Games, Books and Films

One the PlayStation’s greatest mysteries was the unenthusiastic commercial response that Rage Racer was met with. A bold and sleek progression of the Ridge Racer franchise with greater depth of customisation, more cars, more tracks and arcade gameplay tuned to near-perfection, identifying a key factor for the lukewarm reception that greeted what was then easily… Read More

Perhaps inevitably, the huge success Ridge Racer experienced when released alongside the PlayStation in 1995 prompted a flurry of similar titles over the next couple of years, eager to tap into the publics rekindled interested in the arcade-racing game. Ray Tracers is one of the most flagrant rip-offs, but that’s not to say it isn’t… Read More

Broken Sword aside, point ‘n’ click adventures have never really had the same impact on home consoles as they have for the PC, and Wanadoo’s PSOne release of Louvre: The Final Curse in 2002 in a nutshell sums up why. Obvious control and graphical limitations aside, it had the potential to be a very good… Read More

The momentous success of Gran Turismo meant that Polyphony Digital’s “other” racing series of the PSOne generation was rather glossed over, and but for a latter day re-release alongside the aforementioned classic, would now be a real rarity. Those expecting Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 (MTGP2) to be little more than prototype from which GT… Read More

In 2008, the PS2 role-playing game Persona 3 doesn’t seem so outlandish; despite what the name eludes to, it is the first of its lineage to appear in Europe and whilst it’s obscure RPG heritage suggests there should be an element of risk to the release, it seems almost destined to garner some level of… Read More

In many respects, 1997 marked the year Squaresoft really hit the big time as a premier games developer. They finally opted to go worldwide with their Final Fantasy franchise - from which the much-celebrated seventh instalment would go on to sell by the shed-load, helping to introduce the RPG genre to a new audience following… Read More

Though Everybody’s Golf has never quite caught on in the west to the degree it has in Japan, it is heartening to see that the franchise is still going strong. Having now made appearances on three generations of gaming systems, the series fifth iteration (the first for the PS3) recently topped the sales charts in… Read More

Jinx, though almost unheard of even in gaming circles, remains one of the biggest surprises of the PlayStation generation, due mainly to the unlikely climate to which it was conceived. Not known for supporting old hardware once more powerful consoles have taken their place, Sony’s announcement that they were releasing a 3D platformer for the… Read More

Equipped with a trio of great Resident Evil’s and the mother of all scare fests in Silent Hill, the PlayStation certainly wasn’t short of quality games to represent its new-found survival-horror genre, as it emerged as perhaps the first generation of games console to have the capacity to truly scare the player.
And following the massive… Read More

Released in a rather unfortunate time around which Final Fantasy VII and Zelda: Ocarina of Time had teamed up to almost bludgeon the 2D RPG out of existence, Suikoden was perhaps destined not to turn heads in the mainstream because of its old-skool sensibilities. Sure enough, it has gone down in the annals of time… Read More