We have decided to bring it to an end. This will be the last issue of the online magazine for the foreseeable future. However this is not the end, we plan on bringing you an exciting newsletter every fortnight straight to your inbox, so keep your eyes peeled for an announcement online!

Inside this months issue is:

Newsflash

Tribes Beta Hits Milestone 1.742 Patch

Potential iPhone 5 in June and iPad 4 in October

Mass Effect 3 Facebook App Lets You Win Prizes

THQ Axe uDraw Tablet

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Anticipation

Hyperdimension Neptuna MK2

I am Alive

Kingdom of Amalur

Mass Effect 3

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Critique

Catherine

Soul Calibur V

AMY

Choplifter HD

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Topical Stuff

Gaming Gods: Shigeru Miyamoto

TGH Most Anticipated Games 2012

Blast from the past: Grim Fandango

History of a hero: Red – Kanto Pokemon Champion

You can read and download the magazine here for free!

Max Payne opened like a graphic novel. A small slideshow of 3 narrated comic panels appeared one after another to depict a major cut scene, plot point or interesting discovery rather than being tied and dragged down by either the real-time scenarios or a wall of text. The panels all did a superb job of moving the game forward by being backed up by fantastic voice and art work that, at times, really sent a shiver down your back through it’s believability and down right creepiness.

The opening scenes of the game followed the beginning of Max’s huge life turn of events. Coming home from a day of his city cop job, Max entered his house in the midst of a break-in, while his wife and new born baby are still there. You regained control to examine just what the hell was going on. You focused on the strewn papers, damaged goods and the resistance and force marks being worn by the walls; all the while trying to work your way to the source of the painful screams which echoed around the house. Popping off the intruders and seeing Max’s new-born baby laying in it’s own blood was a real shake up. Something I haven’t felt in any game for a long, long time. You know there isn’t anything you can do for the poor child, so you press on just in time to watch as the last man standing murders your wife right before your eyes for a reason you can only imagine. It’s easily one, if not the most effective game scenes in my memory. The famous Final Fantasy 7 scene doesn’t even come close, and that had hours of character development before it!

Following the incident, Max vowed to get revenge on the people behind the slaughtering on his family. The man had nothing else to lose. Even if it meant becoming a rogue cop and  shutting down the city’s underworld crime syndicate single-handed, he had no reason not to.  The art of bullet-time brought Max Payne into the feel of The Matrix as you could look around a corner, pinpoint your enemies, and perform a slow motion dive whilst picking them off.

Max Payne’s characters are all backed-up in a way similar to that of the 1998 version of Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64. Each character or enemy face was that of a real guy simply plastered onto the model. While it did a better job than the modellers could manage with the technology back then, Max’s own face ruined many of the short real-time cutscenes by wearing a one-sided smug smile no matter what the situation. For example; on the first stage, the train station, Max enters a locker room to find the corpse of a railway worker before anything else. His reaction to this wasn’t any sense of remorse for the guy or even his own safety. He simply stood there with that same smug look and pulled out a gun with just his thumb and index finger. He looked more like an antagonist than a hero.  Something the graphic novel scenes completely avoided.

The game’s noir setting gave a fantastic feeling of this guy’s one-man mission. Prowling through the back alleys and dank habitats of mobster henchmen really showed Max’s hatred toward the city’s crime problem. Something he knew his own force wasn’t doing enough to control. Each of the early settings were filled with the creepy ramblings of paranoid drug abusers rocking back and forth in the corridors, an inclusion which just got even creepier when you hear their screams as you willingly kill them. Something you actually regret afterward. The further you delve into the case of your murdered family, the more dark and sadistic it gets. Running into a crazed mob leader obsessed with the occult lead to one disturbingly amazing chapter again with some incredibly believable voice work, and the forced drug use by the hands of the other intervening forces throughout the story leads Max to constantly relive the opening scene in his head as he watches himself gun down his own wife.

