To celebrate the release of this critically acclaimed modern action movie masterpiece, we have a limited edition record bag from the movie to give away to one lucky reader.

You won’t find these available to buy in stores, so if you want to accessorize with a cool piece of promo swag from the movie when you’re imitating Iko’s martial arts moves on the high street (Note: Don’t try that – it’ll either get you arrested or, at the very least, make you look like an idiot in front of your friends), then enter our competition below!

To be in with a chance of winning, simply email us here and include the following:

1. Your full name and mailing address.
2. The answer to the following: Which rock ‘n’ roll legend wrote and recorded the song ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’?

(UK entrants only. One entry per household. Competition ends 22nd May 2012.)

In the currently swamped marketplace, it’s rare that an indie game manages to make the leap from cute curiosity to genuine geek phenomenon, but if there’s a shining example of how quickly and fervently something can spread like an addictive pop culture plague, it’s Minecraft. Cooked up by its then one man studio Markus “Notch” Persson, the free-form sandbox game appealed to hardcore geeks and casual gamers alike, inviting them to lose days of their life in its alluring grasp, spawning Wikis and internet memes along the way.

But if you’re without a PC capable of playing anything more technically taxing than Minesweeper, you’ve probably missed out on the addictive joys of the free-form time-stealer, so you’ll be pleased that Notch’s studio Mojang and port specialist 4J Studios have lovingly brought the game to consoles (well, one at least) in the form of Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition. The result is a surprisingly well crafted (no pun intended) translation, and while the concessions and omissions made in bringing the PC game to 360 will make those who already own the original shy away, newcomers will find the same amazingly addictive, creative joys with a few wonderful tweaks made to make it a more comfortable, accessible sofa experience.
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If you’ve somehow managed to avoid hearing about Minecraft over the past few years, it’s essentially a sandbox building block world in which you explore at your own pace, mining, chopping and hunting for resources to build whatever the heck you feel like. You start out with nothing but your pixel block fists, but punching trees will have them crumbling to bare wood for you to make versatile sticks and planks. You can then craft a workstation or a furnace to build more complex tools which allow you to mine for more precious minerals to build more advanced contraptions, and so on. The more stuff you mine, the more you can make. Pretty soon you’ll have the ingredients and riches to build gigantic castles, underwater fortresses, subterranean cave systems and minecart railways – whatever your imagination and the simple cube block structure will allow.

The open-ended sandbox of Minecraft’s exploring, mining and crafting only makes up half the game’s DNA though, with the other half owing a surprising amount to the survival horror genre. Minecraft runs on a day-night cycle. By day, the game is all whimsical exploration and the joy of Lego-style creative construction in a scenic land full of cutesy farmyard animals. But when the sun goes down, all manner of beastly blocky monsters come out to play, from venomous spiders and deadly zombies to slithering Creepers which explode when they get near.
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You’re dead meat out in the dark alone, so by day all that mining and building carries a second agenda: To keep your butt alive after dark until the sun comes up. You’ll fashion bows and swords to defend yourself, fish and hunt to top up your damaged health, scramble to put together torches to ward off the dark and – most importantly – build a secure shelter to keep the beasts at bay.

The first few nights without the resources to build a cushy home, weapons or a bed, forced to throw together a flimsy dirt hut or wooden shed with a hole to peek through to check for sunlight as unseen monsters shuffle and hiss around is creepy as all hell and the game milks a shocking amount of tension and scares from such simplistic visuals. The same’s true of straying too far from your fortified home during the day and getting lost, only to see the sun starting to set, knowing you have only moments to throw together a hasty shelter, or mining deep underground for minerals, only to punch a hole into an underground cave full of nightmare creatures. The reliance on dwindling resources and the creepy dangers that await in the dark often make Minecraft a survival horror game in the purest sense of the term, with all the frights that come with it.
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The darker survivalist half of Minecraft provides so much fun, a welcome dash of panicked terror and an added sense of purpose to all that crafting, but if you’re of a nervous disposition, you can forgo all the monster mash action, set the game to ‘Peaceful’ difficulty and just focus on mining and building things, and that’s a perfectly enjoyable way to play, too. The almost limitless construction possibilities tap into the creative, relaxing sandbox fun that made games like The Sims and Animal Crossing such a bizarrely addictive joy – don’t be shocked if you unwittingly let the game steal an entire weekend from you without noticing the time. Whether you want to construct a scale recreation of your favourite buildings or fictional landmarks, go to work on an epic castle, tame wolves to be your faitful companions, build a farm to make all that resource hunting easier or just run around punching cows, you’re given freedom to build and do whatever you like.

