Back in 2011, the Sonic series was celebrating its 20th anniversary with a fusion of both new and old Sonic games in Sonic Generations, where the two would come together and you could get the best (or worst) of both worlds. It quickly became a fan favourite thanks to its nostalgia of Sonic’s origins and…
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It’s that time of the year again. PAX Aus is back for another epic event of gaming and pop culture at the Melbourne Convention Centre. Starting today, the event runs Friday 11 October through Sunday 13th of October with live panels, interactive events, competitions, cosplay and so much more! If you are tight on time…
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I consider myself a casual fan of the Yakuza (now Like a Dragon) franchise, yet, I’ve played almost all of them. Having played this game’s predecessor Yakuza: Like a Dragon sometime after its launch, I was pleasantly surprised at the decision to bring combat into the turn-based frontier, making for a more tactical blend of…
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It’s a long title, but this is also a long franchise. With the Like a Dragon series heading in a new direction, we see the Gaiden games coming back to piece together some of the missing pieces. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name picks up the story of the previous protagonist…
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Since 1991, Sega’s blue blur mascot Sonic the Hedgehog has dominated the gaming industry with classic side-scrolling adventures, many defining a particular decade or console genertaion. After Sonic Mania re-invented the series again in 2017, the next big 2D platforming game starring our blue hero is finally here. This time around it is 2.5D expereince…
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To commemorate Sonic’s appearance as a LEGO mini-figure in Sonic Superstars, SEGA has partnered with one of the world’s leading LEGO brick artists and only LEGO Certified Professional (LCP) in the southern hemisphere, Ryan McNaught, aka Brickman, to create a Sonic Building Challenge. Brickman has created a guide on how you can make your own…
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Sega is celebrating a return to form with Samba de Amigo finally getting a next-gen release on both Nintendo Switch and Apple Arcade, with a brand new rhythm-based game that takes on the likes of Guitar Hero and fuses it with the physical energy of Just Dance for an all-out party, which can be played…
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For as much as I have enjoyed almost every entry in the Yakuza series (known in Japan as Like a Dragon), I was surprised to find I had never encountered Like a Dragon: Ishin! Funnily enough, western fans might have felt the same way, upon realising that this entry is actually a remake of a…
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The big blue blur is having the time of his life in 2022, thanks to an incredibly successful film sequel. So with the Sonic series reaching an all-time high in recent years, developer Sonic Team has decided to completely re-invent the wheel by taking him out of his traditional 2D side-scrolling adventure, instead opting for…
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The Yakuza Remastered Collection is a watershed moment for Japan’s favourite video game crime drama. 15 years ago, you might never have heard of the Yakuza series. Today, it is beloved. The series has enjoyed a recent resurgence — a prequel in Yakuza Zero, remakes in Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2, a new game…
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Time to admit it: you need a gift guide. It’s a few days to Chrimbo and you’ve only just realised because you’ve been playing Death Stranding. You’ll be at the shopping centre this weekend to see Star Wars which presents an opportunity to do some last minute Christmas shopping. But what do you get the…
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In the last few years, I’ve watched on as friends with happy, Super Nintendo-infused childhoods got to grips with the SNES Mini. The SNES Mini is a recreation of Nintendo’s legendary machine that is as elegant as it is functional — a curatorial showcase of its greatest titles, controllers that were made of the same…
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After almost 15 years of games buried deep in the criminal psyche, the Yakuza series makes an abrupt pivot to the other side of the law in Judgment, a spin-off title about a worn-down private detective working the mean streets of Kamurocho. A Japanese crime thriller with a few action and RPG aspects thrown in…
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Sonic the Hedgehog’s been through a lot in the last twenty-five years. Repeated, flavourless sequels that cast a wide genre net have dogged the old blue blur, from 3D platformers to endless runners and puzzle games, and the less said about his upcoming movie the better. Team Sonic Racing is the third in Sega’s series…
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Total War: Three Kingdoms steeps Creative Assembly’s venerable strategy franchise in Chinese history for the first time in its nearly 20 year run. Its campaign broadly encompasses the story known as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a period when the Han Dynasty was on the wane, hurling the entire country into a bloody, 60-year…