Max Payne was, and still is, the pinnacle of story telling within a video game. The dark one-man mission to claim retribution and clean up the problems of his city made you really feel for Max’s character as he uncovered a conspiracy far deeper than he expected. Any ally team-ups were incredibly short lived and left him to focus on his own aims. While the game did take a questionable turn toward the end, you can’t argue that the amount of plot twists dotted throughout the title made the story grow into something much more different to the conclusion you jumped to. The story telling methods backed up with the amazing voice work and music pulled the game together as an experience that should be witnessed my anyone and should be seen by other developers as the bridge between video game and cinema story telling. It’ll be hard for any game, even the upcoming second sequel to ever top.

Catherine is somewhat of a strange game, not just because it features copious amounts of sheep and sheep references, but also because it is unlike anything else you’ve ever really played. The story centres around a 32 year old man by the name of Vincent who feels content within the confines of his relationship with long term girlfriend Katherine, who conversely  is ready to move things forward. Things take a turn when blonde bombshell, and slightly psychotic, Catherine enters the scene and wraps Vincent into a downward spiral of adultery, debauchery and a complete mental breakdown. To make everything worse his recurring nightmares don’t aid him in tackling his dilemma, or do they?

The nightmares that plague Vincent every night actually make the meat of this game. Forming as block pulling puzzles, Vincent has to save his hide from the pits of doom by pulling and climbing blocks to escape from the growing horror. It must be said that these puzzles are both incredibly enjoyable, but are mindbogglingly hard and frustrating; although once you surmount them you’ll feel like a god, especially when you’re facing off against one of the boss monstrosities that chase you from the depths. To ensure that these block sections don’t dull, new styles of blocks are brought in which really mix up the gameplay, and a constant stream of new techniques to learn and master mean that what once looked like a very basic gameplay idea, becomes a very deep thought process that needs to be done quickly and efficiently to get the best score.

For us though, the real highlight of the game came outside of the block solving. The small sections in between stages where you could talk to your fellow wall climbers, all of who appear as sheep, proved to be a wonderful respite from the block pushing chaos. The individual stories each sheep had, the tips they could offer, and the hope you could give them from talking really gave you the sense of gratification in seeing them making it through the trials along with you on each stage. After every night of stair climbing action you can relax with an alcoholic beverage at Vincent’s watering hole of choice, the Stray Sheep. Here you can chat to fellow patrons, drink alcohol -which helps improve Vincent’s reaction time in his nightmares (not the greatest advert for drinking responsibly)- and play an arcade machine to take part in some more block pushing madness. It’s these moments of quiet where the story really takes hold. Idle conversations allude to the private lives and issues of other ‘stray sheep’ who populate the bar, and you slowly realise the nature of their problems. Here you also get to read and reply to texts from both of the games temptresses, and all of your actions have a response on how the game will continue on. It’s very subtle in how it does it, but every text ignored, or indeed replied to in one of many multiple ways, changes how your relationship will progress within the story.

Ultimately though it is the story that will keep you gripped. Usually a game that revolves around a relationship would turn us off, it’d sound like some damn rom com stapled onto the side of a puzzle game, but here it takes a very dark tone to the relationship paradigm. Peppered with such bleak humour and the more than occasional swear, this game’s content really isn’t for the young, after all it is all about sleeping around  behind your long term lovers back. Its mature themes however only add to the game’s self awareness of just how crass it can be, and many times erring on just the right side of tasteful. It’s scriptwriting is excellently done and despite the multiple endings that can come out from the game, it isn’t obvious at all whats going to happen, nor when the story changes to tailor the decisions you’ve made. And of course this is all sweetened by the visual package that wraps the entire thing together.

We’d be surprised if you saw another game this year that pulled of the moving comic look as good as this does; it’s just stylistically beautiful. Taking its artistic influences from anime, with cut-scenes being anime in their own right, the character models and environments look stunning in motion, and picture perfect when still. The general lighter tone that anime seems to bring to a production makes the darker moments all the more sinister. The ‘boss’ levels of the nightmare sections of gameplay contain some of the most disturbed creations you’ll see in a video game. Few things can creep you out, or create a sense of urgency, than a giant rotting baby with a mini-gun for an eye and a chainsaw for a hand, clambering up after you so it can kill you. And if it isn’t that, then it could be a crazed zombie bride with blade like nails waiting to squish you like the helpless bug you are. It’s crazy stuff, but its also some of the best design we’ve seen in a long time.

