I'm much more sympathetic to the game design reasons for the move, which argue that persistence, social features, trading and deep integration of multiplayer co-op (the competitive Arena mode will be added later) make the game much more fun. They unquestionably do. In fact, it's a bitter shame that the poor launch service has obscured what is otherwise a dazzling piece of engineering and design - a true vision of the future of connected gaming that for seamlessness, approachability and ease-of-use knocks every rival on computers and consoles into a cocked hat. In those terms, Diablo 3 is one of the best online games ever made.


It's great to see the production values of a modern blockbuster applied to an old-school 'isometric' camera perspective, with some ingenious staging.
I've already detailed its virtues (and a few niggles) but the stellar implementation of drop-in, drop-out co-op needs to be singled out here. The elegance and speed with which you can jump between friends' games, public games and private games, dotting around the levels, cycling through various sessions and modes of play according to your mood, with the game dynamically adjusting difficulty to party size - all without breaking the action for more than 30 seconds at a time - is quietly breathtaking. This is what co-op gaming is supposed to be like. You'll never look back.

The biggest difference is that now we're in more expensively assembled car parks, offices, docks, hotels and alleyways, infused with the sort of fine-grain environmental detail we've come to expect from Rockstar's worlds. A slow walk through a Sao Paolo favela halfway through the game is almost on a par with Uncharted 2's stroll through a Tibetan village; as Max prowls the alleys in a bad Hawaiian shirt, street kids play football on a rundown basketball court, startled mothers rush to close wooden shutters, and gang members stalk the player's shadows with AK-47s.

"After a few respawns, the game gives you some extra painkillers, suggesting even Rockstar realised its game wasn't perfectly weighted. So why not fix it?"
But all this polish can only sustain your enjoyment for so long when it's punctuated by such repetitive and increasingly frustrating combat. Even on the regular difficulty setting, using Shoot Dodge - the most entertaining thing about being Max Payne - soon becomes impractical due to the weight of enemy numbers and their pinpoint accuracy. We've learned to cope with the occasional balancing issue in a vast Grand Theft Auto game, but the difficulty spikes and checkpointing mistakes in Max Payne 3 betray Rockstar's lack of experience in pure third-person shooters. After a few respawns, the game gives you some extra painkillers, suggesting even Rockstar realised its game wasn't perfectly weighted. So why not fix it?

Little niggles quickly start to pile up, too. When cut-scenes finish, the game switches you back to a single pistol, forcing you to fumble with the inventory every time you retake control. Enemies hurl grenades in your direction to force you out of cover, but you don't get grenades of your own. And enemies take far too many bullets to go down. You can understand them getting back to their feet in body armour - however annoying it is - but when they're wearing shorts and a T-shirt?

Ambitious, grand, at once derivative and pioneering, Dragon's Dogma may not be a classic but it's an important title nonetheless - the first example of a blockbuster Japanese RPG attempting to marry its own heritage with contemporary Western expressions. Expectedly, coming as it does from an action game developer, its jewels are to be found in the dynamic combat, stat-tweaking party-building and defining boss battles. In this way, the game echoes the adventurous, dragon-hunting spirit of its (second- and third-hand) literary influences: that sense of unpredictable peril that could be lurking in every cave and thicket.

I'm not going to pretend what I came up with can match any of that. Truth be told, there are hundreds of thousands of things I feel genuinely positive about, anyway. There's the theoretically easy route to market, the range of platforms for developers to aim for, the endless possibilities of cheap middleware and - oh yeah! - the sheer amount of good games that are coming out. Something else - something far more basic - popped into my head, though, and then it wouldn't go away. Over the last few years, games have rediscovered colour.

Okay, a caveat here: I appreciate that the much-maligned colourlessness of contemporary games has been fiercely overstated in the first place. Platformers and puzzlers, for example, never fell out of love with Richard of York, and even the blandest of military shooters will have a good chunk of the rainbow present - in the skies, in the trees, in the rich glow of your burning and irradiated comrades. Drink it in! The idea that games have become monochrome this generation holds up to no scrutiny.

