Posts By Mat Growcott

Goldeneye is still the incredible game we always knew it was. That confirmation, as if confirmation was needed, came with its re-release on Xbox and Switch this week. But with every re-release, there comes the shocked voices of those who miss the obvious. Old games are old. There aren’t quality of life features. The controls are a little more complicated than they need to be. The textures look like someone threw up in gravel and smeared them on the ...

With all the talk about The Last of Us, and the popularity of “film-like” games, it’s got me to thinking. When is a game a game? What basic elements of interactivity create something that just can’t be chopped up and placed into another medium? Ironically, the game that made me start thinking of this was Telling Lies. On the surface, it’s about as filmic as you can get. You scrub through actual video, clicking words in the ...

The Last of Us is a TV show now, and a million websites have declared it the end of the Video Game adaption curse. But at this point it’s just a talking point. This article won’t touch on The Last of Us – I’m not watching it until the series is finished – but instead on the hype around every new video game adaption as finally “breaking the curse”. It happened with Sonic, it happened with Mortal Kombat and it…

Survival horror has returned. Resident Evil isn’t a punchline anymore, and there are any number of big and small games for genre fans to sink their teeth into – some of them might even be pretty good. Nightmare of Decay expertly uses this to take us back to a simpler time. It’s first-person, but don’t read too much into that. This is a love letter to the old Resident Evil games, where you would explore sprawling buildings, fight the ...

Sonic Frontiers is the best Sonic game in a generation. If you’re running faster than the blue blur to tell me that isn’t saying much, congratulations. You win Internet Original of the Day. But believe me when I say this is a new direction for the former console mascot. Do you remember the Saturday morning cartoon Sonic? He could seemingly run on any surface, leaping from one area to another in a blue line, impossible to see. That was the…

My round-up of 2023 glossed over third party support. In a year that’s going to be dominated by first party bighitters, it seemed like there just wasn’t the space. But here we go: a closer look at some of the third party games that we’ll be talking about this time next year too. Some of them we’ll be talking about positively, others not so much. Some will surprise, others will disappoint. I’ve tried to avoid timed exclusives ...

Welcome to 2023 – the first year of the next generation. And I don’t mean that sarcastically, and it’s not a dig at the games that have come until this point. This year is going to be the start of something brand new. That’s not all we have to look forward to. This year is going to see huge changes in the gaming world. We have the launch of a brand new VR device, and the potential completion of the…

The gaming news started big in 2022 with the announcement that Microsoft were buying Activision. And it never quite reached that peak again. In terms of gaming news, in terms of the games themselves and in terms of the general state of the industry as a whole, 2022 feels like it was a bit of a wash. That’s not to say it was awful. There were plenty of highlights. But it felt like the final year of covid’s impact. Most…

It’s funny that 2007 classic Portal is now one of the hardest games to get running at max settings on PC. But by adding raytracing, that’s exactly what it has become. Does it make the immortal GOAT a better game? No. But it sure as hell proves a concept that feels a long, long way away. As a visual overhaul Portal with RTX is impressive. It takes a still decent-looking 15-year-old game and it makes it modern – and that’s…

Remember how to share a game? You take your disc, and you hand it to your friend. Cue applause. But with a rumoured new PlayStation 5 ditching the disc drive and making it a bonus purchase, we’re officially entering a brave new digital world. I say new. I don’t really mean new. Digital games have been the norm for quite a while now. There’s no doubt in my mind that the used game section in CEX or GAME is half…