It’s funny how childhood memories sitting in the dustier corners of your mind can suddenly be pushed to the fore by a few mere words. ‘Remember those hand held water games you had as a kid?’, asks Socialagogo on its website, a question which – for a moment – left me staring blankly at the screen. But then it suddenly dawned on me – ‘Oh! Those hand held water games! The ones with the big squishy buttons with plastic balls and tiny plastic toys floating in them’. In a flash I was seven years old again which was a simpler age of simpler pleasures – and ‘simple pleasures’ is quite an apt turn of phrase to describe iOS game Bubble Jets. Read the full story »

Kirby’s Adventure Wii is a game of sickening ultraviolence wrapped in the aesthetic of a loveable children’s platformer. At one point our titular pink blob unleashes a machete almost as big as the screen, slicing through harmless-looking sleeping enemies with barely disguised glee. Later on, a devastating flame attack is responsible for the biggest moment of rampant deforestation in videogaming history. This is without mentioning the automatic cannon he frequently stumble upon – held above his head, it decimates everything in his path as he nonchalantly walks ahead, the in-game massacre massaged by trippy, vibrant colours. Kirby’s Adventure Wii is, in these moments, a game of primal, unabashed joy. Read the full story »

To date, the Zen Pinball series has proven to be a masterclass in videogame pinball design. It started by laying down remarkably solid foundations with wonderfully authentic physics, and then built an impressive suite of features on top – online leaderboards and multiplayer, videochat support and more. It then cemented its position with a series of nicely priced and beautifully designed DLC tables to keep players hooked. In short, it has provided the most authentic and fully featured pinball experiences that gamers could ask for. The game now arrives on the Nintendo 3DS’s eStore – and this release sees the series’ high standards maintained, even if it doesn’t necessarily push it in any particularly new or interesting directions. Read the full story »

On the back of the box for the UK release of Super Mario 3D Land, Nintendo describes the game as ‘A Pick-Up-and-Play 3D Mario’. As far as promotional statements go, this seemed a little unnecessary – haven’t Mario platformers always been ‘pick-up-and-play’? Isn’t accessibility in a Mario game a given? It’s not until you actually start playing that the significance of this hits home, as you realise that for Mario’s first platforming adventure on the 3DS Nintendo have gone back to basics, stripping away many of the embellishments that have attached themselves to the series since the plumber first appeared on the NES all those years ago. But, in stripping away so much, is the resulting game a lean, mean platforming machine or just rather emaciated? Read the full story »

So far the life of the Playstation Move accessory has been a relatively inauspicious one. Whilst the technology itself has proven to be very accurate and versatile, the accompanying software has failed to make it anything other than a curiosity, a situation not helped by the fact that its implementation into some of the big AAA titles has still felt somewhat shoehorned in this year. Carnival Island is the latest Move focused game from Sony that hopes to change this trend. Ostensibly a mini-game collection, Carnival Island is clearly aimed at the kids and family market, after all its relation (in name only) to the wildly successful Carnival Games series on the Wii is hardly accidental. Unfortunately whilst the package that Sony’s Santa Monica Studio (along with new developer Magic Pixel) have put together is aesthetically very pleasing, it masks a serious lack of ambition and depth that conspire to make the value proposition of the game a hard one to justify. Read the full story »