Shu is a standout indie platforming game with slick gameplay and a vibrant aesthetic. Though it will remind you of some of the iconic sidescrollers of yesteryear, the game has enough of its own character to stand apart from a saturated genre.
If you love video games, then autumn is always an exciting time of year. It’s the season in which the year’s big gun AAA titles hit the shelves in time for the impending holiday season, and 2016 is already shaping up to be a real corker. Particularly so given that we’re about to witness a showdown of epic proportions; a face off between the industry giants, and this time they're battling for supremacy amid the most popular genre in gaming.
Take a peek at the video game release schedule over the next 6 months and you’re likely to go weak at the knees. We’re certainly in for a roller coaster ride of wonderful entertainment, with everything from intriguing new IPs, long-awaited sequels, and even the annualized franchises making bold changes to their upcoming titles.
It’s that time of the year again, when the trees are turning auburn, the leaves are starting to drop and the days are slowly but surely getting shorter. For most people, the end of summer is a picturesque but rather depressing inevitability, but as the rest of the world mopes about the onset of gloomy weather, gamers revel in the excuse to hunker down and enjoy some quality video games.
Pre-order bonus schemes, paid downloadable content, and the ever-irritating rise of season passes have been thwarting gamers' best interests for years now, and the practice is becoming ever more ingrained in the business of selling video games. Obviously, publishers exist to generate revenue through their investments, but the extent to which that has started to affect the consumer experience has become an especially palpable issue over the past five years. Under the instruction of greedy publishers, timed exclusives, invasive micro-transactions and repacked cut content is spoiling the hard work of the creative minds that produce video games and the experience for the consumers that invest their hard earned money into purchasing them.
The last 4 or so weeks might have been somewhat barren of video game releases, but there’s certainly been no shortage information about upcoming hardware and software to keep us enthused. Gamescom, TGS, PlayStation’s launch event, Nintendo’s recent direct; the industry normally trickles information across the year, but recently, we’ve had a pretty frantic wave of press conferences.
Sony have forged their reputation on superb press conferences. In the last half decade, the company have had a succession of golden showings, the results of which have unquestionably helped to elevate the current PlayStation iteration to its unrivalled commercial success. The industry buzz around the initial PS4 reveal, the amusing demonstration of unrestricted second hand games exchange, the tremendous software showings at both the 2015 and 2016 E3; Sony’s stage performances have all been raving success stories that have helped to elevate the PS4 to an unrivalled top dog status.
Cyberpunk: a dark vision of the future in which technology has shaped social order. The thematic concept of “high tech low life” was first pioneered by authors such as William Gibson and Philip K. Dick with their respective novels Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner), but the genre has since spilled over to other mediums including video games, resulting in some of the most grimly fascinating and atmospheric games of all-time.