Catherine isn’t perfect. It’s puzzles are unbelievably hard, so hard in fact the Japanese version came with a patch for ‘super easy’ mode, and it can be confusing to figure out exactly what you ‘should’ be doing to get the desired story outcome, but those are about its only faults. It has tonnes of replay value, with nine alternate, and amusing, endings, as well as a two player co-op and competitive modes to enjoy and a super difficult extra block puzzle mode known as Babel for those seeking an even greater challenge. If we’re honest, this title was completely worth the obscene wait that it took to get it across the Atlantic from North America, and we’re incredibly grateful that Deep Silver took the chance to publish it. It may only be February, but Catherine is easily the greatest game we’ve played this year, and  unless something truly spectacular comes along, it’ll stay at our number one. It seems that Atlus’ Persona Team can create an incredible and engrossing game, even outside the Persona series.

Final Score: 4.5/5

The first game,  A Reckless Disregard for Gravity took the popular Missile flash game of maneuvering around obstacles while building up speed and took it to a commercial level. Its sequel doesn’t do much radically different. But perhaps that’s a good thing.

AaaaaAAaaaAA’s simple objective of racking up scores through small stages makes it the perfect candidate for quick burst gameplay and a cheap price tag to boot. Set across a collection of odd little boxes, the game’s stages are unlocked by purchasing those adjacent to the last effectively allowing you to buy straight into the more tricky stages or concentrate on perfected the easier ones as you get used to the feeling of rubbing up against a building and shaving your skin off in the process.

Ever felt like hurtling toward the sun? Well now you can!

In AaaaaAAaaaAA!!! you control yourself in a first person view, starting off on a platform, you pull up the courage to walk off the edge and free-fall through the stage as building, platforms and bladed fans whiz by you. Paying close attention to each of the games dozens of stages, you should determine the most valuable route before you plunge down. Getting close to the buildings earns you “kisses” while staying close to them as you try not to drag your ass against them earns you a steady stream of  “hugs”. Hit as many buildings as you can and risk your survival by drifting toward the point signs littered around the fall and, assuming you don’t faceplant into the ground, you’ll get a nice score and hefty collection of knee caps (yes, that is the currency) to unlock more stages.

The odd little humour of the game comes from the sly comments and descriptions accompanying the stages and the brief radio style newsflashes piped through as you browse the stage select screen. Sometimes they poke fun at you, and sometimes they just blurt out silly headlines. Either way we like thoughtfulness of the developers to record them, and while we think the dull/slow voice was intentional, it actually sounds as if the voice-actor was yawning through the entire recording. Never the less, the comments did a good job and make us chuckle a little between stages.

This is just a glimpse of the game's many stages

The games stage selection system makes sure you gain a reasonable amount of experience with the game’s few in-flight features, introducing you to the art of hugging and kissing, flipping off on-lookers and eventual inclusion of bonus targets makes sure are not thrown into the deep end straight away. Though players of the last game can opt to skip the tutorials by integrating their old save within the new one, those who have played the demo of either will need to crawl through the initial training stages again before any real challenges arrive.

Dejobaan have done a fantastic job of dishing out stages for the game. Our screenshot only shows a portion of the stage selection screen with another, just as big waiting just above it. The stages are well crafted and offer a lot of potential routes open for you should you be brave enough. If you manage to horde the point targets and buildings available by straying from your comfortable path, you’ll easily reap the rewards. The more extreme stages will all leave you slamming into blades and platforms so your precise camera control and non-jerky actions are all key to your successful…downfall.

Those guys? They hate you. Show em' some love!