What I do think is true, though, is that games often play back in the mind a little blandly now, due to their artfully limited pallets. When I think of Space Marine, in other words, I tend to remember uninterrupted passages of rusty browns, while a lot of other shooters seem to be parades of sandy beige and urban grey. When I say games have rediscovered colour, I guess I mean that more and more games are falling in love with bold, dynamic ranges of colour: they're throwing in all kinds of different shades at once, and it makes a real difference.

Is the soldier of the future relevant today in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier?

Tera's focus on action-combat makes it a new kind of MMO, but is it one worth playing?

A small platform game about love or maybe just a little pretentious game?

In this episode of Hit Points see the reasons why we can't wait for the arrival of Max Payne 3.

This is a beta build of Grunty's Revenge with a full debug menu still in tact.

A top ten list that should be in the library of every self-respecting gamer, old and new. See more games you should play on ScrewAttack here!

Is Starhawk a match made in heaven or a black hole?

Those are just some of the examples. Trust me; I spent literally thirty minutes just thinking of which one to post. There are just too many good ones.

I think the reason I love Zac Gorman's artwork is because they are simple, yet so complex. Not to mention in some of them he uses animation and it definitely makes the art come to alive. I truly hope that he will continue to do what he loves and that people give him the positive response he truly deserve.

Here's the exclusive scoop on what to expect from Sony's highly anticipated title, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale!

Working with John was like the sequence in “The Matrix” where Neo has one martial art after another pumped into his brain. I’d stagger out into the parking lot of Id’s Black Cube in Mesquite each evening stunned from a day of trying to keep up with John as we figured out an entirely new programming world – 3D, Internet client-server multiplayer gaming, mods, scripting, everything since we were the only two programmers – and somehow manage the half-hour drive back to Plano. It all happened at lightning speed, with no time to sit back and digest – Quake shipped only 16 months after I arrived. And it was all worth it – not only did I grow tremendously as a programmer, but Quake turned out to be a seminal game; granted, not one of the best games ever, but truly groundbreaking technically (for which, to be clear, John was the brilliant innovator and driving force), and a game that gave rise to a genre and a community that continue strong to this day. As one example, when I started at Valve I found that dozens of people there had started their careers by modding Quake or working on games based on the Quake engine – and in a way I also created my own job 15 years in the future.

Every franchise has its haters, but which ones have completely overstayed their welcome?

Has Trials truly "Evolved" from the primordial physics soup?

Who's behind this jazzy PC platformer? Why, the master of farts himself, Cliffy B of course!

Premiering on console with new content, does The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition make the grade?

Boy meets dragon. Dragon eats boy's heart. Boy becomes hero and departs on an epic quest!

Body Harvest is a game that would greatly benefit from today’s graphical engines and the storage capacity of computer hard drives and/or blu-ray discs. Imagine adding the Geomod 2.0 engine seen in Red Faction Guerilla to a whole city, or the individual limb destruction as seen in Dead Space? You’d have giant insect limbs flying off and crashing into large buildings, causing a delightful palette of destruction that would make most any gamer smile. Lets not even get into vehicle customization or level alterations based on the time traveling piece. I can imagine accidentally leveling an entire city, only to find that future scenarios were adversely affected by a lackadaisical approach to preventing an infestation. The possibilities are endless, which is where the huge difference between a cartridge and today‘s storage medium would really show through.

There were 296 games released for the Nintendo 64 in North America. Which is hardly any, I know. But it'll still seem like a lot when you sit down and watch this movie which collects footage from every single one of them.

Step into the shoes of a revengeful assassin framed for the murder of the emperor in Bethesda's new first-person action game.

The other thing I played this week was Journey. Man, that game is great. It’s also short. I think it only took me about an hour and a half to play from start to finish, but it could take another hour or so if you explored every little nook and cranny. At $15 that may be a somewhat dicey proposition for people who like to judge games based on weird hour-to-dollar ratios (you know, crazy people), but I loved the experience I got out of it; it was pretty much perfect. It’s kind of a hard game to describe, but that’s partially because it’s so simple. You just go on a journey, and that’s about it. It’s about travelling across this epic landscape, and seeing what there is to see as you go from point A to point B. The mechanics are incredibly simple, there’s no combat or conflict to speak of, and there’s no mechanism for judging your performance. Journey exists to let you experience an incredible sequence of sights and sounds at your leisure, each one as varied and beautiful as the last.