Unfortunately, those who’re put off by the idea of limitless creative ‘make your own fun’ freedom might find the sheer open-endedness of things a little daunting. And even if you don’t, the lack of any real objectives do hamper the experience in the long term; once you’ve unearthed every type of mineral, built everything, constructed gigantic fortresses, fashioned a portal to the Netherworld and wandered the landscape endlessly, things can get pretty aimless and the initially enrapturing fun will wear off a bit unless you’re someone who relishes an absence of structure and purpose.
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Things have been slightly simplified in the jump to consoles, with the obligatory console port downsides but a surprising amount of improvements, too. The controls are an intuitive breeze, the visuals are sharp and charming and when it comes to the crafting system, the ways in which the 360 version handles the process to make it more accessible are absolutely fantastic. The PC version took a “Screw it, let them figure it out themselves!” approach, with little indication of what or how you could craft, leaving you futzing around using trial and error combinations or scouring online Wikis.

The XBLA version, however, gives you a whole simple-to-use recipe book to show you what’s possible and what you need to make, say, a pressure plate switch, a bow or a bucket. If you have the ingredients you can instantly make them with the push of a button without the precise crafting placement that the PC version demanded. Along with the handy tutorials, item descriptions and so on, it all makes the potentially daunting world of Minecraft a lot easier to get to grips with and nudges you to the core creative fun a lot quicker.
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The big downside, however, is that the world is now limited to a smaller section of real estate, rather than the infinitely generating land that you’d find on the PC. Walk far enough and you’ll hit invisible walls to mark the world’s boundaries and resources are finite, so once you’ve mined all the coal, diamond and gold, that’s it until you start another world. It’s a necessary evil in making the leap to XBLA and the technical limitations thereof, but it means that the hardcore creative times who need an endless canvas to play with will want to stick with the PC original.

In fairness, to most people the world will still feel gigantic – just mining tunnels and caves directly beneath my base shelter took up hours on end and felt colossal, that’s before factoring in the expansive areas and islands further afield and all the land underneath them. There’ll never be a shortage of things to find on the surface, let alone what waits underneath, and most people’s ideas and creativity will run out long before the resources dry up. So while the finite resources are a bit of a downer, most people won’t find it a dealbreaker or even notice it unless they were planning on building a life-size recreation of New York City or an endless land covered in solid gold towering wangs.
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The XBLA version is ported from a slightly older build of the PC Minecraft, too, meaning that some content isn’t included (though apparently updates are forthcoming to hopefully rectify that), like Hardcore Mode (which removes the ability to respawn and deletes your world upon death) and Creative Mode (in which you’re invulnerable, can fly and have infinite resources to build to your heart’s content), along with some crafting items, abilities and populated villages. In a game free from objectives and structure and predicated on free-form creativity and exploration, the more content you’re given to play with the better, so PC Minecraft fans won’t want to make the jump to the 360 port, but there’s still a tonne to keep newcomers happy.

And if you’re the kind of gamer who likes to bring friends or your significant other along for the ride, then the option of split-screen multiplayer or online co-op will be an incredibly welcome one. If you’re playing online, the clear and handy toggle options to switch your game from ‘Offline’ to ‘Invite Only’ or ‘Online’ allows you to bring friends into your world to check out your handywork or act as slave labour, spending a relaxing afternoon toiling away together on shared construction projects. The 360 restricts the online experience a little – there aren’t any persistent online servers, so you can only play online with people on your friends list, and even then, you can only explore their world when they’re online and playing the game themselves. But in a way, the ‘friends list only’ restriction is a welcome one – the potential for people to wreak havok and destroy your creations is pretty high, so it’s handy to know who to hold accountable for payback.
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The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft won’t be an ideal replacement for those who have already sunk countless hours into the PC version, thanks to a few less features and a more limited landscape to play with. But if you’ve never jumped into this addictive sandbox world of block-stacking, brick-mining, monster-evading fun, the XBLA port is still a fantastic way to do it, with some wonderful tweaks to the PC to make it a more accessible experience, like the streamlined crafting system, the more intuitive, comfortable controls and the welcome addition of local multiplayer.

The free-form sandbox nature and absence of objectives means that your enjoyment will only last as long as your creativity does, but if you’re someone who loves playing around with Lego, then the endless creative possibilities and intensely addictive gameplay make Minecraft a must.

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Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition is available to buy now on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 1600 Microsoft Points.

Strongly tipped as a filmmaker to watch on the strength of his astonishing debut feature “Frontier(s)” and hard-hitting follow up “Hitman”, director Xavier Gens fulfils all expectations with his latest offering, The Divide, an intense, post-apocalyptic shocker.

Starring Michael Biehn (The Abyss; Aliens; The Terminator), Lauren German (Hawaii Five-O; Hostel: Part II), Rosanna Arquette (Pulp Fiction), Milo Ventimiglia (Wolverine; Heroes), Courtney B. Vance (Final Destination 5; FlashForward) and Ashton Holmes (Nikita; The Pacific). The Divide is terrifying from it’s opening sequence to its breathtaking and totally unexpected finale, it grips like a vice throughout and sees the ever-excellent Biehn delivering one of the most riveting performances of his career.

The Divide (Momentum Pictures) is available to download and on DVD from 14th May 2012.

Check out The Divide Fanhub site – http://www.totalfanhub.com/the-divide/

To be in with a chance of winning, simply email us here and include your full name and mailing address. That’s it! Best of luck!

