Winning a game of Solitaire is as much about luck as it is skill but, just like Peggle and Drop7, it’s highly compulsive even armed with that knowledge. You could always make your own luck, of course, which is exactly what Lars, Marcus and Theo of near-unpronounceable design collective Skrekkogle did when they set about rending Solitaire’s win screen from the restrictive confines of the monitor.
The sight of a PSP Monster Hunter at the top of the all-formats chart may suggest that it's business as usual in Japan. Further down the list, however, are the first green shoots of 3DS's recovery.
Xenoblade Chronicles begins in much the same way as its spiritual grandfather, the seminal Japanese RPG Xenogears, did some 13 years ago. No sooner have you settled into the shoes of your protagonist, learned the layout of his pastoral neighbourhood and met the friendly faces that comprise his community in Colony 9, than everything around you is destroyed in a gigantic robot attack.
Driver’s story sounds daft: series hero Tanner gets a bonk on the head and ends up in a coma. The game takes place in his dream, and so explains the game’s principle novelty: the ability to leave Tanner’s body and possess that of any other driver in the city. Two things subsequently surprise you.
Driver’s story sounds daft: series hero Tanner gets a bonk on the head and ends up in a coma. The game takes place in his dream, and so explains the game’s principle novelty: the ability to leave Tanner’s body and possess that of any other driver in the city. Two things subsequently surprise you.
Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, has condemned EA's combative attitude in the run-up to the release later this year of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, saying: "This kind of rhetoric is bad for our industry."
As Square Enix Group worldwide technology director, Julien Merceron must oversee a great deal of development projects, managing the tech needed to create them. At last month's Develop conference, he told us that while budgetary and staffing limitations mean that bespoke engines aren't always possible, ensuring teams have access to tools that don't inhibit their visions takes precedence.
The Adventures Of Shuggy is by all accounts a buoyant little platform-puzzler with ever-changing mechanics and a cheery sense of its own nonsense. To deal in crude numbers: on this website it rated an enthusiastic seven, and we were trailing a little below the critical average. But then there are those other numbers - the ones that really matter: sales. For all the goodwill towards it, the game has barely troubled the charts since it became available for download on XBLA in June.