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Posts By Mat Growcott

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Grin and Bear the MGS Master Collection

I haven’t spoken much about the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, despite the fact that it’s MGS and I’m a huge fan. I’ve been cautiously awaiting impressions to know what to make of it. I don’t want another GTA set. On the face of it, it’s an amazing set. MGS is available on Xbox for the first time, and with trophies and achievements. It includes Integral, VR Missions and multiple languages to choose from. For the first ...

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Activision: The Deal is Done – Now What?

Since the Activision merger was announced in January last year, it’s been all we’ve talked about. No gaming news has quite lived up to this giant behemoth, edging ever more closely to the finish line. And it probably never will again. But it is indeed now done. What impact is it going to have on the industry? Will Microsoft keep buying? And where does this leave PlayStation? Suffice it to say this deal is going to feel like a lot…

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Sonic Frontiers 2023 + The Final Horizon DLC Review

It is the nature of modern games that they can change, and quickly. Luckily Sonic Frontiers is all about quick. Okay, puns aside, this is a game that has changed a lot since I reviewed it back in January, and not least because of the free Final Horizon DLC released at the end of last month. But is that enough to bring players back? My initial opinion on Sonic Frontiers is that it was a diamond in the rough. It…

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A Beginner’s Guide to Hearts

I get all the high scores in hearts. Unfortunately for me, that’s the opposite of what you should be trying to do. While you can pick up something like solitaire fairly easily, hearts sometimes feels counterproductive. It’s about scoring as low as possible. And at first the rules are seemingly complicated. Like poker, you don’t know till you know. But then you play it a bit more and start to get into it. You start to learn how to get…

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Microsoft Activision Merger Closes This Week

It’s a headline that I didn’t think would take me the best part of two years to write… but the Microsoft Activision merger looks likely to close this week. Honestly, I’ve spent so long writing about this thing. It’s almost like the actual impact of it no longer clicks. It’s all been about the detail and the largeness, but not the actual long-term impact. So, for instance, within the week Crash and Spyro will be Xbox mascots ...

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Capcom: Are Games Really Too Cheap?

You hear that, gamers? Capcom boss Haruhiro Tsujimoto reckons you’re paying too little for your video games – and maybe he’s kind of right. It’s hard to argue his point too much. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis we’ve seen increasing prices, increasingly aggressive monetisation, experimentation with AI and NFTs and a whole host of other ways to nickel and dime people who, by and large, just want to play a cool game. But we ...

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Lies of P Review

If you’d have told me that one of my favourite games of 2023 would be a Soulslike based on Pinocchio, I’d have laughed and laughed. And yet here we are. Lies of P takes the formula perfected by From in Dark Souls and Elden Ring and makes an impressive job at replicating it. This is addictive, dark and fun. It’s also difficult. Arguably it’s more difficult than some of the From games. But as always in this genre, there is…

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I Bounced Off FF7: Ever Crisis In a Few Days

I was one of the first to download, but something about Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis just hasn’t clicked.  Some of you will know that I’m a Final Fantasy 7 superfan. This remake-but-not was seemingly made for me and me alone. And yet in translation to a gacha mobile game, it has lost some of its soul. The gang are all there, and they look great. And the story beats are pretty well represented too, even if you’re racing through…

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These are the IPs Microsoft Will Soon Own

The Microsoft/Activision deal has been given a preliminary approval by the UK’s CMA and that means it will be closing within a fortnight. The biggest deal in tech history is coming to a close. This has been by no means a foregone conclusion. The deal made a lot of legal sense, but some regulators seemed desperate to shut it down. We went from being fairly positive it would close, to some industry analysts giving it a less than 20 percent…

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Top 10 CSGO Roulette Sites In 2024

CSGO is still hugely popular, even 11 years after it was first released. In fact, it’s massively more popular today than it was back then. That’s a rare thing in today’s gaming industry, and there’s a couple of simple reasons why. The first is that it’s just a very good game. Free-to-play and with far more content than it launched with, there’s never been a better time to get into it. It is one of those occasional titles ...

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