Sam has been arguing for months that the original Rayman should be taken seriously in platformer discussions. And I think he may be right after playing Ubisoft’s debut PlayStation exclusive, which took around two dozen hours to complete. It was released in the United States on 7 September 1995 via Wikipedia. Although originally intended as a quirky character design, Rayman turned out to be the first genuinely good platformer for PlayStation, showing the potential of…
The cartridge slot clicked with that familiar satisfying snap, and there I was again—standing in that cursed carnival town of Termina, watching the same three-day cycle begin anew. My mate Dave had warned me about Majora's Mask when he lent it to me back in 2001. "It's proper weird, this one," he'd said, tapping the gold cart like it might bite. "Not like normal Zelda."He wasn't wrong. Where Ocarina of Time felt like an epic…
Half-Life: How Valve Revolutionised Storytelling in First-Person Shooters Carl is currently working on writing a review of System Shock 2 because Joe is too busy convincing Tim that the original System Shock did narrative brilliance first, and therefore should receive more credit. Everyone knows System Shock set the bar for FPS games and their ability to tell proper stories without stopping to give you a history lesson every five minutes. Here is why Half-Life proves…
Tim is mistaken when he says that Jak and Daxter was just “another mascot platformer.” Joe is closer to correct that it was the last great traditional 3D platformer before all of them turned into open world. However, Joe is missing the technical innovations that made it possible. Technical innovation enabled both the artistic vision and the engineering excellence necessary to make Jak and Daxter a great platformer. The GOAL programming language, the seamless world…
It is not easy to rank the top 10 greatest platform games, especially with the heated debate that occurred during our discussion. By the time we had decided on our first five, we were already exhausted, and we knew there would be at least another few rounds of debate before we were done. We also knew that we needed to focus on the games that defined or revolutionised the platform genre. As such, we looked…
Elena here, and if you’re anything like me, you have no idea about half the European strategy games that came out before StarCraft. But let’s be honest; when Blizzard released this RTS on 31 March 1998 via Metacritic, it did more than just enter the fray against Command & Conquer and Age of Empires. It became a sport. After spending years cataloguing obscure strategy titles from publishers you’ve likely never heard of, released only in…
You know what's funny? I can pinpoint exactly when my relationship with stress changed forever. It wasn't meditation, wasn't therapy, wasn't even that weird breathing app everyone keeps recommending. It was a plastic cartridge shaped like a tiny grey brick, and it taught me that sometimes the best way to solve real-world problems is to plant virtual turnips.Harvest Moon 64 landed in my life during what I'll diplomatically call my "quarter-life crisis before quarter-life crises…
Carl asked David to cover this one because everyone else on the team wanted to talk about the remake. David refused, on the grounds that half our readers still own a working PS3 and deserve to know what they’re actually getting into with the original hardware. That’s the debate that kicked this whole thing off, and honestly, it’s the right call. The 2020 remake is a different beast entirely. This is about the game that…
There's something magical about stumbling across a game that shouldn't work but absolutely does. Picture this: 1995, and Disney's about to unleash their first fully computer-animated film on the world. Pixar's still this scrappy little studio that most people couldn't even pronounce properly, and here comes Toy Story—this revolutionary thing that looked like nothing we'd seen before. Naturally, the suits decided it needed a video game tie-in. What they gave us on the Mega Drive…
Right, let’s get one thing straight from the start – David here and I need to talk about something that has been driving me crazy about our team discussions. Tim has been saying for months now that modern ARPGs like Path of Exile have completely surpassed Diablo II in every way. Absolute nonsense. Yes, they may be more complex; yeah, they probably do look shinier with their flashy graphics; and, sure, they are most likely…