College football’s toughest critics – the ones who agonize endlessly over the disaster that is the BCS or the unfair advantage that big-time conferences enjoy over their mid-major counterparts – are also its biggest fans. When it comes to EA’s annual collegiate gridiron efforts, we group ourselves in that mix. …

Go to Source

You might think that decent licensed platform games died out with the dinosaurs. But Activision has experienced reasonable success recently with the likes of Kung Fu Panda, and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs follows in the same vein by delivering another competent slice of platforming action. In fact, it might have been a bit of a mini-classic if only the difficulty level had been ramped up a bit. …

Go to Source

Your typical baseball came doesn’t come packed with fireballs, explosions, powerups, and character-building, but chances are you already knew The BIGS 2 isn’t your average hardballer. In fact, it celebrates not being a staid old sim; yes, it sports MLB licensed-players, stadiums, and teams, but in reality it’s got more in common with a good ol’ action RPG than anything else. …

Go to Source

Spider-Man and Hulk work well as open-world adventurers and the X-Men make for stellar action RPG stars. Few Marvel Comics properties fit the first-person shooter bill like The Punisher, and Frank Castle’s wanton violence in the name of vigilante justice is a comfortable premise for a videogame. Unlike the last generation’s solid third-person Punisher game, however, The Punisher: No Mercy is a sloppy, online-focused FPS …

Go to Source

Spare a thought for the poor old chaps at Japan’s ARC System Works, who were merrily working to perfect the only thing for which they’d ever achieved any kind of fame – the Guilty Gear series – when, above their heads, some legal wrangling meant their child was taken away from them and custody awarded to SEGA Sammy. What to do? Make a new baby! …

Go to Source

Sorry, solo gamers, Battlefield 1943 can only be bought and played online. There’s no single player campaign, no option to fight bots – there isn’t even the option to run around the maps on your own (unless you’re playing the tutorial). It’s all about human vs human FPS combat; a game so perfectly balanced to accommodate and encourage the randomness of online play that it simply wouldn’t work with AI. …

Go to Source

Seven months. That’s how much extra time EA Bright Light has had to tweak and polish Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince after its release date was pushed back thanks to the movie’s theatrical slippage. The time could have been spent perfecting one of the most valuable game licenses. …

Go to Source

The current reinvention of Transformers is one of those things that make it hard to be a geek some days. The previous Transformers film took everything we loved about the original cartoon and toys and rendered it stupid – yet made something like 700 million dollars – and the game was just shy of an abomination. This time around, the movie is arguably even worse. Seriously, gold-toothed, urban transformers who can’t read? …

Go to Source

After apocalyptic future worlds, there can be few settings less original than the Old West. Chuck in a desert, some dueling and a few authentic guns and you have yourselves a game, right? Well Techland don’t subscribe to that – Bound in Blood, like its predecessor, has ideas coming out the wazoo. …

Go to Source

The Guitar Hero series has usually had a stellar track list – seriously, how many people would be willing to shred out to a ridiculous looking plastic guitar if the tunes were lame? So on one hand, it makes sense for publisher Activision to release this compilation, which collects 48 songs from five previous Guitar Hero titles (Guitar Heroes 1 through 3 as well as Rocks the ‘80s and Aerosmith). …

Go to Source