Yep. Still beautiful.
That’s what makes the game resonate so well. It looks and sounds absolutely amazing, and the way the game is paced is perfectly designed to guide your emotions through all sorts of memorable turns (I had chills go up my spine on multiple occasions, most prominently at the end). If nothing else, Journey is a master at the art of showing but not telling. It doesn’t explicitly tell you a damn thing, yet I have no doubt that anyone who plays it comes away knowing exactly what happened, even if they can’t put it into words themselves. I really enjoy this type of narrative. The other really interesting component to Journey is the “multiplayer”. Similar to Demon’s/Dark Souls, other players just kind of come in and out of your world. Since there’s no combat, however, you are simply sharing the same space with someone else, thus gaining a companion to journey with. I spent most of the game traveling with one other person, and the level of camaraderie the game effortlessly instills in players is incredible. I won’t spoil anything, but there were moments where I genuinely felt bad for my companion as he or she stumbled along, and I’d like to think they felt the same way about me. This is all the more impressive given the fact that there is no way to communicate past a hilarious little chirping sound you can make. I think this style of multiplayer is amazing at getting people to play together while keeping you fully immersed. I think it leads to a more raw set of player interactions than you would have otherwise, and I hope we see more games do this stuff in the future.

It was made with a nameless companion. I had met him at the base of the mountain, taking shelter behind a headstone. I tried to get his attention by casting a quick spell. After a few casts, he responds with a spell of his own to let me know he has noticed me. I move forward to his location, and after a few seconds spent behind the headstone we silently agree to travel forward together. We soon learned that it was best to stay close to each other for warmth. Several times during the trip we were blown back and against each other in fierce gales that threatened to wipe away any progress we had made throughout the trek if we didn't quickly find shelter behind one of the several headstones that littered the landscape. At some point during the trip, my companion was torn asunder and thrown several feet back by giant dragon creatures that flew overhead. I, having barely escaped the same fate, sought out shelter from the winds and another possible attack inside a stone structure that was partially covered in snow. It was here that I waited for my companion to make his way back to me. After a few minutes, we meet back up and continue our journey up the mountain.

“The fact that you have two-player online, the social experience is there, asking for you to explore, but most games, 90% of the time, you’re shooting zombies,” he said. “You only get 10% time to look at each other and usually that’s forced. People kill me before we reach the end; they steal my health pack. I think if we really want to make people feel better towards each other and have a different impression compared to what the general consensus of online play is, you need to design a game differently. “

You can finish Journey without working with another player, but that's your choice. Chen wants that to be your decision. When solving puzzles in Portal 2’s co-op mode, you’re doing so because you booted up co-op. What if someone appeared in the middle of the single-player experience and asked to help? You’d probably turn them down, wouldn’t you? I know I would. And besides Journey intentionally masking names, your Bluetooth headset means nothing; you can't talk.

"When you run into another player [in Journey], you don’t think about ‘oh, this character’s hot, this character has history.’" said Chen. "You think ‘okay, this is another person who’s controlling the same kind of thing and I know that’s a person.’ That interaction happens at the level of a human being. I know someone’s playing a game. I don’t know how old he is, what gender he is or she is, but I can tell he’s a human, I can tell he’s doing things, I can tell he’s trying to communicate with me. I think, at that level, the multiplayer’s the most beautiful. As soon as you have language, you have ‘okay, this guy is clearly a twelve-year-old.’"

Does Fez live up to the pixelated beauty or is it all just an optical illusion?

Classic physics and classic characters return to make Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II very promising.

The animated planets of popular 20 videos games in under 3 minutes.

How much punch do these intricately-animated ladies pack in Skullgirls?

Can the grossest game ever make this pick-and-flick adventure worthwhile?

Is the kinetic force of Kinect Star Wars strong or is it just bantha fodder?

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Smash but don't crash! Is Ridge Racer Unbounded reborn or rubbish?

