To celebrate the launch of Minecraft – Mojang’s hugely successful build ‘em up – on the Xbox 360, D+PAD decided to take a close look at one of the game’s most-compelling (and downright evil) characters: The Creeper. So, with cuboids in hand, Charles Etheridge-Nunn enters the world of Minecraft and sets about dissecting this curious and terrifying foe… Read the full story »

Linger In Shadows (the first PlayStation 3 title by demoscene stalwarts, Plastic) refused to sit comfortably within any particular genre. Was it a game, an interactive video, a tech demo? The answer to these questions is still open to debate, but what is certain is that it served up a series of remarkably striking and imaginative visuals. From flying beagles, cloud-faced babies, floating plants, smirking cats, swarms of cubes and a swirling black cloud of nothingness (all surrounded by a grimly realised cityscape), Linger In Shadows was imaginative and astonishingly good looking, even if it did leave you floundering to grasp what on earth was going on. For the follow up – enigmatically titled Datura – the developers at Plastic have retained the head scratching weirdness, but also aim to demonstrate a new found love for traditionally more gamey mechanics. Read the full story »

The licensed video game is a much-maligned species, and quite rightly so if one looks at the majority of titles on offer. From dubious platform games in the 16-bit era to the flood of 3D action platformers and simple fighting games that current-generation consoles have been faced with, the main problem of a licensed game is often that it does not adequately or faithfully represent is source material or push it in any interesting directions. By rights, superheroes should be an easy subject for games to handle, being as they are power fantasies with abilities as required by the plot, but somehow few games manage to make “being” Captain America, or Superman, or Iron Man a fun experience. Titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum are few and far between. Read the full story »

Modern gaming is often plagued by the lure of feature creep, with gamers and publishers alike frequently expecting or demanding that a feature list as long as your arm (or, possibly, your leg) appears on the back of a game’s box. Over time, we have been conditioned to expect an online component with virtually every game for example and, in fairness, at £40+ per title it’s not unreasonable to expect value for money. ‘Value for money’ and good game design are not necessarily one and the same however, and just because you can include an extra element in your title, doesn’t mean that you always should. Read the full story »

I spent the majority of my Easter weekend playing a wonderfully conceived city-based zombie shooter, in which at least three separate design threads – twin-stick high-score chaser, single-player narrative, global metagame – all work in near-perfect harmony. Anyway, enough about Housemarque’s Dead Nation. This here is Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Capcom’s latest attempt to sully its legendary series. Read the full story »