ALEX M SACCARDO | WRITER / DESIGNER
Demon’s Souls introduced me to the PS3 with a bang. Dark Souls showed me how cleverly games could play with traditional narrative. You can understand why, then, I was so ecstatic when I was asked play and review this game before it hit shelves.
Featured in Hyper Magazine #247
Featured in PC PowerPlay #228
Featured in Hyper Magazine #253
When talking Souls, be it Demon’s or Dark, it’s hard to avoid the subject of difficulty. To the casual observer, frequent deaths followed by a taunting ‘YOU DIED’ screen makes player persistence seem borderline masochistic. Add this to the tantrums thrown when a Souls game aims to be more ‘accessible’ and it’s easy to misconstrue intentions. So let’s get this out of the way: is Dark Souls III difficult?
Good thing I wrote this preview so you can find out, huh?
Featured in PC PowerPlay #245
The Deep Web makes up the back alleys of the internet. It’s not indexed by search engines and is reserved for the unknown: think password protected forums, private sites and the unlinkable. So when Obscure Horror Corner claimed to have found a game in the darkness, a wave of goosebumps rippled through our digital realm…
Featured on VICE.
The Nilfgaardian’s have invaded the Northern Kigndoms, but while the rest of the realm are distracted by the onslaught, Geralt roams the wild searching for bounties. In this preview, I was exposed to five different faces of the famous White Wolf…
Featured on Rocket Chainsaw
There are definitely sections of excellence in LoS2. On occasion an engaging enemy will draw you in, or a pretty setting will catch your eye – all while Oscar Araujo’s soaring soundtrack carries you lovingly off to another place. But every time the game is about to nail that Castlevania tone, it yanks you back out into the cold light of the modern day…
All featured on Rocket Chainsaw.
In recent years, the video game world has been working hard to move past a reputation of blood, guts and unadulterated violence. Games like Beyond: Two Souls, Journey and The Last of Us have paved the way to elevate audience interaction above the physical realm, reaching out on a much deeper emotional level.
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, on the other hand, gives a big one finger salute to those emotional sissies…
Featured on Rocket Chainsaw
Two combatants face off, poised for battle. They edge back and forth, shifting sweaty grips on 8bit swords as each one waits for the other to strike first. The canvas behind them explodes in a vast array of colours while Daedelus's retro anthem builds to a crescendo, coaxing the rainbow warriors to battle. The tension is palpable…
Featured in Hyper Magazine #246
In the travel spirit of their seventh issue, the food-loving mag-heads (or is it the other way around?) at Lucky Peach have released an ACSII game that puts you out to sea…
Featured on Smith Journal
Entertaining four players on the same screen is a huge task; it’s kind of like extreme babysitting. Not that cushy gig spent watching TV, rather the one planning an activity to keep four annoyingly astute children engaged at all times…
Featured on Rocket Chainsaw.
Three of history's greatest warrior-types going at it sounds like the setting of a kid's (read: my) bedroom. Surely the only way to claim the 'Ultimate Warrior' crown is to mush the plastic bodies of action figures together until one ends up victorious? Ubisoft Montreal may have found a better path...
Featured in Hyper Magazine #262
Dragon Ball Z is arguably one of the most successful anime series to reach western shores.
Exploding onto Cheez TV in the mid 90s, the series acted as a gateway drug to the spiky-haired joys of Japanese animation. It comes as no surprise, then, that a new game is churned out almost yearly... what does come as a surprise is that they're only getting worse…
Featured in Hyper Magazine #253