(UK entrants only. One entry per household. Entrants must be over 18. Competition ends 21st May 2012.)

The recent episodic Jurassic Park game was supposed to mark a major leap in the creative evolution of Telltale Games. Following close on the heels of Telltale’s Back To The Future adaptation, tackling Spielberg’s blockbuster didn’t just help catapult the scale of their projects from reviving cult classic games of yore to adapting full-fledged major household name franchises, but signaled their first fledgling steps outside the comfort of their point-and-click adventure game niche.

The resulting product, which owed a huge debt to the Quick Time Event-laden ‘interactive cinema’ formula of Heavy Rain, was sadly Telltale’s weakest offering yet – a hurried, glitchy technical mess that obscured the story’s high points with a stuttering frame rate and clumsy presentation. The Walking Dead thankfully fixes every mistake the studio made with Jurassic Park and accomplishes everything that game tried to do with impressive finesse, resulting in an intense, involving bit of cinematic adventure game and a big creative step forward for Telltale Games.
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A five part episodic series that takes its cues from Robert Kirkman’s comic, The Walking Dead tells a tangential story to the graphic novels with you assuming the role of new character Lee Everett. Taking place at the beginning of the zombie outbreak, the first episode sees Lee shackled in a cop car and headed off to jail when the police cruiser is driven off the road amidst the undead chaos. Lee takes shelter in a nearby home and becomes unlikely guardian to Clementine, a young girl separated from her vacationing parents. Together the two search for help, meeting familiar faces from the comic along the way while Lee struggles to keep his criminal a secret from other survivors.

A fusion of Telltale’s familiar adventure game mechanics melded with a heavily streamlined version of the gameplay they tried out in Jurassic Park, The Walking Dead handles perfectly. For the adventure sections of the game, things are much like a simplified version of the familiar Telltale exploration gameplay found in Sam & Max or Back to the Future. You have full control of Lee as he investigates certain areas, collects items and chats with fellow survivors – dialogue trees which are pared down to an Alpha Protocol style four-choice reply wheel with a ticking timer to effectively ramp up the pressure for your gut decisions.
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You’ll use collected items on other items to solve puzzles, but there’s never the same amount of puzzle action as in Telltale’s past adventure games – collected items will be in short supply and the interface is heavily streamlined to keep the focus on character and action. If, like most people, you found the clunky of overuse of button-prompting QTE action in Jurassic Park, The Walking Dead will have you breathing a sigh of relief as it narrows and hones those mechanics beautifully. A large opaque cursor hovers over the screen and as a zombie attack section of the story breaks out, you’ll steer a fallen Lee with one stick as he slowly shuffles away from the flesh-chompy undead and aim the shaky cursor with the other to target the foe or select items in the scene. Lining it up allows you to hit button prompts to clock the zombie in the head or interact with useful objects or characters. It’s all very linear and on-rails, and the Heavy Rain lineage is still apparent, but it works perfectly, introducing some white-knuckle tension and edge-of-your-seat action moments without the horribly clunky presentation of Jurassic Park.

Story, dialogue and character has always been the driving force behind Telltale’s games and The Walking Dead is no different; the rest of the game is a great blend of focused adventure game puzzling and interactive movie mechanics, but the biggest strength is how well the story is put together and how involving, tense and well-written the narrative is. Lee’s story is an engrossing one, full of the kinds of interesting characters, high-tension drama and pathos that the comic and show aspire to while trimming all the fat and pacing bloat from the TV series. Characters from the comics/TV show appear here and there, most notably Glen and Hershel, providing a fun, familiar link to the source material for fans without being obtrusive for newcomers. Visually the game is a smooth experience, and while it still runs on the slightly featureless, cartoony Telltale engine, the developers turn it into an advantage, adding a cool cell-shading filter to make it feel a lot like a moving, interactive version of the comics. It’s lean, tense, grisly and tremendously entertaining, made even more rewarding for how your choices cause a ripple effect through the episode and on to future installments.

Similar to the branching storylines of games like Mass Effect, The Walking Dead poses plenty of minor and major moral dilemmas and allows you to shape the story depending on your gut choices. Do a clumsy job at covering up your shady past and characters might see through your lies and distrust you as a result. Choosing to help certain characters over others or take sides in an argument will have a knock-on effect as to who will have your back later on. Depending on the choices you make, alliances could form or crumble and characters might not survive to appear in the next episode. Much like Heavy Rain, there’s the great feeling that you’re actually having an impact on the story while playing it, and there’s the added fun of talking through which choices you made differently from friends and what differed in your unique, individual playthroughs. And in a cool added extra, the game throws up a percentage chart letting you know how players worldwide leaned with each of the game’s pivotal choices.
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Nonetheless, playing the game through a second time does shine an unfortunately revealing light on how little weight some of the choices actually have. A couple of the major, wildly serious decisions still result in the same consequences no matter which gut choice you made. There’s a strict, linear narrative laid out that the game can’t really steer away from too much and with the technical limitations of an episodic Telltale game, that’s understandable. How those choices play out over the next few episodes will be the real test, and the illusion of moulding the game to suit your choices is still effective, but it’s a shame that the branching plot choices only really lead to superficial dialogue differences.

