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The Hitman games were a master class in stealth and player choice when they were originally released. Agent 47 could find a thousand ways of eliminating any target and sneaking out without anybody being any the wiser, and playing again and again to improve your playthrough was a big part of the way the series worked. With Absolution, the latest in the franchise, now available in stores, this HD collection is a nice way of comparing how the series has evolved and, in a wider sense, how the gaming industry has changed since the turn of the millennium.

Aliens: Colonial Marines, a collaboration between SEGA and Gearbox, was first announced in 2006, just short of a year before the reveal of Borderlands. Borderlands was released in 2009 to critical acclaim, Aliens wasn’t and wouldn’t be until much later. In fact, Colonial Marines was presumed dead for much of its six and a half year development cycle and perhaps, given the controversy surrounding the title since its release, it should have been left buried. With so much going for it, not least the Aliens IP, how did it all go so terribly wrong?

Battlefield 3 is a first person shooter from the development company Dice, and was the showcase game for their new graphics engine, the fabled Frostbite 2. The game features a compelling campaign based on a United States marine who is arrested on suspicion of murder and for ‘apparently’ assisting Iranian ultra-nationalists in nuclear terrorism. We follow Sergeant Blackburn as he tries to save the world from re-entering the Cold War. Battlefield 3 is most revered however for its expansive multiplayer, which, like all previous Battlefield games, has redefined ...

Saints Row III seems like a hard sell. It’s essentially “Grand Theft Auto… But More OUTRAGEOUS” and it’s easy to imagine consumers thinking that GTA is already sufficiently outrageous. However, while the GTA franchise uses satire as a form of comic relief, that series is really a gritty crime drama at heart. Saints Row The Third is actually the opposite of Grand Theft Auto. Saints Row The Third is almost entirely focused on comedy with just a pinch of seriousness; it’s a game where players can team up with Burt Reynolds to fight Mexican wrestlers, zombies and ...

Aliens: Colonial Marines has been in development for over half a decade. Despite the track record of developer Gearbox, and the popularity of the sci-fi franchise, the much anticipated game has been delayed more times than I can count. Considering that, it's something of a miracle that this game was released at all. Unfortunately, it's a little less of a miracle considering how surprisingly bad this game turned out to be.

Despite a generally luke-warm reception from critics, 2010’s Medal of Honor reboot from developer Danger Close was not all bad. The title focused on the elite branch of the military known as Tier 1, of which there are a mere handful of operatives currently deployed. Granted, the missions were a little sloppy and the characters not very interesting, but at its core was a mostly decent modern warfare sim with some interesting ideas that just didn’t quite come to fruition.

Battlefield is a franchise known for its more serious take on war and for its emphasis on teamwork and strategy. It got a following – and rightly so – for its large maps, it’s vehicles and its excellent community. Battlefield 3 is the first main entry in the series since Battlefield 2 was released in 2005 and is the first specifically for HD consoles. With top notch graphics and impressive animation, have DICE squeezed as much as they’re going to get out of the PlayStation 3?

Every year there is a deluge of First Person Shooter games, each one with their own level of hype around them and expectations from the developers and publishers as to how they’ll perform. The market has erred on the side of more arcade, fast-paced action of late much in the vein of the uber-popular Call of Duty series. For years now, the yin to the yang of Call of Duty has been the Battlefield games and for good reason -- the Battlefield games show that games within the same genre can be very, very different. Battlefield games tend to emphasize bigger maps, ...

Capcom has several successful series that it tends to stick to the majority of the time; Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, just to name a few. So when the publisher/developer released their brand new IP Dragon’s Dogma, they were definitely stepping way outside of the box. Combine that with what they claimed would be a unique and complex combat system, and different way to adventure with friends, and a large open world to explore and Capcom had the makings for quite a gaming experience. Doubts ran rampant about whether Dragon’s Dogma could live up ...

The first Borderlands was one of the breakout successes of 2009. With its incredibly unique blend of first person shooter action with role-playing game character customization, Borderlands was an instant phenomenon. Gamers logged thousands of hours shooting bad guys, picking up loot, and repeating. Three years and lot of DLC later, Gearbox has finally released a proper sequel, complete with new characters, new gameplay features, and of course, about a billion new guns.