Looking at the surroundings as you make your decent, you’ll probably come to realize AaaaaAAaaaAA is something a little different. It has character. Once you ponder the reason why there are buildings suspended in, what can only be assumed as space, with cars driving vertically and coloured blobs ready to hurl abuse at you, you’ll start to wonder what exactly the guys at Dejobaan were doing when they created the stages. The visuals may look a little dated, but you won’t really have time to focus on them. Flipping off protesters and encouraging your fans, collecting teeth and knee caps, landing safely in the middle of nowhere and sitting through the hypnotic little “relaxation” bonus stages will defiantly give you that “What the…” vibe but ultimately leave you with an odd little grin on your face.

AaaaaAAaaaAA!!! is defiantly not short of content. Unlocking all of the stages will take some time to accomplish assuming you play it in the burst sessions to seems designed for, even then you’ll find yourself reattempting earlier levels to better your score or just to collect a few extra knee caps. It never fails to induce that fear of dying horribly should you take your eyes off the screen at any moment and feels incredibly satisfying to flip off the angry protesters as you plummet. If you ever have a free moment, load up AaAaaaAa and throw yourself off of a cliff. You won’t regret the decision.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome is available now on PC and Mac via Steam – A demo is also available!

Final Score: 3.5/5

Taking control of an exiled ruler of a Kingdom you set out to work your way back up to regain the trust of your former home by working with your allied towns and your troops to run errands during the 13th century. Thrown into the playing field with very little in the way of gameplay tutorial, you can quickly see that the  “State-of-the-art graphics” proposed by the titles product listing was a huge overstatement unless 1C Company meant unique. The visuals of anything from the grass, trees, water and towns are something you could expect on older smartphones. Everything looks flat and lifeless and often times blurry, a look that can only be explained as if 3D vision was turned on without you wearing the glasses. 1C promised to “depict the 13th century in great detail” and if this is their best attempt, they should probably move onto a different time period.

The flare may be pretty but everything else is as bland as it comes

Developer, Unicorn Games Studio, used a Dual Core, nVidia 8800GT setup as their recommended specs while our own 4gb Quad Core Radeon 6870 setup had difficulty keeping the game running above 30 frames per second no matter what scenario we found ourselves in. Even with the bland visuals and lack of heavy overworld activity.

The playing field simply consists of little characters going about their lives with 1 model usually represents a boat load more; single buildings depicting towns and equally more boring, yet slightly bigger model structures representing cities. Hovering over each of these displays their relationship towards you along with their army’s difficulty, allowing you to pick your battles a little easier and not go strolling into towns that would like nothing better than to feed your head to their plague-ridden mice – for reasons we don’t know. Real Warfare 2 is as much of an RPG as it is RTS. You stand as the leader of an army that is awarded experience points after each successful battle. Army EXP then acts as currency used to upgrade the troops various stats. Your commanding general figure works in a slightly different manor as his own own experience accumulates to increase his level and allowing you to add a point to a choice of perks like permanent EXP bonuses to increased tax money from your allied towns along with increasing the amount of troops you can bring into battle. While the system certainly offers depth to the possible play styles available, it didn’t really serve as an incentive to continue like other experience based character progression systems do, the fact that most, if not all of the in-game enemies over power you with easy means grinding them for experience and troop money isn’t a viable option leaving the game extremely linear as you just click a town, accept a quest, click the quest enemy and fight them one after another.

Go to town - Get Quest - Defeat Quest Enemy - Restock Army - Repeat

Starting off with a merry band of men, we simply watched all of the other mounted characters run about the map as we seriously didn’t have much of an idea of what to do. The game does nothing to explain its inner workings leaving you to just experiment and hope you don’t get ambushed by the dozens of robber gangs riding around. Though even that doesn’t mean anything as you can simply close a bandit’s chat window after they bad mouth your medieval mother and be on your way without any consequence. The 13th century wasn’t nearly this forgiving.

