Super Mario and Zelda may have gotten more attention, but for those who grew up on Nintendo's original NES console, ExciteBike was equally iconic. Racing a motocross over jumps was awesome — but the ability to create your own tracks, even without being saveable on such a primitive system, was straight-up amazeballs. JoeDanger maintains that sense of exhilaration and wonder by crossing ExciteBike with the physics-based, community-driven, side-scrolling platformer LittleBigPlanet to create an addictive and engaging hybrid. Though not a racer per se, speed is as important as reflexes, tricks and exploration. There are several ways for the titular stuntman to complete every level, multiple challenges to beat to open up new ones and bonus points for style. But where JoeDanger really lands its jump is its ability to create and share your own cartoonish tracks, daring gamers to trump the creators' own vivid imaginations — you can even edit levels on the fly — and make the game play essentially limitless. This impeccably produced PSN download was coded by four-man British micro-studio Hello Games, making Joe Danger another gold star for the indie scene. (Hello Games)
There's been so much talk lately about "feature creep" — the addition of unnecessary features because gamers demand them, not because the games do — that it's thrilling to play a purist "bullet-hell" title like Star Successor, the follow-up the Nintendo N64 game Sin &
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Nneka / Tanika Chawlz
On what felt like one of the stickiest nights of this blessedly heated summer, legions of Toronto's soul-seeking faithful sauntered down to the El Mocambo on a steamy Tuesday to welcome Nigerian-born singer-songwriter Nneka on her debut jaunt through town.
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The electric vigour that fires out of the opening track of Year Zero's debut LP is sure to catch you off guard. Fierce yet grounded, relentless but positive and so effortlessly unwavering to the very end of the 16 tracks, Year One is both excitingly familiar and so fresh in their skill and...
Full Review
(Edgar Wright)
His hilarious first two features were genre parodies: Shawn of the Dead (zombies) and Hot Fuzz (buddy cops), but in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, director Edgar Wright is inventing a whole new film genre: the videogame/comic/action mash-up, with great success. ...Full Review
There's been so much talk lately about "feature creep" — the addition of unnecessary features because gamers demand them, not because the games do — that it's thrilling to play a purist "bullet-hell" title like Star Successor, the follow-up the Nintendo N64 game Sin &
...
On what felt like one of the stickiest nights of this blessedly heated summer, legions of Toronto's soul-seeking faithful sauntered down to the El Mocambo on a steamy Tuesday to welcome Nigerian-born singer-songwriter Nneka on her debut jaunt through town.
The electric vigour that fires out of the opening track of Year Zero's debut LP is sure to catch you off guard. Fierce yet grounded, relentless but positive and so effortlessly unwavering to the very end of the 16 tracks, Year One is both excitingly familiar and so fresh in their skill and...
His hilarious first two features were genre parodies: Shawn of the Dead (zombies) and Hot Fuzz (buddy cops), but in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, director Edgar Wright is inventing a whole new film genre: the videogame/comic/action mash-up, with great success.
