David James

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is here and is geared up to be one of the biggest games of the year. It already boasts “universal acclaim” on Metacritic, RPG fans are salivating over it, and social media is about to light up with discussion of its story, characters and themes. But, if you haven’t been keeping up with all things Final Fantasy you may feel left out in the cold.

Steve Rogers is finally back in action, with the newly unveiled game Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra seeing the newly-empowered super soldier bashing the fash in occupied Paris. Along the way, he’ll be tangling with that era’s Black Panther Azzuri, T’Challa’s grandfather, with the pair united against the same enemy but with different goals.

While superhero movies may have hit a rough patch at the box office, the genre is going from strength to strength in video games. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was amazing (also spectacular) and we have great-looking titles about Blade and Wolverine on the way. But as of last night, the future looks a lot brighter for Marvel fans after the unveiling of the first trailer for Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra.

Marty O’Donnell, the famed and beloved composer of the Halo soundtracks has announced his plans to run for Congress to fight for “self-sacrifice, faith, integrity, fidelity, and valor”. And he’s doing this by siding with the man who embodies the exact opposite of every single one of those qualities.

When gaming icon Hideo Kojima talks, people listen. The Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator is currently riding high after a stupendously great Death Stranding 2: On the Beach reveal and the Disney Plus premiere of the documentary Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds. But now he has what at first glance appears to be a very spicy take on Oscar Isaac.

Anyone working in the video game industry must feel as if they have a target painted on their back. 2023 saw at least 6000 people lose their jobs and 2024 is somehow looking much worse. January saw Microsoft sack 9000 people, there’s been a raft of smaller studio closures and staff cuts. Now Sony has joined this miserable party, handing 900 PlayStation workers their notices across the company.

It’s a good day to be a Pokémon. For once the streets are relatively quiet and the chances of being stuffed into a tiny ball and forced into brutal fights are low. On the flipside, Pokémon GO players are not enjoying themselves. Many are firing up the app for their daily routine of training, evolving and battling to find that they can’t log on, with any attempt being met with a “failed to authenticate” error.

Listen! You hear that? The guns have stopped. The shells aren’t falling. There’s not a grenade explosion to be heard! Sadly this isn’t the beginning of a new era of world peace, but rather the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare IIIservers going down. This is, to say the least, something of a big deal in gaming. Each year’s Call of Duty sells like gangbusters and even the infamously lackluster Modern Warfare III campaign hasn’t stopped tens of millions of gamers swarming to its online modes.

If you haven’t been paying attention Fortnite is now much more than building towers and blasting humanoid bananas. Epic Games is doing what Meta wishes it could and is busy building a bona fide metaverse, with Fortnite rapidly becoming a platform for varied interactive experiences with the Battle Royale mode at its core. Over the last few months, we’ve seen ‘Rocket Racing’, the Minecraft-like ‘LEGO Fortnite’, and expansions of the Creative Modes in which players can make pretty much whatever they want.

Rocksteady Studios’ Arkham-Verse games are one of the most iconic and influential Batman stories of the 21st century, arguably second only to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. The games are built on the foundations of Batman: The Animated Series and feature many returning voice actors, but even by the second entry had begun to tell a tale quite different to that previously emerged from Gotham City.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is finally out and, mercifully, it’s not the disaster everyone had feared. It’s not what fans wanted from a sequel to Arkham Knight and is far from a perfect game, but there is some enjoyment to be had battling through Metropolis in the wake of Brainiac’s invasion.

It’d be so much simpler if Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a complete disaster. If this game were a buggy, ugly, mess populated by unlikeable characters and riddled from top to bottom with predatory microtransactions writing a review would be easy. But, frustratingly, there’s just enough of the Rocksteady Studios I knew and loved in this game to make its mediocrity that much more painful.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is now out. Kinda. Those who pre-ordered the $100 deluxe edition can now play the game, while everyone else has to wait until Feb 2. Then again, given that bugs and glitches saw the game unceremoniously yanked offline hours after its launch and the servers only seem to be sporadically up, few people have been able to put serious time into it.

Rocksteady Studios’ long anticipated Arkhamverse sequel Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will be available to play for those who have preordered it on Jan 30, and to the public at large on its official release date of Feb. 2.

The Dial of Destiny was one of 2023’s biggest flops but, as many soon-to-be-dead Nazis have discovered, just because you knock Indiana Jones down doesn’t mean he’s out of the count. Wolfenstein developer MachineGames has now unveiled Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which allow players to don that fedora and crack that whip.

2015’s Until Dawn was an early stand-out PlayStation 4 exclusive. Developed by Supermassive Games, it effectively asked players to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to a horror movie. Everyone has yelled at characters not to run upstairs when pursued or split up to search for somebody, but Until Dawn let you make those calls.

The first time I powered on my PlayStation Portable I felt like the future had arrived. I’d enjoyed my trusty GameBoy Advance, but here was a fully-fledged multimedia device in a deeply stylish form factor. I booted up my copy of Wipeout Pure and my jaw hit the floor at the silky smooth 3D graphics and toe-tapping dance soundtrack.

In the 1990s Sony was already riding high on the success of the PlayStation, but at the turn of the millennium, they went stratospheric with the all-conquering PlayStation 2. This powerful and elegantly designed console is, as of writing, still the highest-selling games console of all time, with an incredible 155 million units sold over its lifetime.

The Sega Saturn never stood a chance. From day one it was hobbled by a surprise launch annoying gaming retailers and was soon in a one-sided brawl against Sony’s all-conquering PlayStation. The Saturn was comparatively more difficult to develop for, couldn’t push polygons as efficiently, and was soon cratering in sales.

In Nov. 2005 Microsoft hit a home run. The original Xbox had built up a solid reputation as a graphical powerhouse, boasted critically acclaimed titles like Halo: Combat Evolved and provided slick console online functionality with Xbox Live.