There are some rather daft moments of adventure game puzzling and contrived story moments that blemish the otherwise excellent plot and character work, too. A whip-smart survivalist reporter who’s a crack shot with a pistol sets off one of the game’s puzzles by revealing that she doesn’t know what AA batteries look like or understand how to put them into an average househould store-bought radio. Another moment has you locked behind a shop security gate. There’s a house brick you need that’s clearly within arm’s reach and the gap in the gate rails looks more than wide enough to pull it through, but you’re met with an ‘I can’t reach it!’ response if you try. The dumber moments do make an impression, but they’re thankfully in the minority and the game’s shifting narrative is incredibly engrossing.

A true return to form for Telltale after the glitch-riddled missteps of Jurassic Park, The Walking Dead is a wonderfully gripping, gory and thrilling narrative experience on par with and often better than the TV show and comic it takes its cues from. Sharp writing, interesting characters and a tense, well-told story provide a great foundation for the interactive movie gameplay, which leads to some fantastic, exhilarating action set-pieces. The lack of real weight to the branching choices revealed on a second playthrough is unfortunate, but if you allow the game to sweep you away and don’t poke too much into the mechanics, it’s a fantastic bit of interactive zombie entertainment that’s sure to please Walking Dead fans and newcomers alike.

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The Walking Dead: Episode 1 is available to buy now on the PlayStation Network Store and Xbox Live Marketplace and for PC.

The trouble with reviewing any of the HD Collection updates hitting consoles over the past few years is what exactly to review: Do you delve into the classic fan-favourite games that’ve been reviewed, dissected and replayed incessantly in the years since release, or focus and judge it merely on the technically merits of the fancy high-def upgrades?

In the interest of brevity, I’ll try to give you the long and short of it. The Silent Hill HD Collection collects two fantastic, must-play games which helped usher the survival horror genre into more cerebral territory and will certainly be of interest to newcomers and fans looking to play them on their next-gen consoles. Unfortunately the developers behind the HD update have crafted it with less-than-perfect brushstrokes, making it far from the definitive collection of the scary, surreal genre landmarks.
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The Silent Hill series certainly didn’t give birth to the survival horror genre, but it was monumental in helping it evolve from the cheesy B-Movie thrills of Capcom’s Resident Evil and Dino Crisis into the realm of intelligent narratives rich with symbolic depth, chilling atmosphere and nightmarish imagery. After the first entry hit the original PlayStation, making waves and inspiring many sleepless nights, Silent Hill 2 side-stepped the direct sequel route, choosing to tell a standalone tale set in the spooky titular town.

James Sutherland drives out to Silent Hill after getting a letter from his deceased wife, clinging to the desperate, misguided hope that she might somehow be still alive. When he arrives, he’s soon trapped within the apparently deserted town as a dense fog rolls in, concealing horrifying monsters, leaving James fighting for survival as he fights the figurative and literal demons of his murky past.
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The slow-paced controls, and limited weapons at your disposal might be off-putting to those weened on action-heavy games, but they’re crucial to the palpable, dread-filled atmosphere and sense of claustrophobic isolation as you roam the town solving clever puzzles and fleeing from nightmarish monsters with dwindling resources. The twisted imagery inspires ghoulish terror, the creepy ambiance offers genuine frights aplenty and the story unfolds with a shocking amount of symbolic depth that’ll have you poring over every detail long after you’ve completing it. It’s arguably the best survival horror game and one of the most cleverly-written narrative experiences you’ll find on a console. (The HD collection also includes the Maria side-story ‘Born From a Wish’, previously exclusive to Special Edition versions of the game.)

Silent Hill 3, however, revisits the characters of the first game with teenager Heather Mason finding herself trapped in Silent Hill’s mall as she becomes the target of monsters and a sinister cult. For newcomers jumping in with the HD Collection, that might limit the amount of enjoyment you’ll get from the story (Silent Hill 1 isn’t included – the PS1-era visuals wouldn’t be suited for an HD update without being remade from the ground up) but it’s ripe for revisiting, and unfairly overlooked in the wake of its genre-defining predecessor.
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The gameplay is just as tight, claustrophobic and thrilling, the sense of isolation and dread-drenched atmosphere is still there and Silent Hill 3 is arguably the best looking and most visually imaginative of the series, especially when it comes to the surreal monsters and the nightmarish otherworld sections. While the story isn’t quite as densely woven as that of the second game, it offers some great character work and some of the most creepily-engineered scares of the franchise, along with the standard clever puzzles and classic survival horror gameplay.

