Just completed: Deus Ex: Human Revolution (X360)

Adam Jensen: Hater of lightbulb fanatics.

There are a chosen few titles - such as Half Life, Legend of Zelda, or World of Warcraft - which come to secure a place in gaming's collective consciousness, but when Ion Storm's Deus Ex came out in 2000, it quickly scaled the ranks to become not only an instant hall-of-famer but to be regarded by many, including PC Gamer magazine, as 'The Greatest PC Game of All Time'. High praise indeed, if fruitless, for although the sequel, Invisible War, was still considered to be a decent effort, it failed to captivate players to the same degree as its forefather. All of this goes some way to explaining why I had completely missed the PR regarding Eidos Montréal's prequel, Human Revolution. What a mistake I had made, and boy am I glad it was rectified.

League of Legends lets me down, Dance Central 2 still looks good

The is the first screen you'll see on the battlefield in LoL.

My Age of Empires Online ambitions were swiftly and permanently curtailed this weekend upon discovering that the version of Windows XP to which I had access was pre-Service Pack 3 and so ineligible for an install. Not one to be put off, I moved immediately onto something else Windows-only: League of Legends.

Suffering Through Final Fantasy XIII: Part II

Lightning whips through foes like... an electrical storm.

I've managed to clock in seven hours now, and at this point, it feels as if the game is starting to open up a little more. I'm still tracking that same linear pathway as before, but at last the combat engine looks to finally be waking up a little.

Suffering Through FFXIII (X360)

Say what you want about gameplay, but FFXIII is beautiful to behold

A rejected copy of Final Fantasy XIII has laid ignored for months beside me, and so last week I decided to give it a chance. Upon release, Square Enix’s latest iteration of the Final Fantasy franchise was much maligned, among other things, for its linearity. Depending on who you’d believe, the game has what amounts to a glorified tutorial section that lasts between fifteen and twenty-five hours, after which point the real game begins in earnest. Challenge accepted.

Xbox Summer of Arcade: Fruit Ninja Kinect, Renegade Ops

Fruit! Slicing! It can only be Fruit Ninja Kinect!

Arriving this week for review on Xbox Live Arcade is an already popular game on smartphones the world over. Now infused with motion capture, I was keen to see how the new iteration, Fruit Ninja Kinect, would compare to its low-budget counterpart.

Xbox Summer of Arcade: From Dust and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (XBLA)

The clean, Flash-esque visuals really work to ITSP's advantage.

It’s been just over a week, and the second and third instalments of Summer of Arcade have been released, so let’s go take a look at them, shall we?

Catherine is frustrating, Kinectimals is cute, Dance Central is great

Catherine could just as easily be renamed 'Tower of Ragequit'.

I decided to take a dabble into the world of Catherine, the new game from the developers of the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona franchise. A survival horror puzzle platformer dating sim certainly sounds like a new experience. But does it work?

XBLA Weekend: Torchlight, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, and others

Torchlight is an excellent dungeon crawler.

Saturday evening turned into a bit of an XBLA proving ground. I downloaded a whole host of titles in my continuing mission to find a game worthy of my 800 points. In and amongst the games were a few choice highlights and a very certain lowlight. Winner of the night – Torchlight.

Summer of Arcade: The Kid loaded up Bastion, and it was good (XBLA)

Bastion looks new and familiar all at once.

After much hype and fuss since I first heard of its development, SuperGiant Games’ Bastion finally saw release this week, as part 1 of Xbox’s Summer of Arcade season. If the trial version is anything to go by, this is a very impressive little title.

Alice continues to dazzle and delight; Alan is barely awake

The swift justice of the Vorpal Blade really shows off A:MR's visuals.

After another week of playing, I’ve seen even more of the alphabetically prime Alice: Madness Returns and Alan Wake, the latter of which I finished last night. Asides from that, I took some time to try out a couple of releases; some new, and some not so new on the XBLA Marketplace.

First Impressions: Alan Wake (X360)

Alan ain't afraid o' no ghost.

Last weekend, Amazon delivered two new bright young things to Notre maison d’amour numérique: Alan Wake and Alice: Madness Returns. I spent the week mostly engrossing myself in the psychological thriller that is Alan Wake, and took a backseat to watch my girlfriend work through Spicy Horse’s sequel to American McGee’s Alice. Both games deal with eerie worlds in almost diametrically opposed ways.
Alan Wake plays like a television series – the game goes so far as to even be split up into ‘episodes’, whilst Alice: Madness Returns is a more whimsical affair, though its cute and colourful visuals look to belie a serious, blackened core of a story. Essentially, both of the protagonists in these games are disturbed by their thoughts, and suffer in varying degrees as victims of their own psyche. Whilst running and gunning certainly has a time and place in terms of good, clean fun, I have always found myself to be most drawn in by a good story, and if there can be even so much as a dash of suffering, I’m on board. Let’s take a look at Alan Wake first-off.

New Adventures in XBLA

Journey isn't on XBLA, but it represents how I feel when I sit at the Marketplace menu.

A recent change in both location and situation has left me with substantially more free time to spend playing video games. Laden with such time, my first port of call was my list of older games I wanted to catch up on, and after some deliberation I chose to start with the serially-delayed Remedy joint, Alan Wake, of which many good things were heard. Having then placed the order with my good friends at Amazon, I opted to pass the waiting time by delving into the cavernous realm of Xbox’s Game Marketplace to try out a few mostly-recent demos. Here are my impressions on them:

The Nostalgia Buck: Is Gaming going the way of Hollywood?

Child of Eden has all of the colours, all of the sounds, all of the time.

Last week, not one, not two, but three separate hotly-anticipated sequels to three relatively antiquated titles saw release: the testosterone-laden shooter Duke Nukem Forever (Duke Nukem 3D, 1996), the synaesthesia-influenced Child of Eden (Rez, 2001), and gothic fairytale-retold Alice: Madness Returns (American McGee’s Alice, 2000). All three of these originals share a common trait of having been considered singular at their time of release and yet have made for a combined wait of thirty-six years to finally escape into the market. But was it worth the wait? And is this a sign of a wider, darker trend in games development?

E3 Round-up, Duke Nukem Forever, Silent Hill 2

Duke Nukem 4eva, baybee.

Another year, another post-E3 week, with only a mere 358 days until the next event. Get marking your calendars, people who attend E3. Disclaimer: I wasn’t at E3, though it has long been an ambition of mine to attend it. Ideally, that would be in a professional capacity, though. Anyway, I thought I’d touch on the announcements that piqued my interest most throughout the event.

E3 2011: Impressions of the Nintendo Conference

Reggie Fils-Aimé working his Force Lightning pose.

In many ways the most highly-anticipated of the Big Three this year, everyone was perched and poised, ready to witness the unveiling of the first console to be a member of the next generation. Running at just around half the length of Microsoft’s media extravaganza, Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé came armed and serious, confident in an outcome that wowed us all.