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I don’t know when it happened precisely, but at some time in the last few years I became a huge fan of the Yakuza series. If I weren’t working as a games critic, it’s likely I never would have played them. And to not have played them would have been a tremendous shame. The Yakuza…
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This month’s free game haul for Xbox Live subscribers is a pretty solid one. This month sees the usual drop of four free titles, ranging from strategy to indies, family games and retro gems. So here’s what you get: Xbox One: Prison Architect — available Sept. 1 to 30 Livelock — available Sept. 16 to…
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Look, I reviewed Sonic Mania when it launched last year. I found it to be a breath of fresh air in a series comprehensively and aggressively starved of it for decades. It was the kind of modern update that walks an incredibly fine line, paying homage to what came before and pushing the property forward…
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I have bloviated at length on this website about my upbringing as a Sega kid. While the SNES dominated the market, those of us who chose the Sega life knew we had a machine with true gems among its library. The arcade-centric counterpart to the SNES’ far broader appeal, the Mega Drive did its own…
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Don’t let the new title fool you. Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia is still a fully-fledged entry in Creative Assembly’s long-running series of historical strategy games. But where older Total War titles have selected a particular real world empire or historical era to focus on, Total War Saga narrows its scope. It focuses not…
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In the last twelve months, I’ve gone from having never played a Yakuza game to having played three of them and what I didn’t expect was for them to grow on me so quickly. This series has always felt very By Japanese People, For Japanese People, there’s so many cultural nods and gestures that don’t…
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In Yakuza 6, you can put a dude’s head into a microwave at a convenience store and have the store assistant fry him to death with the push of a button. Aside from being wildly impractical and likely causing lifelong trauma for all involved, the fatality underscores the inherent wildness and absurd humour of the…
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Former developers and artists from now defunct studios Bullfrog and Lionhead (Black & White, Fable) have found a home at SEGA, launching their new outfit Two Point Studios. Their first title? A spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, one one of Bullfrog’s most popular titles.
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At the beginning of my holiday break, I started working on a piece about using the SNES Classic Mini to play games I’d missed out on in my childhood as a Sega kid. The plan was to play each of these games and produce a few pars on each to illustrate the experience, how they…
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The next time you have a creative project that you feel isn’t coming together quickly enough, I want you to remember that it took Creative Assembly 20 years of rigourous experimentation, honing the things that worked and pruning back the things that didn’t, to get their Total War series to the point where it’s damned near…
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Yakuza Kiwami is the sum of every other game in the series. I don’t know that it would exist without every other game that has preceeded it (though I guess, if you want to be pedantic, most come after it in the greater series timeline). What Yakuza Kiwami can’t quite do is bring itself to be better than…
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Sonic Mania is a gift. For Sega kids everywhere, it is a portal to your childhood. For long-suffering Sonic fans, it is a well overdue homecoming. It is proof that the Sonic the Hedgehog formula, abandoned in the Saturn era, is as fun, interesting and engaging as it was in the early 90’s. After nearly 25 years of…
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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III seems to want to be all things to all people. Did you miss the base building from DoW2? Good news, bases are back. Heroic units? Large-scale armies? All present and accounted for. It wants to be all things to all people (specifically fans of the DoW series and tabletop game), and it…
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The first teaser for upcoming SEGA title, Sonic Forces has been revealed at the annual SXSW festival. The trailer features a break-neck journey through a city under siege, with Sonic dashing his way through a gorgeous landscape.
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Yakuza 0 is the latest addition to SEGA’s long-running series of adventure games set in the Japanese criminal underworld. A prequel to the 2005 original, Yakuza 0 is all about how series mainstay Kazuma Kiryu began his bloody career in the mob.
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