The games themselves hold up wonderfully, but what of the HD collection’s bells, whistles and changes? The visual upgrades are something of a mixed bag. On the whole, everything looks much sharper and more detailed by a wide margin, but odd alterations and issues stand out. The atmosphere of Silent Hill 2 was largely owing to the fog that enveloped the town, with the half-glimpsed ‘Did I really just see that?!’ peeks at enemies in the mist providing wonderful tension and plenty of freak-outs. The HD collection makes the strange decision to remove much of the fog, making previously unseen things visible and thus diluting much of the eerie ambiance. Less is tinkered with for the third game, but frame rate problems rear their head around the mall sections and Heather often appears to be running in slow motion.
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Then there’s the controversial voice work replacements. Fan outcry over the rerecording and replacement of the game’s original voice performances is understandable, but not universally justified. Sure, for the sake of nostalgic purity, everyone should want and feel entitled to enjoy the games of the past the way they remember them, but that same nostalgia also has a convenient rose-tinted filter for many. As fantastic as the larger narratives were, the voice acting and delivery in Silent Hill 1 & 2 was arguably pretty stiff and stilted, so the idea of updating them with “better” performances is hardly a crime, especially since the choice to select the original voices for the first game is offered. The performances themselves are hit and miss: Troy Baker does a great job at injecting some emotion into the previously robotic James Sutherland, but characters like Eddy suffer from more cartoonish vocals.

Silent Hill 3 was, to me at least, always the best game in terms of voice acting, and after two games of emotionless lead performances and main characters who felt more like cyphers for the top-notch stories than actual human characters, having a lead character with vocal personality and emotion felt like a welcome surprise. Unfortunately Silent Hill 3 fans get stiffed by the HD Collection even more; there’s the choice of original and new voice performances for Silent Hill 2, but no such option for the third game, leaving faithful players stuck with lesser vocal tracks.

Silent Hill 2 and 3 are fantastic games – landmarks in the genre that stand the test of time and are infinitely deserving of a revisit by fans and newcomers alike. Unfortunately, the HD Collection injects just as many unfortunate added problems as it does technical improvements, making it far from a definitive collection. If you can see past the omissions, tweaks and occasional frame rate problems, there’s some impressive visual upgrades and two stellar, scary games hidden underneath, but fans of Silent Hill 3 especially will want to hang on to their original PS2 copies.

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Silent Hill HD Collection is available to buy now for PS3 and Xbox 360.
Click here to buy the game from Amazon.co.uk.

You’d be forgiven for not expecting much from Silent Hill: Downpour. After all, the landscape of survival horror games has shifted and changed so much since its inception that new entries in classic franchises barely resemble the genre output that made us love being scared on consoles to begin with.

The Resident Evil series became less about claustrophobic atmosphere and scary solo survival and more about blasting zombie hordes without a care in the world or just suplexing the undead as everything turned action-heavy. While the Silent Hill series has retained its spirit more than most, it still took the same path, with last major sequel Homecoming focusing largely around QuickTime Event-heavy combat. Thankfully Silent Hill Downpour takes a more careful approach to updating the series, opening up and expanding on familiar series gameplay in interesting ways while retaining the engrossing slow-burn story, spooky frights and intense, isolated atmosphere that made Silent Hill the benchmark for survival horror.

As always, the story finds a troubled soul trapped in the eerie town of Silent Hill – a place where the ghosts of a tormented past can quite literally come back to destroy their victim. Convict Murphy Pendleton is in the process of a prison transfer, serving time for crimes unknown, but during the trip the bus takes a spill off the road and into the woods. When Murphy wakes up, everyone in the bus is gone, fog has overrun the town and monsters are crawling out of the woodwork as he struggles to piece together where he is and how to find a way home before his demons tear him apart.
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Plot-wise, Silent Hill Downpour is let down slightly by the fact that it never really offers any real surprises. Almost all the major twists and turns of Downpour’s story become clear in the first half hour or so, and though the writing hints at some thought-provoking, morally dark and interesting detours for the series, none of them come to pass and the narrative plays out pretty much exactly as expected. Even so, it’s an engrossing, well-told tale that’s gripping, creepy and bolstered by some solid voice acting and an effectively eerie soundtrack.

The gameplay itself steers back more towards the roots of Silent Hill’s intense survival horror action and puzzling and mercifully away from the Quick-Time Event-heavy combat of Homecoming. There’s a solid block-and-parry melee system weaved in and breakable weapons are still a factor, which might irk some players, but the prevalence of a massive variety of killing tools from lamps to pipes and wrenches to firearms dotted around the town offers tried-and-true survival horror dwindling resources tension without the frustration that the combat of Homecoming introduced. And, taking a little from Shattered Memories’ DNA, the fleeing mechanic that featured prominently in that game returns here to lesser extent – you can run from any enemy if the combat’s not to your liking, peeking over your shoulder to get a panic-inducing glance at how close pursuing enemies are.
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That ‘run like hell’ element wears out its welcome a little in the game’s Otherworld sections, where you’re running through mazes of grimy, rusty corridors from an abstract, indestructible, black, glowing void. The black hole that chases you can move vertically through buildings, so you can be running up stairs only to find your amorphous pursuer is magically ahead of you and quickly draining your life. There’s also frequent pausing and stuttering when transitioning between areas of the map. That aside, the gameplay is a huge improvement over Downpour, sprinkling in cleverly-designed puzzles, while combat and enemy interaction is varied, enjoyable, and at long last actually scary again. Getting ominous glimpses of unearthly creatures shambling in the fog is tremendously spooky, and having brutish, shrieking, nightmarish creatures suddenly get the drop on you as you’re exploring back streets of the town is instantly panic-inducing.

