A team based shooter similar to the Team Fortress premise made popular by Valve, Brink offers players the opportunity to fill the shoes of either the Ark Security or the Revolutionary Forces based on the floating citadel. Touting freeform parkour style movement, multiple player classes, and highly customisable characters, Brink promises a lot at the first look. In a genre where players expect innovation, quality and balance, have Bethesda managed to deliver …. the Pixel Junkies endevour to find out.

*Snore. Snore. Snore….* Grumble… Huh? Did someone wake me? Sorry about that readers, I was away with the faeries, dreaming as it were of some idyllic world populated by cute fluffy bunnies and huge, friendly birds with gigantic eyes. I dreampt that they roamed free in the knowledge that if I approached them, I could only ‘press A to interact’ and that there was simply no way I was going to blow them into a thousand chunks. They roamed freely across emerald fields, flew in clear blue SEGA inspired skies and swam in seas of deep marillion (with no gigantic, city sized, ancient predators in mind.)

This is not the world of Bulletstorm.

Donkey Kong Country Returns (or DKCR as it will be known) comes as a revival of the golden days of platforming when the Super Nintendo was King and the Mega Drive was a pretender to the throne of gaming. But is the world happy to see DK and Co again or are they simply the same banana munching Primates we saw 15 Years Ago?

Back in about 1990….

Having had a great early experience through the Master System and engaged in a 5 year war of words with SNES Owners over which was the better 16 Bit Console, it came as great news to me that both Nintendo and Sega were planning CD based systems as expansions to their crowning glories. While Nintendo’s effort fizzled away into vapourware only to reappear as one of the most successful home consoles ever (the Sony Playstation) Sega’s attempt had a short lived existence mired by poor marketing, minimal developer support and controversy.

With all the fuss around the upcoming Sony’s Xperia Play and with graphics giant Nvidia now on board with its Tegra Mobile GPU, the Android gaming scene is really starting to gather pace and is starting to catch the eye of those of us down at Pixel Towers who initially dismissed it as a poor mans iPhone.

After a recent resurgence of classic, single dimension, one on one fighters it is nice to know that Netherrealm Studios have taken note and have been busy beavering away on a reboot of the Mortal Kombat franchise. The build we had the opportunity of sampling had 4 of the available fighters for use along with a selection of environments in which combat (Kombat, surely – Ed) takes place.

Initially sceptical over the technology utilised in Microsoft’s latest gadget, i personally held off to see which would be the better implementation between both Sony’s Move and the Kinect. After deliberating over the possible implementation i felt that the Wii fulfilled my desire for a controller tracking motion solution and that even after a less than impressive stint with an EyeToy i would still go for the Kinect. 

Sitting down to play Dead Space 2 i got the same feeling that i got when sitting down to watch the second Matix Movie (Revolutions). As a real fan of Dead Space i couldn’t see how the developer could improve upon the original. A great story with some fine twists, great control and genuine brown trouser moments that were welcome in a new IP hitting the next generation consoles. Having checked the same build as Super Stu, i had become slightly worried that some things had changed too much and gone were the things that made Dead Space a must have.