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Topping the brilliant Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time was always going to be a challenge for Insomniac Games

The developer's previous entry in its highly acclaimed platforming franchise neared perfection in terms of level variety, design, and combat. Short of sprucing up the graphics and adding more of the same, it's hard to see where else Insomniac could take the Ratchet & Clank formula..

Featuring one of the most influential survival horror games of all time, it's hard not to include the Silent Hill HD Collection on our list of most anticipated overlooked Holiday games

There are a number of high-definition remakes coming to the PlayStation 3 this year; most of them from big-name franchises. But despite the popularity (and quality) of the Silent Hill franchise, Konami seems keen on..

It's curious isn't it: you long for a good co-operative platformer and two come along at once

We've only just finished championing Sony and Insomniac's four-player opus Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, and now we're moving directly onto Rayman Origins. Ubisoft's delightfully French platformer series was iconic on the original PlayStation, but has slowly faded away into obscurity in recent years. The..

Earlier in the year we took a look at our top-five most anticipated PlayStation games of Holiday 2011

Since the beginning of time (sort of!) developers and publishers have used the run-up to Christmas to release their very best games. This year the charts are set to be dominated by some monstrous titles, such as Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception and Batman: Arkham City. But what of the games that..

Outperforming the Sharp Shooter?

Has there ever been a time in your life when you thought, ‘I could do or make that better’? But what do we normally do at this point? We go on with our lives, as the thought passes on and whatever it was we thought we could do better... well, it just never comes to be. But what would happen if you actually tried...

Medieval Moves: Deadmund's Quest is Sports Champions

Make no mistake, this is a brand new PlayStation Move-exclusive title with its own characters and narrative, but at its core it's built upon the same fundamentals that developer Zindagi Games founded in last year's motion controlled sports compilation. Our demo opens in a vast training arena. It's early evening, and the sun is setting upon the..

Each year, the hardcore video game community ignites with debates over which platform holder 'won' E3

It's a topic that's been adopted by industry analysts and high-profile journalists, with fictional grades awarded to the manufacturers with the most surprises and best content. But GamesCom — now the world's largest video game event — has a very different tone to it. There's no competition, no..

The most striking thing about Resistance 3 is the way it looks

Insomniac's poured love into every facet of the game's presentation; from the surprisingly minimalistic hand-drawn menu back-drops, to the slick and industrial user-interface — the game's presentation is lavish. We'd read some criticism of the game's visuals prior to going hands-on with Resistance 3's multiplayer beta, but within..

Part three: The Plus Points

We’ve been discussing Vita’s delay here at VitaGamr with our previous Talking Points: Why PlayStation Push Vita to 2012? and How Much Will Missing Christmas Hurt Vita? articles, but there's another side of this debate: could there be any benefits to Vita being delayed to 2012? It’s quite obvious that Vita will miss...

Phew

Thus concludes another bonkers day in PlayStation land, and we're sure the announcements won't stop coming as GamesCom fever takes hold over the course of the week. Sony's GamesCom press conference was, all told, a fairly muted affair with not an enormous number of huge announcements to shout about. But despite the lack of mind-shattering megatons, the platform holder did drop a number of..

Sony always has a big presence at GamesCom in Cologne

In 2009 it used the European show to reveal the PlayStation 3 Slim. And last year it made some huge software announcements: Virtua Tennis 4, Resistance 3 and Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One all got their debuts at the German event. But what can we expect from this year's show? Plenty of PlayStation Vita is almost certainly the safest bet. Sony's..

It's the littlest things that make Driver: San Francisco fun

From the wah-pedal infused soundtrack, through to the rear-wheel camera angles, it's clear that Ubisoft Reflections has spent a lot of time analysing classic seventies car chases during the development of the game. Driver: San Francisco promises the "ultimate car chase experience", and based on our first impressions, it's..

Part two: The Risk

To say that Nintendo has pretty much dominated the portable gaming market for the better part of two decades would be a bit of an understatement. Its Game Boy line of systems sold millions upon millions of units, and Nintendo DS became the best-selling portable console of all time. So it would be easy to assume that the follow-up...

Part one: Wii are watching U

The sound of thousands of shattered Christmas wishes echoed across the globe last week, as Sony revealed that PS Vita won't reach North America and Europe until 2012. The company maintained all along that the system would launch in the "global market" by the end of 2011, technically exonerating as PS Vita will...

We always knew it was a likely scenario, but we chose to believe otherwise

Sony never officially said the PlayStation Vita would get a worldwide launch this year, only ever really committing to a Japanese launch. "Phased global rollout" was the textbook buzzword Sony used. But we believed because it made sense. How could Sony not put the PlayStation Vita out in all major markets before..

The portable gaming war is about to heat up

Very seldom do you see a company like Nintendo drop the price of its brand new console by $80 less than 6 months after release, but with sales of the system lagging over the past few months Nintendo's taken the drastic measure. On 27th July, Nintendo announced that 3DS will drop to $169.99 in North...

Wireless functions explained

It's all well and good being able to play Vita games on your own, but the machine is designed to help you connect with other users too, whether you know it or not. Sony's R&D man Phil Rogers explained the machine's capabilities at the recent Develop conference, detailing the console's LiveArea, Party, Near and...

Video games can be quite immature

Even when they come attached with mature age ratings, the content inside can often feel like the opposite. Enormous guns, vats of gore and over-sized breasts are not necessarily indicative of what it means to be mature, in fact they are the antithesis. Few games capture the essence of adulthood. For all its faults, Heavy Rain came close. Quantic Dream's thriller..

On paper it sounds like a dream scenario: a future where Sony and Microsoft work together to build the ultimate system

Sony's knowledge of hardware architecture coupled with Microsoft's dominance in the software sector. Sony's outstanding first-party output supported by Microsoft's (supposedly) superior networking talents. Combining both Sony and Microsoft's individual talents makes for a glorious..

Fight the opposition

If the third entry in the Killzone series wasn’t enough sci-fi shooter action to keep you busy, then the upcoming release of Insomniac’s Resistance 3 is shaping up to Move you back into action in just a few short months. We recently survived some hands-on time with the Resistance 3 demo and have returned to give you some...

The online communities of PlayStation Network titles tend to dwindle quickly

But despite being released in the hazy days of 2008, the obnoxiously titled SuperSonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars is still brimming with activity. Given a new lease of life via PlayStation Plus this month, we hopped into the part-racer, part-soccer title to find out what all the fuss is about. As far as gameplay..

Over the last three weeks I've played two niche games which I thoroughly enjoyed

Neither of the games were particularly successful at retail, but both enhanced my appreciation of EA as a publisher. Alice: Madness Returns was scorned for being derivative and classical in design, while Shadows Of The Damned was dismissed because of some poor gameplay decisions and an over-emphasis on mediocre..

If the Uncharted 3 multiplayer beta has taught us anything, it's that we're terrible at Uncharted multiplayer

After a spot of beginner's luck — winning our first game of Free For All with a deftly timed melee swipe to the face — we've lingered in the loser's half of every game we've played. We're even rubbish at co-op, consecutively getting less kills than our partners despite our greatest..

We counted down our most anticipated PlayStation games of the holiday season this week, touching on what we think are the five most intriguing titles of this year's end

Some of the games were included out of curiosity — Battlefield 3 and Sonic Generations might not be the best games of the year, but they are titles that we can't wait to play simply to see how they shaped up. Other games such as..