The monsters aren’t as surreally ghoulish as those of Silent Hill 1 and 2, but there’s been actual effort to make the creatures creatively reflect the symbolic torment of our protagonist in the way that the Silent Hill games used to, rather than just rehash old designs – thankfully those nurse-monsters are nowhere to be found. There’s some commendably unsettling set-pieces, most notably a train ride wherein the monsters creepily shamble closer every time the lights flicker out, evoking Doctor Who’s wonderfully frightening episode Blink. Downpour conjures up a tonne of palpable atmosphere, which goes a long way towards making the story more involving, but more than that, developer Vatra Games go to impressive lengths to expand on the core exploration of the town and give you more to do throughout the game without ever sacrificing that contained, claustrophobic sense of dread and tension.
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Free-roaming side missions aren’t exactly new for the Silent Hill series. Since the first entry there’s been optional story bits to discover while roaming the fog-drenched streets of everyone’s favourite nightmare town, but Downpour approaches that with a much broader sense of scope. Sure, it’s not going to rival Fallout for longevity, but with a massive map to traverse, if you choose to seek out the side-story stuff, there’s a good 30-plus extra hours of gameplay to enjoy with a much wider sense of exploratory freedom while retaining the atmospheric claustrophobia that made those fog-soaked streets so terrifying.

While some are a little too simplistic (like finding five bird cages) or too obtuse, expecting you to simply scour the town blindly for puzzle items, most of the optional objectives introduce some wonderfully creepy story vignettes (the search for a mission autistic girl being the unsettling standout) and expand on the core gameplay and atmosphere of the Silent Hill franchise without losing sight of what made the series so great to begin with. Like the core game, the cleverly designed puzzles will have you jotting down notes and potential solutions to riddles on a notepad the way the brain-taxing puzzles of survival horror games used to.
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A solid, but largely revelation-free story disappoints a little, as do the slightly awkward and repetitive Otherworld chase sections, but despite that, Silent Hill Downpour is an impressive return to form for the franchise after the last couple of less-than-stellar core sequels. It’s incredibly creepy and oozing with dread-filled atmosphere, but Vatra Games also expand on the exploration and puzzles of the series, broadening the scope of its gameplay with a bountiful stack of engrossing side-missions that’ll have you spending countless more hours lost and wetting your pants in the fog-drenched streets and back alleys of Silent Hill.

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Silent Hill Downpour is available to buy now for PS3 and Xbox 360.
Click here to buy the game from Amazon.co.uk.

The National Lampoon comedy factory have another movie on shelves and to celebrate we have a T-shirt and DVD pack to give away to two lucky readers!

Charlie LaRue is a cheap rate producer with a dream and that dream is a film, a film that will bring together all the most low-down, filthy, nasty, offensive jokes in one disgusting place. Welcome to National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie, a flick that doesn’t let up in its efforts to offend your sensibilities and make you lose your lunch laughing, from the people who brought you Christmas Vacation, Animal House and Class Reunion.

On DVD from 16th April 2012 courtesy of Transition Digital Media, Dirty Movie is an hilarious filth rollercoaster that doesn’t let up with the smut for second. Didn’t like that off colour joke? Well don’t worry, because another one is coming to upset your elderly relatives in a second. The twisted humour never quits in this sledgehammer sketch comedy that assaults you with jokes until you can’t take no more.

National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie is now available to buy from Amazon here.

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Like Lemmings, but with GI Joes, A-Men brings tongue-in-cheek 2D strategy puzzle/platform gaming to the PlayStation Vita as you put the various limited skills of your squad to use in the most efficient way possible to dispose of enemies and get all your men through hostile territory to the escape chopper. There’s a shortage of strategy games on the Vita at the moment, and A-Men certainly fills that void with some clever puzzling, a pretty lengthy campaign and some cute and colourful cartoon aesthetics, but some awkward mechanics, a dull and repetitive sense of humour and an unfortunately high price point prevent it from being a must-buy title.

Much like the aforementioned Lemmings, you’re given distinct units to swap between throughout the game, each with their own unique skills and limited resources. The Private has a one-shot rifle, the Engineer can destroy or rebuild bridges and floor sections, the Commando makes use of grappling hook and parachute to reach and descent from higher platforms, the Muscleman can toss characters and heavy objects, while the Spy can disguise himself as the enemy. Each skill often only has a limited amount of uses, even with power-up refills dotted around the map, and while there’s different ways to make it to the end, you’ll get a much higher score for taking out every enemy with the most efficient use of your tools, all in the quickest time possible.
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The puzzle layouts are pretty clever, and as the game moves on, the enemies get wise to your tricks. Grunt enemies will brainlessly wander into holes you’ve blown in the environments or fall down lift shafts you’ve left open, making it simple for you to leave perilous traps dotted about to snuff them out, but smarter enemies won’t go out quite so easily. Higher-up foes will stop short of dropping into chasms or stepping on mines, but in return, your extra skills mean you can paint landmines to trick them. New abilities/characters are unveiled at a steady pace, there’s a nice variety of environments throughout the game and the challenge offers a nice balance of being accessible and having enough tougher replay value for hardcore gamers who want to set up the most efficient, speedy chain of traps and actions to get the highest score.

