Amy seemed to have a similar visual palette and style to “The Rings of Akhaten.” Both “The Fires of Pompeii” and “The Beast Below” had a lot of red and browns dominating the sets and costumes. The sets all looked a little dirty and dusty rather than clean, futuristic sci-fi. And each had a scene in something that looked like a market.
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Retro/Grade (PC) Review: Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Insanity
What happens when you mix an arcade style shoot-’em-up with a rhythm game and then do it all backwards? You get the delightful (and difficult) Retro/Grade. Originally released as an indie game on the PlayStation 3, Retro/Grade has made the jump to PC.
Rhythm games and shoot-em-ups have been done before so the base genres are well represented in gaming. However, they’ve never been done like this.
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Doctor Who – The Bells of Saint John Review
Steven Moffat loves that little catchphrase that he wrote back in Season 3’s Blink. When Moffat writes, you get the sense that wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey will be involved at some point. (That or Weeping Angels.) With new companion Clara Oswald, we got our fair share of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey fun. There just wasn’t that same Moffat writing that we come to expect from his episodes in The Bells of Saint John.
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Trials Evolution Gold Edition (PC) Review: The Engine Has a Misfire
Do you remember Miniclip? When I was in high school many a joke class (like intro to business, civics and career studies) was spent playing flash games that wouldn’t crash the old, cheap computers. The original mainstay was miniclip.com, which, I’m slightly surprised to say, still exists today.
That’s where I first played the Red Lynx’s Trials series (it was called Trial Bike back then). I had seen proper Trials on TV on an old show called Motorsport Mundial so I knew what Trials was about and was instantly hooked on the flash game. Naturally, I’d have to pick up Red Lynx’s first PC Trials game since it left flash.
The problem is that while Trials Evolution, the most recent Trials (né Trial Bike) game, is a critically acclaimed game on the Xbox 360, Red Lynx should have kept their PC games on flash.
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The Showdown Effect Review: Yippee-ki… Ah, Screw It
Have you ever wondered what would happen if Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Bruce Lee and Liam Neeson did battle in a giant battle royale of action movie superstars? I’m sure a drunken conversation has resulted in a battle between movie heroes but nobody’s really gone beyond the argument over pints.
The Showdown Effect, a new game from Magicka devs Arrowhead Studios, tries to answer the question of which action star would win if placed in a battle to the death. If Super Smash Bros. dropped the more family oriented direction for the comically clichéd action ripped out of 80s and 90s action movies, it would be The Showdown Effect.
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Mass Effect 3: Citadel DLC Review: An End, Once and For All
This is it, isn’t it? One last ride with Commander Shepard as we take on a group of well-armed and ill-intentioned bad guys in order to save the galaxy with our friends in tow. BioWare made us well aware that this was going to be the final piece of DLC released for Mass Effect 3. In effect, Citadel would be a send-off for the series that people had invested so much time and energy into over the last six years.
So how was our ride into the sunset with Commander Shepard and crew?
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Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed Review: A Car in a Boat in a Plane in a Hedgehog
I’ve never been a Sega guy. I grew up with a classic NES and had Mario rather than Sonic. Even my one friend who did have a Genesis (or Mega Drive, if you’d prefer) didn’t have a Sonic game. (He did have a game on the classic Stallone movie Cliffhanger so maybe game buying wasn’t his parents’ forté.) From there, I got a PS1 so I largely missed out on everything Sonic and Mario Kart related in my youth.
And that created a very real problem when it came to reviewing Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. It was described as fan service for long-time Sega and Sonic the Hedgehog fans and a Mario Kart clone. Well, I can’t exactly evaluate a game based on that when the Sega game I had the most playing time with was ATP Tour Championship Tennis.
Looking at SASRT (God, that’s a terrible acronym. That’s what happens when you make a game with an obscenely long and ridiculous title.) from a racing game enthusiasts perspective didn’t give me much cause for hope. After all, saying that Sega would only put out an exceptional Sonic game would omit the existence of Sonic Free Riders which was so universally panned that it makes Aliens: Colonial Marines look like Skyrim by comparison. Read the rest of this entry
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Antichamber Review: You Just Wrinkled My Brain
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the gaming press soil themselves in excitement over an indie release but that’s exactly what happened in the run up to the release of Antichamber.
The game has been described as Escher-like, in reference to the famous Dutch “impossible reality” painter M.C. Escher. You might know his drawing “Relativity” which shows people climbing stairs with no regards for the laws of physics at all. And that seems to be where Alexander Bruce got his inspiration for Antichamber. Read the rest of this entry
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