Yes, Real Warfare 2 may be more suited to a medieval combat strategy game than it is an RPG. The character progression is boring and the story is no better, but in all honesty the combat isn’t anything special. Battles are initiated through the playing field by clicking on an enemy figure where you then choose from two lines of abuse to yell at them and organising your men before you reach a ridiculously lengthy loading screen just to be thrown into an up-scaled version of the playing field minus any of the knick-knacks that made it even remotely interesting to look at. A simple large patch of grass and trees is all you’ll see between you and your enemy. Their forces may look a little daunting at first, but rest assured, in the end you’ll just feel bored. From here the battles play out in a standard RTS fashion, albeit slower. You select your troops an issue movement, formation and attack commands while though the game does little in a way to explain the interface and procedure, leaving you to figure it out while the enemy walks toward you.

Real Warfare’s fighting mechanics seem to focus on the general rule of formation. Most of the UI and mouse commands are used to shift your troops into long lines, balls or wedges to counter your opponent. This is where a major issue arose. While troop selection worked as well as you would expect, commands had a noticeable lag between being issued and actually being carried out. Using the mouse to send troops toward a target worked fine but gesturing it to set the troops up in a certain formation was erratic and less than precise. Issues which make a whole lot of different when an army of thousands are heading your way. Camera movement fell victim to the same issues and just didn’t feel fluid making the switch between army control and actually enjoying the battle near impossible.

Zooming into the action would usually spell doom but was fun while it lasted

In the end we found the game to be more comical than fun. Losing a battle simply meant reloading a previous save, meaning you had to put up with the more annoying loading times after each botched attempt as you attempt to come to grips with the games controls. In the early battles we simply sped up the combat and ran our troops to their death and laughing hysterically as the last remaining few decided to throw in the towel and sprint over the mountains faster than the camera could pan across. Even attacking peasants who would surprise us with bigger armies than our own provided more fun than the game itself.

Real Warfare 2 suffers from a host of issues ranging from a large learning curve, disappointing visuals and typically boring gameplay. Surprising is the fact the game is a sequel, if this game has taken it’s predecessor and improved it’s formula like any sequel is meant to do, we shudder at the quality of the last. Real Warfare 2 is probably just as painful to play as the 13th century was for Soldiers to live in.

Final Score:  2/5

This weekend, those with Sneak Peek keys can download and play TERA all weekend, and we’re giving them away on our Twitter page. You can grab one by simply rewteeting the appropriate tweet and making sure to follow us!

While Tribes is still in it’s long beta test phase, the comminuty feedback has enabled the game to really evolve. The latest patch comes from the work of the thousands of players taking part in the game’s early days to address an array of balance issues across the game’s many classes whilst also fixing the bugs players have reported throughout the testing period. All previous player builds will be reset upon logging into the game with gold and XP returned to give players the chance to respec their characters to compensate for the changes.

You can read the patch notes here.

Developed by DigitalArrow – a new development studio, InMomentum slaps players into a completely story-less world reminiscent of virtual reality scenes of old sci-fi movies. Based around 12 stages, all varying in design and colour, players are simply tasked with racing against each another to the end of a map by utilizing – you guessed it – Momentum.

Each map employs countless walls and platforms to propel yourself ahead of your rivals

Each stage is comprised of hundreds of walls and platform blocks. Charging ahead, you use the standard WASD keys to move while using your mouse buttons to jump across platforms and bounce along walls. The idea of the game is to keep a steady stream of jumps and bounces enough to build your speed up to the maximum of 299Kmph, which if sustainable, will usually allow you to leap across huge sections of the stage at a time.

The beauty of InMomentum is easily the amount of paths available to complete a course. Players can generally opt to ride the stage on it’s lower levels across the platforms or they can decide to be adventurous, bouncing from one wall to another to eventually scale their way up to the top of the map to use the lack of walls as their advantage to gain more speed with less risk of collision along with the obvious birds-eye view. Currently two game-play modes are open to players – “Time Trial” and “Sphere Hunt” – one involves collecting orbs scattered around the stage – limiting players to a specific path, while the second gives runners more freedom with a small number of checkpoint gates to pass through before reaching the end of the level.