Unfortunately for those striving to nail all the gold medals and such, the action system can be a little wonky at times. An icon indicator hangs at the right of the screen with a list of tools and actions you can use, but the button for each action isn’t constant and gets bumped around if you discover a new context-based action on the map, like a lever. The button you need to press to draw your rifle could be the Square button one minute, then suddenly switch to the X button. If you’re attempting to nail everything under a certain time (the game rewards completion of extra bonus objectives, like finishing the level in less than one minute), having the action prompts constantly switching around can be a pain and costs you vital seconds of preparedness.
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The game’s sense of humour can be awfully trying and obnoxious, too. Your team of soldiers are incredibly chatty, but they speak exclusively in already worn thin pop culture quotes. Hearing Duke Nukem borrow lines from They Live (“I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum.”) got a laugh or two sixteen years ago, but quickly grew tiresome over a decade of repetition. So having A-Men throw those re-recycled “jokes” at you every few seconds can really grind at your patience. Some lines are more current, but still too late out of the gate – hearing Skyrim’s “arrow to the knee” quote stopped being amusing after months of being an internet meme – while the attempts at meta-humour (characters poke fun at level design and call the graphics crummy) never really muster a laugh the first time, let alone after the tenth time in a few minutes.

A-Men is an enjoyable game that boasts some clever strategic puzzle action, and that’s especially welcome on the Vita, where the range and amount of games still isn’t especially bountiful. But in comparison to some of the other launch window titles that are of higher quality for a lower cost, the £11.99 price tag seems excessively steep. The occasionally awkward controls add an unwelcome and unfair level of challenge and the sense of humour quickly grinds away at your patience, but nonetheless, there’s enough intelligent puzzle design, variety and enjoyment to make it worthwhile for strategy fans.

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A-Men is available to buy now exclusively on PlayStation Network for PS Vita, priced £11.99.

Calling Double Fine Happy Action Theater a game would be stretching the truth by more than a hair. Less an actual game and more an augmented reality playset, Happy Action Theater uses the Kinect sensor to display a live stream of you and your room onto the screen, then a series of activities will project virtual objects on top, transforming your living room into an imaginative land of daft fun.

Want to see lava fill your room, leaving you hopping onto the sofa to avoid burning your legs off, or have a snow storm hit your house so you can toss virtual snowballs at your family? Ever wanted birds to flock to you and perch all over your shoulders and head without the pesky poop clean-up afterwards? Or maybe you’ve wondered what it’d be like to be encased in a giant bowl of jelly? Double Fine Happy Action Theater gives you the chance to do all that and more, dragging in up to five of your friends and family to join the fun.
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There’s some genuinely inventive, imaginative use of the Kinect hardware amongst the selection of activities. The 5x photo tool takes a 5-exposure photo with a delay in between, so you can strike a pose, have your photo taken, then effectively jump around in the photograph and reposition yourself before the camera snaps another image of you to add on top. The end result is as crazy and creative as your imagination allows: You can have five clones of you all beating each other up, hugging each other, stacked and hidden behind you to give the illusion of Vishnu arms, and so on. It’s the most replayable and inventive tool in the mix, let down only by the unfortunate lack of ability to save your crazy pictures.

Others offer more basic, but visually engaging fun, especially for kids. One tracks the movements of your hands and straps virtual sparkler fireworks to them, allowing your to spray sparks from your fingers. One traps your image inside a giant bowl of jelly, your movements causing it to wobble and wiggle. One makes flowers bloom around your room until it’s an overgrown jungle. Another drops you underwater to play with fish, but getting caught by a hook sees you yanked out of the screen. A couple of others make you the controller in Breakout and Space Invaders clones as you dash along the bottom of the screen to destroy targets. It’s fantastic fun that caters to the childlike whims of actual kids and drunken adults goofing around after a night out.
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Of course, after a while, the simplistic, hit-and-miss nature of the activities start to make replay value a bit questionable. Some activities, like the photo snap game, reward creativity more than others and invite more replay. But outside of the human Breakout activity and such, none of the other choices keep a score or offer any depth, progression or variety. The pigeon, flower and jelly activities become pretty dull after a few minutes, and many of the choice on offer are one-trick ponies that even youngsters will likely skip when they start up the game again.

