Ever since the humble beginnings of the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, we’ve seen releases of large swaths of arcade-style games. These titles, from Geometry Wars to Super Stardust, have populated these services from day one. Vlambeer, the creative team behind Super Crate Box and Ridiculous Fishing, is back with Luftrausers, a 2D action game that feels like it’s a lost gem from a bygone era. It continues the unstoppable trend of arcade-style downloadable games in style.
As a new game from the Disgaea team, The Witch and the Hundred Knight has a lot to live up to. Though it ventures into the realm of hack-and-slash action-RPG instead of the usual turn-based tactics, the team has retained its love of telling a story about the bad guys, complete with crazy plot twists. You play as the Hundred Knight, a creature summoned by Metallia, the Swamp Witch. As she is unable to leave the swamp, she sends you on missions for her, to spread the swamp further into the land of Madea. The main conflict: Metallia is locked in an endless struggle with her nemesis Malia, the forest witch. READ MORE
One of the grandfathers of stealth, Metal Gear Solid, has seen a lot of changes over the years. You can almost track the slow evolution of the genre with each iteration, going from traditional stealth with the original title to a more streamlined, varied approach with Metal Gear Solid 4. The prologue to the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, titled Ground Zeroes, pushes the series even more away from its roots, making it the most modern adaptation of the classic formula.
My very first New Game+ column was all about the “death” of local multiplayer. No, it never actually died, but with the start of the last console generation it seemed to be steadily disappearing. Online multiplayer continued to get bigger and more popular as the generation went on, with only a select handful of the best actually supporting local play. Luckily for us, those who love playing games locally with some buddies, we have seen a resurgence of titles that support (or exclusively focus on) local multiplayer in the past couple of years.
While we must not mistake correlation for causation, no top-selling game system of any generation so far has been the highest technical performer. Alas, history has a tendency to repeat itself. Platform creators can still lose the forest for the trees, neglecting to deliver a quality lineup of software in favor of running glorified tech demos with a high price tag. READ MORE