Is Dante's Devil May Cry HD Collection still stylish after all these years?

Is your body ready for Borderlands 2? Raw gameplay, guns galore, old friends, and new tricks!

What's black and white and only exists in the light? The answer lies in Closure.

Following a few ramshackle E3 presentations, expectations for Kinect Star Wars were tempered at best. After footage of the game's Galactic Dance Off mode, featuring a dancing Han Solo at the carbonite pit, hit YouTube, these expectations turned from "low" to "the deathblow for the entire Star Wars franchise."

There's certainly more to Kinect Star Wars than a mere generic collection of mini-games, but is really the manifestation of Naga Sadow's wrath for motion gaming?

This is part two of the countdown of the top twenty Nintendo DS games. No matter what is said now, people are going to disagree (Not that they didn't in the last video, especially with Radiant Historia at number 19), so let me restate this: This is all personal opinion, if you agree or disagree, that's understandable, but know that is isn't fact, it's just what I feel are the top games for the little handheld that could. What do you think deserved or didn't deserved a spot on this list?

Alien origins aren't the only way to do the TMNT a major disservice.

Wherein Anthony Burch questions why gamers enjoy backtracking-filled platformers.

Destructoid's Anthony Burch lays down some ground rules for enjoying, and succeeding at, Mega Man 9.

James Rolfe steps outside the Nerd character to recount some cherished memories of Sega's beloved Hedgehog, Sonic.

Has looting robot corpses ever been so enjoyable as in Shoot Many Robots?

With no Itagaki, can Team Ninja teach this old franchise new tricks in Ninja Gaiden 3?

The classic series races onto the Vita. Does it need a tune-up or is Ridge Racer Vita revving to go?

Does the Yakuza series survive these Dead Souls?

Pop Fiction teams up with The Angry Video Game Nerd to take on one of the worst games of all time.

Are you ready to be pounded over the head by the same thing for 19 levels? Welcome to Taz-Mania.

Giant robots and MMO-concepts collide! Is Armored Core V a match made in heaven or hell?

Does the return of Kid Icarus live up to fans' legendary expectations?

How many green herbs will you need to survive Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City?

Revision3 is sharing their behind-the-sounds look with the Berkeley-based Wabi Sabi Sound and how they created all the racket for games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Left 4 Dead 2.

You can accomplish a lot in 100 hours. You could read War and Peace, for instance, then follow it up with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a few starter courses in a new language. You could watch Melancholia 40 times and still have time to squeeze in a screening of Shoah. You could also drive from Los Angeles to New York and back again, or complete 20 weeks of training and then run a marathon. Or, if you preferred, you could also play through the video game Dark Souls from start to finish.
Dark Souls, a medieval fantasy game, was one of the best-reviewed titles of 2011. It was given perfect scores by the Telegraph, 1Up.com, and GamePro, and was named as “game of the year” in Slate's year-end “Gaming Club” by Michael Abbott and Tom Bissell. What happens in Dark Souls? You control a reanimated soul trapped in a violent purgatory. To escape you must seek out and kill phantasmagoric demons waiting in the distant corners of the world, thus proving your worth to the primordial snake gods who keep watch over the place.
In more than twice the time it would take to read Tolstoy's historical fiction, Dark Souls leaves one's head overflowing with useless junk like the difference in attack stats between a Great Axe with a fire bonus versus a Great Axe with a divine bonus. These bits of occult nonsense don't have an internal logic. In one early section, you'll fight a pair of gargoyles who live perched high up on a bell tower in a castle. These gargoyles, you discover, are especially vulnerable to lightning damage. Why a creature that lives on the medieval equivalent of a lightning rod should be vulnerable to lightning damage is not explained. Every victory in the game is built on a similarly dumbfounding bit of nonlogic.
Dark Souls takes so long to play because it refuses to tell you its basic ground rules, then kills you over and over again for failing to understand them. As a player, you proceed not by thinking through problems but by randomly trying anything and everything until something haphazard sticks. The game is teaching you, but it's not teaching you anything worth knowing. In roughly 40 hours of reading, Tolstoy covers the range of human existence: love, premature death, villainy, class, the limits of friendship, the crucible of debt, the idea of humans as helplessly caught in the tidal forces of history. Dark Souls leaves you with the intimate knowledge of when to roll out of the way of an ogre's club swing.