The game mostly does a great job at integrating your movements into the screen and mapping the virtual chaos to your room accurately, but the few technical issues that pop up occasionally seem less a fault of Double Fine and more the limitations and quirks of the Kinect Sensor itself. Trying out the pigeon activity in my bedroom, which is in the process of being repainted, resulted in pigeons perching in mid-air, standing on a light paint smudge on the wall and even having trouble distinguishing shadows from solid objects in a well-lit room.
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But for a kid-orientated Kinect showcase, it’s a success despite the few dud activities in the mix. The interface is beautifully simple, free from the awkward set-up and demanding precision motion that most games on the platform demand, it’s wonderfully simple for gamers of all ages and inclinations to fire up the game, jump in and have some visually creative fun at their own speed. The game automatically queues up a playlist of activities, but it’s incredibly easy to single out your favourites and play them again and again.

If you’ve just picked one up a Kinect and are still smitten with the futuristic joys of waving your hands around Minority Report style to control your console or barking orders at it like a gleefully sadistic drill sergeant, then Happy Action Theater is pretty much essential. It feels like the best pack-in product that Microsoft forgot to make, cramming just as much free-form inventive family fun as Kinect Adventures, but with the benefit of Double Fine’s charm.

It won’t satisfy those looking for a proper game that boasts endless depth and longevity, and a few technical hiccups and lesser activities dampen the fires of enjoyment a little, but as an inventive display of the all-ages entertainment and imaginative creativity that the Kinect is capable of, it’s fantastic fun for adults and kids alike.

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Double Fine Happy Action Theater is available to buy now exclusively on Xbox Live Marketplace for Xbox Kinect.

Like any good car, it’s all well and good if a driving game has a fancy paintjob and a snazzy interior, but without solid components under the hood, it’s all for nothing. Wheels of Destruction has plenty of potential, but it’s the gaming equivalent of a car with a broken steering column, making the mere act of driving around feel like you’re trapped in the passenger seat with Mr. Magoo at the wheel.

Taking its cue from Twisted Metal and the like, Gelid Games’ PSN exclusive Wheels of Destruction is an arena-based car combat game where you pick up shield and bonus weapons and use them to destroy your foes. To mix things up slightly, Gelid attempt to weave class-based multiplayer a-la Team Fortress into the vehicular mayhem. You’re given a choice of five cars, each with their own “class” and corresponding strengths and weaknesses. The Heavy can soak up lots of damage, but at the cost of speed, while the scout moves quickly but isn’t well protected against attacks. The choice is welcome, but despite the names, the class system is an entirely hollow one: There’s no level progression, unique skills or perks for each one, so it’s no more than choosing a different car with slightly different stats and names that give the illusion of multiplayer depth.
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If you’re playing the game solo and hoping for some variety of single player campaign or content, you’ll be naturally disappointed. Wheels of Destruction adopts a Left 4 Dead approach to single player gaming, in that solo and multiplayer modes are the same, only with AI bots dropped in if you’re playing offline. It’s fine if you’re just after a standard multiplayer game, and the maps offer a decent enough level of variety, but with only three modes (Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag) it’s a game that could really use a helping of objective-based single player to round out the package more satisfyingly.

There’s a handful of weapons to take your pick of, from the default machine gun to shotguns, flamethrowers and rockets, each with an alternate fire mode, but the relative uselessness of most of them means you’ll only ever really be using the rockets, which makes things a little dull. That aside, it’s a game that does satisfy the base cravings of a multiplayer shooter – it’s fast-paced, chaotic, you shoot things to death and get shot to death in return – but much of the fun is undone by some wonky design decisions.
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Instead of more traditional and comfortable driving controls, Wheels of Destruction adopts something akin to Halo’s Warthog mechanics, only infinitely more sluggish and cumbersome. The left stick controls the camera’s direction and pretty much everything along with it – whichever way you point the camera, your car will slowly turn and head in that direction, aiming your weapons along with it. An incredibly slow rate of turn and the needlessly botched controls means that navigation, especially in tight corridors, is a nightmarish chore. Even though the mechanics of steering are something you sort-of get used to after several matches of being a sitting duck for other players, it’s still something that never manages to feel comfortable.

One of the more redeeming aspects of the game is the level design. With lovely-looking multi-tiered maps full of laser launchpads that fire you into the air, full-pipes that you can twist around and onto the ceiling of, and curling ramps to hidden upper decks and arena rooms. Jump off a bounce pad or ramp and you can perform acrobatic boosts in mid-air to snag items or reach new areas. The controls scupper much of the fun, though, since getting to many sections of the maps requires tight precision to navigate curving, narrow tracks. Unfortunately, you spend far too much time sailing into the abyss at the cost of a life or bouncing off walls as you struggle to navigate through close quarters, and the controls are an unnecessary chore far too much of the time.
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There’s potential in Wheels of Destruction, but Gelid Games never really lives up to much of it. It’s a playable game that offers a diverting enough session of multiplayer vehicular combat. But while the level design is interestingly put together, it’s a disappointingly scant package hampered by some needlessly awkward controls that actively detract from the fun far too much of the time.

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Wheels of Destruction is available to buy now exclusively on PlayStation Network.