About Joe Martin

Dragon Quest is a curious beast. The series is monstrously popular in Japan, more so even than Final Fantasy, and its old school gaming mechanics and stubborn resistance to change only seem to have increased its popularity. Read Review

The Assassin’s Creed series has been going through a rough patch in recent years. Ubisoft’s last offering, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, was a glitch-ridden mess, so bloated by its faults and inconsistencies that it was rendered unplayable at launch and still twitched like a bag full of clockwork mice following months of extensive patching. Read Review

I’ve never understood the appeal of football. Like my love of seafood and the swell of anger I feel every time I see Tony Blair’s face, it’s just one of those things I’ve never quite been able to explain. The closest I’ve ever come is that it bores me. Read Review

Age takes its toll on us all. As the years go by, those grey hairs, wrinkles and peg-legs become more and more pronounced. It’s not clear when it happens. For some it’s around middle age, where the realisation that time doth not stand still inspires them to dye their hair fluorescent pink or drive around in a Honda Midlifecrisis. Read Review

Remasters are a funny thing. They rely on nostalgia for the original game, feeding off that sense of wonder we felt when experiencing it the first time around. Some manage this successfully, upgrading everything that made the original great and ironing out any lingering flaws, while others attempt a half-arsed rehash that at best looks only nominally better and at worst comes out more broken than its predecessor. Read Review

If you only take one thing from this review let it be this – the Alien is a bastard.

You’ll shout, you’ll cry, you’ll invent all-new profanities just to belt at the screen as the scaly-skinned nightmare drops from a ceiling vent and chews your face off just as you get near a save point. Read Review

Gaming doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to representing cultures or their beliefs. Stereotypes and wild inaccuracies are all too frequent – Resident Evil 5’s African village level is a particularly controversial example – which just leads to more problems than it’s worth. Read Review

It’s no secret that Outlast is a pretty terrifying game. A first-person survival horror title developed and published by Red Barrels for PC and later PS4 and Xbox One, horror fans were left salivating at the prospect of playing as freelance investigative journalist Miles Upsher, who receives an anonymous tip from a source identified only as a whistleblower…
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HD re-releases are a funny thing. On the one hand they bring much-loved and sometimes overlooked titles to a whole new generation of gamers with a slick graphical overhaul, but on the other they have a habit of reminding you just how limited the newly-polished games are by today’s standards. Read Review

Released on the PS2 way back in 2006, the original Okami was a hit with game critics both in Japan and the Western gaming market due to its unique art direction and mesmerising visuals. Unfortunately for developers Clover Studio, the game was released shortly before the launch of the PS3. Read Review