Is the ninth time around the block a revelation for Mario Party 9?

There’s obviously a very good chance you already know this, but just in case: when a developer is bought out by a publisher, it’s usually the case that they then don’t see any ongoing royalties from the games they make for them, or indeed for any existing intellectual property that was swallowed up as part of the studio acquisition. It’s standard practice, knowingly agreed by both parties during the dark deal some studios made to ensure immediate financial viability and larger project budgets. But what it does mean is that a great many of the PC games we regularly celebrate around these parts are no longer bringing in any money for their creators, despite still being on sale. Whenever we excitedly see an old classic appear on Steam or GoG (such as Thief last week), chances are very high that whatever we pay for it goes purely to the publisher and the download service. And while it may well be right that these bodies profit from projects they funded and distribute, it’s sad that the men and women who toiled over that game’s creation won’t see another penny from it.

Will Homefront compel you to fight or to just stay home? Find out in our official Homefront review!

Craig played sports games long before they were cool.

Does Snake's stealthy jungle adventure pop on the 3DS?

The champions of 2D and 3D fighting are joining forces in a tag team like no other, but do opposites really attract?

Does Shepard's massive-scale battle for Human survival provide a fitting conclusion to this interactive space opera? Find out in the GameTrailers Review of Mass Effect 3!

Create beautiful games with Construct 2, the HTML5 game maker.

Download the Free Edition and discover your creative potential. Unlock your inner game maker!

A game so fun you can almost forget it debuted the worst character in Mario history.

Does Journey offer an oasis in the sands from the stilted everyday world?

Binary Domain had all the hallmarks of one of these games. While it promised an absorbing story that posed questions about human emotion, and while it featured intriguing voice recognition technology, early looks at the game revealed wash-out graphics and bog-standard gameplay. In short, it looked like the next Mindjack -- lots of ideas, terrible execution. 

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Binary Domain looks great, plays well, and is a pretty damn fine title overall!

We run pretty far away, all the way back to 2002, with the designer of Retro City Rampage to talk about his love for Rockstar Games' 80s opus.

I want to state, even though the list is set to ‘improve’ on Sonic Team of today, it is mostly a list of what I think makes a great Sonic game. I know this differs from person to person, so I’m always open to hear your input on the matter and what makes a Sonic game good to you.

In reality the 3D gameplay happened to be borderline unplayable, and camera angles often had you staring in Sonic’s ass or stuck in a wall. The three part gameplay was boring nonsense – I mean, who the hell stands around town talking to a giant hedgehog? Furthermore, traveling between missions was contrived bullsh*t. All of which led to a story and plot that made little to no sense and questioned the need for Sonic’s friends, and oh boy, did he have friends. Tails and Knuckles make an ok (at best) comeback, but did we really need Amy, Big, and E102? I should not be f*cking fishing in my Sonic games! The extra friends brought game play and progression to a screeching halt. Little did we know, this was the beginning of the end for Sonic the Hedgehog.
After Sonic Adventure was followed by Sonic Adventure 2, I realized SEGA had lost it. Everything that made Sonic Adventure a bore was brought back. Messy camera work, boring gameplay, and new friends all attributed to an even more disastrous attempt at Sonic in 3D. SEGA was on its way out of the race with a failing Dreamcast, and they took Sonic down with the ship. Sonic, now forced to play catch up with Mario, was seen in too many games not of his genre. Board games, racers, and fighters – you name it, Sonic did it. My favorite speedster was reduced to serving as a whore to a broke pimp.

The slopes beckon, should you answer their call? Carve out your niche in the snowboarding world!

You mad? Asura sure is! See if this unique adventure is the right stress reliever for you!

Engage in large interstellar combat in Starhawk's Public Beta.

A game so bizarre, there is only one mind who could've been responsible.

The makers of Gunstar Heroes bring you a Genesis adventure with less originality than a military FPS.