The Gobliiins Pack includes three games. These are Gobliiins, Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon, and Goblins 3. No, I’ve not committed some grievous spelling error – INCONTHIEVABLE! – but instead, the number of ‘i’s in the title represents the number of playable characters in each game. In an exceedingly clever twist, this sequence is perfectly inverted in series iterations.

After playing this game for five minutes or so, I started feeling excited. It wasn’t the hilarious references to dialogue from previous King’s Quest titles, nor the reappearance of just about every main character from every King’s Quest title ever. It wasn’t even because Graham looks kinda like Michael Palin from Monty Python. No, I [...]

And in other news, Japanese game narratives continue to vindicate my theory that they’re unremittingly sh**. Then there’s the usual cast of precocious, self-important preteens – including the requisite androgynous male in short, short pants and fetish boots – supported by the world’s worst voice cast [...]

It’s like Wipeout ****ed Burnout and had a kid, although if you’re an authentically old skool DOS troll like me, it’s kinda like Deathtrack for the current gen. Since that works out to substantially less than 400 words, however, here’s a bunch of otherwise mostly superfluous paragraphs. Blur is 100% pure arcade. There’s no mucking [...]

Oh, it’s a long story. The sort of stuff rheumy granddaddies tell wide-eyed kids around the hearth on winter nights, as wolves arch and cry dismay to a clouded, bitter moon in the world outside. But it’s the same story. It always is. Intoxicated with pride and hubris, men turned wild and wicked, their reckless [...]

In and around Southern Europe, sometime between 27 BC and AD 476. The Roman Empire is all the rage, and Milan’s haute couture catwalks groan under the formidable weight of stylish bronze plating, leather pleats, and luxurious Arctic wolf’s head accessories imported all the way from that fashionably-to-die-for-darling barbarous Saxones [...]

When cadavers start turning up all over New Orleans, it can only ever be one thing: VOODOO RITUAL MURDERS. Nobody dies of natural causes in New Orleans, of course, as a matter of rigorous local policy. The chicken blood slopped all over everything, esoteric chalk markings, bits of snake, and other paraphernalia of death kinda [...]

Welcome to Oddworld, home of the Magog Cartel’s premiere consumer industrial facilities, and SoulStorm Brew™. When RuptureFarms 1029 carelessly exhausts the local population of Meeches, grinding its production of the immensely popular novelty meat snack Meech Munchies™ to an abrupt and potentially commercially devastating halt, CEO Molluck the Glukkon turns a prospective eye to the [...]

A man with a secret drives himself off the road in a storm, and wakes up in a grotty Gothic asylum. It’s also on fire, because it just wouldn’t be a proper grotty Gothic asylum if it wasn’t on fire. And just to keep things interesting in a Grand Guignol-does-soap opera sort of way, this [...]

MATT HAZARD! INDOMITABLE HERO OF SUCH INSTANT CLASSICS AS ADVENTURES OF MATT IN HAZARD LAND AND THE REAL MATT HAZARD AND WEAPONS OF HAZARD DESTRUCTION AND OTHER GAMES WITH THE WORDS MATT AND/OR HAZARD IN IT! You’ve heard of Matt Hazard, of course. Matt Hazard pretty much invented gaming. Actually, chuck that “pretty much” – [...]

Hey, who remembers Atari’s Paperboy? Ah, bland suburban complacency, the muted rustle of newspapers hitting the lawn, and a halcyon age of wide-eyed innocence when videogames were about things like, well, chucking newspapers. Now, Postal – its obvious titular connotations notwithstanding – isn’t quite the same sort of thing. This is the other, grislier sort [...]

Oh blimey, bother, and baked beans on Big Ben! Professor Layton and his boy companion, Luke (unnecessary but inevitable tasteless joke here, I say!) have gotten themselves all tangled up in another grand adventure. Layton’s jolly chum Doc Schrader (I say!) has come into possession of one evil little artefact – a box said to [...]

Eddie Riggs is a roadie, and a pretty luckless one at that. He spends most of his time smoking cheap cigarettes and lugging heavy things around for the worst metal band on the planet. What serendipitous fate, then, that the whole not-but-actually-really-Linkin Park dies totally gruesomely right at the start of the game when Eddie [...]

There are two sorts of contract killer. There’s the shady, scarred sort of guy with an eye patch and Eastern European accent who’s only ever glimpsed through a pall of cigarette smoke, hangs out in underworld bars with lighting problems, and has a nickname prefixed with Little or Lucky or The. He’d be prosecuted and [...]

“Imitation,” goes the reliably quotable aphorism, “is the sincerest form of flattery.” It’s also the surest form of instant cash if you’re cloning the good stuff, so when the concept guys over at Chair Entertainment HQ first sat down to design a game that would basically print money, someone suggested, “Metroidvania” and everyone else squealed, [...]

There’s an ancient prophecy, of course. This one says that, every hundred years, the seven bits of floating continental stuff that make up the world of Septerra will come apart, exposing some kind of biocomputer at its core. The prophecy also says that if some guy has these two fancy key things, he can use [...]