Players can either brave the platforms solo or race with players online. Solo play allows for uninterrupted attempts to gain a spot on the high-score board as you try to beat the times of other players while multi-player races allow you to give chase against your very rivals with the added chance to shoot them off the side of the map. The space-bar shoot button is something every player will sadly need to learn in order to have any chance of bragging rights. By launching a projectile, you can hope the force of the blast will be enough to push the rival at the receiving end of your laser will be enough to send them hurtling to their death, else you run the risk of your blast giving them a huge boost in speed and seeing your chances of winning disappear in the distance. Still, you can use a well timed laser shot-jump combo to propel yourself a little further and reap the benefits of a steady speed increase. The combo shot isn’t really hard to learn, yet I dislike the idea of such a heavy advantage meaning people who can’t quite get to grips with it have very little chance of success with the game, much like when you learn how to snake on Mario Kart while your friends watch as they are lapped in each race.

Each stage offers dozens of routes that can drastically alter your final times

Each map has 4 different difficulty settings to choose from, altering the selected map to less real estate to make traversing the stage that little bit more puzzling while certain levels employ barricades to stop you in your tracks. Most of these walls can be turned off by shooting nearby switches or can be avoided altogether by bouncing around them with the help of the surrounding obstacles. The switches can effectively allow you to close the walls in the faces of other racers should you become that confident in your skills.

While the slow-motion button of the single-player can help you to fine-tune a jump and perfect a time, such an option only comes into the multiplayer in the form of a pick-up. One of numerous pick-ups to be exact. Throughout a multiplayer race, obtainable pick-ups can be collected with a maximum of two at a time. These can range from an immediate speed boost, heightened acceleration, fixed distance teleport, single super jump, time freeze and again, periodic slow motion. All of these will affect just the user with the exception being the slow motion which generally helps the lead runner to maintain that speed more easily whilst leaving everyone else in no better or worse position.       

In terms of bugs or glitches, it is hard for such a simple game to really have a serious issue. It has been confirmed by the developers that certain AMD cards do have some trouble with the lighting effects used to create the game world, with my own card falling victim to the bug. A fix was promised but the blocky light reflections hardly deter away from the experience.  The game’s visuals are simple enough to allow most modern, store-bought laptops or desktops to run it with ease, with the system requirements reflecting my words. Because of the simplicity of this game’s style, don’t expect many graphical options aside from screen-resolution and Post Processed Anti Aliasing.  

Players can alter certain visuals of their on-screen runner (no hats here folks)

While InMomentum does share a few similarities to Mirror’s Edge – such as the relatively solid colour pallet to the fine-tuned task of time trial speed runs, it really isn’t going to make that wait for a Mirror’s Edge 2 any easier. The ability to scale a tower without having to jump to another doesn’t leave much room to think about how to approach certain map sections, and, due to the game not having any sort of story whatsoever, you will be hard pressed to get more than a few hours out of it, but for the asking price it is a solid purchase for speed freaks and leader board junkies with 40 Steam achievements offering replay value to some.  Just be prepared for that vertigo feeling from classic platformers to return and make your hoping that much more of a challenge. InMomentum is available now on Steam (PC)

Final Score:  3/5

In January we heard reports that the iPhone 5 production was underway at the Chinese manufacturing plant of Foxconn. And as if to back up such reports, we heard claims from the new Apple CEO, Tim Cook, about new iDevices and “amazing new products in the pipeline”.

Another recent report by DigiTimes also claims that Apple plans to launch an iPad 3, along with a new iMac and MacBook Air, this year. The iPad 3 will allegedly be followed by an iPad 4 in October.

Personally this doesn’t come as much of a surprise to us as Apple know people can’t get enough of its products, but it seems incredibly silly to launch an iPad 4 potentially 3 – 4 months after the iPad 3 launches.

Source: CVG

The video showcases nearly two minutes of off screen gameplay from the new Playstation handheld.

Earlier in the year some details on the fighter emerged from NetherRealm Studios creative director Ed Boon, it seems that it will contain everything and more than the PS3 version did.

You can see the gameplay video below