Posts By Mat Growcott

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…

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 ...

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 ...

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…

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…

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…

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 ...

,I’ve made no secret about my love for Final Fantasy VII. The remake was a long-awaited treasure, and this week’s trailer for its sequel, Rebirth, made me pre-order immediately. It will be a masterpiece. And while I’m mostly saying that as an excited fan, it’s undeniable that the trailer showed a game that I didn’t think was possible. The scope and scale of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is something far in excess of what I ...

Game engines aren’t supposed to cause major problems for their users. Usually when they do, it’s accidental. This week Unity bucked that trend. And while there is no shortage of column space around this very issue, it’s worth another look. It could very easily impact on the way we all play our games old and new. So as a quick recap: Unity decided to change their deal with developers. They would charge a set fee of $0.20 for every download…

Final Fantasy has struggled with itself for a good long time. How do you recreate the scale and majesty of a massive SNES or even PS1 game in the HD era? The answer, for a long time, was that you just don’t. You stick to narrow corridors, or scale back the story. Maybe you confine your characters to a car for long journeys, with passing landmarks doing just and only that. With Final Fantasy VII Remake and now Final Fantasy…