Author: David Smith

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Mini released around the world over the weekend to rapturous applause from longtime SNES devotees, packing a ton of nostalgia into an extremely small package. I missed out on a first round pre-order on the device, and we were not able to obtain a unit for review from Nintendo…

By now you’ve almost certainly heard about Cuphead and its pronounced level of difficulty so let’s begin this review with a declaration: Cuphead is hard. But it’s also way less hard than you might think it is. Having just spent the weekend with the SNES Mini and being reminded of what true old school game design was like,…

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…

NHL 18 wants to be a mirror to this year’s Stanley Cup — no bells, no whistles, no brawls or bullshit, just great skillful hockey. That’s what it wants, and it’s a noble goal, but sadly the puck never quite finds the back of the net.

Sony Interactive Entertainment Australia is kicking off a new competition called PlayStation Plus Platinum Hunters. The goal is for players to unlock every trophy within four specific games.

Do you remember the last time you played an entry in the NBA Live series? Me either. More or less off the radar for about a decade at this point, the series is back in the public eye this year with NBA Live 18, a basketball sim with a clear desire to leave the series’ average reputation behind.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider takes former-apprentice assassin Billie Lurk, a character the series has heretofore considered little more than a side-kick, and catapults her into the spotlight as a lead. The final game in the current Dishonored series hands Billie an unenviable task — find and kill the Outsider.

XCOM 2 is, at its heart, a game about loss. It’s why save-scumming, the act of loading an earlier save in an effort to avoid catastrophe, is so frowned upon in the game’s community. Losing valuable soldiers isn’t just a part of the game, it fills out the unscripted narrative of your personal XCOM 2 experience….

I’ve now played Super Mario Odyssey twice. The first time was at E3 in Los Angeles earlier this year. The second was at Nintendo’s Australian headquarters in Melbourne earlier this week. From these two brief sessions, I can tell you this — I love Super Mario Odyssey so much.

So you managed to snag a preorder on the Xbox One X before they sold out. Fantastic effort, great job! But what the hell are you going to play on it, and which games will allow you to take advantage of all that raw power? Xbox Australia invited us to a hands on event in…

The Xbox One X has been met with a bit of bemusement by Australian gaming hobbyists so far. First we couldn’t pre-order the machine but could instead go on a waitlist. Then it was announced that the unit was cost Aussie punters a whopping $649.95 AUD. Then pre-orders for the machine finally opened but the…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that powerful new video game consoles must be in want of a pretty racing game for their launch lineup.

Destiny was the first game I reviewed for this site, back when the games section was still called VideAU Games, an offshoot of The Iris‘ parent site, The AU Review. On launch, it was an ambitious but deeply flawed experiment in the MMO space, hyped beyond almost any other game in recent memory. It weathered two major…

The demand for Overwatch characters in Blizzard’s popular strategic hero brawler Heroes of the Storm has been rife ever since the game’s roster of iconic heroes was announced. Having added D.va, Tracer, Genji and Zarya to the mix in previous updates, Blizzard have now revealed two new Overwatch characters heading to the Nexus — Ana and Junkrat. While not much…

Quake Champions is id Software’s return to the 90’s multiplayer shooter genre that has traditionally been one of their strongest suits. Now in early access, it is both a throwback to the kind of multiplayer shooter that id invented and a clarion call to everyone else with a game in this suddenly resurgent genre — there’ll be no…

Who the hell was asking for a remake of Metroid II? Nobody, that’s who, and Nintendo made it anyway. Metroid: Samus Returns takes the general thrust of series’ largely-forgotten 1992 Game Boy adventure and updates it with fresh, modern mechanics and the kind of visuals I wasn’t aware the 3DS could pull off. It takes a game consigned to…

Nintendo have debuted a new 45 minute Nintendo Direct broadcast this morning, covering a range of titles releasing for their 3DS and Nintendo Switch consoles over the next two quarters. You can watch the broadcast in full, and get a full list of everything Nintendo talked about, after the jump.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I know I’m not the only one. I loved (and continue to love) The Land Before Time and Jurassic Park, I read every book on them I could find, I inhaled the Dinotopia novels, I spent more time on DinoPark Tycoon in the primary school’s computer room than I…

There’s two kinds of people in this world — people who played Okami back in 2007 and those who did not. Originally released here in Australia on the PlayStation 2 a full year after its Japanese and American launch, and only in a very limited run (the 2000’s were a dark time), Capcom have announced that Okami…

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…

A brand new Nintendo Direct presentation will broadcast on Twitch this Thursday morning at 8am AEST. The 45 minute broadcast will be primarily focused on upcoming Switch and 3DS titles.

Rockstar Games has announced overnight, seemingly out of nowhere, that its 2011 open world crime procedural L.A. Noire is coming to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch (!!) and the HTC Vive (!!!) this year.

Monster Hunter World is all about sanding down some of the series’ rougher edges. Gone are loading screens between areas, replaced with a single, expansive world (hence the game’s title). Combat remains a visceral experience, perhaps even more so than ever. The crafting retains the depth that makes it so rewarding to spend the time prepping…

As of this filing, I will have now reviewed fully three instalments of the Madden NFL series for this website. Reviewing sports titles, as I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, is one of the easier aspects of the gig as a games critic — the games don’t change much year-to-year and they are, by and large, quite…

Written by author Ken Follett in his 1989 novel, The Pillars of the Earth is a wildly popular story about the building of a cathedral in a small town in 12th century England. It is a long and sweeping story, and one of the most popular literary works of the last two decades. It also makes…

We’ve come to expect a certain standard from Edifier’s many different speakers. When we took at a look at the older R2000DB speakers  about this time last year, we found them to be an extremely solid option in the 2.1 home speaker category. The R1010BT, a much cheaper alternative by comparison, feels like the jaded…

Nintendo took to their Twitch channel overnight with a new showcase broadcast, focusing on the raft of indie content coming to the Nintendo Switch in the next 12 months. We’ve collated all the announcements and trailers for your viewing pleasure after the jump.

Ubisoft’s forthcoming action RPG South Park: The Fractured But Whole has made it through the Australian Board of Classification without a single cut.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a game that pulls from all sorts of different places for inspiration. It pulls from literature, it pulls from movies and (most often) it pulls from other games. While its inspirations are worn quite proudly on its sleeve, it’s what Yonder does with them that makes it memorable.

That headline isn’t bullcrap, I actually believe it. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, Ubisoft’s big, bridge-repairing gamble with Nintendo, is one of the studio’s best offerings in years. It’s smart, addictive, tough as nails in the later levels and leverages a genre that doesn’t get much play on console in a way that is perfect for…