Review - inFamous: Second Son (PS4)

Expectations were high for Sucker Punch's newest installment in the inFamous franchise when it launched earlier this year. Indeed, many people (myself included) were claiming it to be the first game on the PS4 that would give consumers a 'true' reason to buy the system. However, after the recent announcement that PS4 has maintained its position as the best selling console for nine consecutive months and that over ten million units have been sold to consumers, it has become clear that Sony's newest console has needed little help from first party software.

Preview - Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS (3DS)

For reasons unknown to me, I have not felt any excitement building for the imminent release of Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. The year before the launch of Brawl on Wii was filled with regular sessions of scouring the latest issues of Official Nintendo Magazine for new information leading up to the release. A month after the June street date was when I first played the game and, somehow, it managed to live up to my stratospherically high expectations! Said expectations were exhaustive to maintain, which is perhaps I have rarely felt such prolonged anticipation since...

Given my history with the franchise, I was pleased to hear that a demo of the new 3DS game would hit the eShop on the 19th of September. I hoped that this would instill another batch of 'Smash Bros. excitement' into me, and it's safe to say that it succeeded! I have never been too bothered about demos (aside from early in the life of the 3DS when there was little to play), so it was a surprise when the Smash Bros. demo fulfilled it's marketing task, and prompted my interest to sky-rocket. It was certainly the most enjoyable and pure of all the demos I have played, and hopefully one that offered an experience similar to the final game.

Feature - The State of Battlefield

As DICE has attempted to fix the various problems that have plagued Battlefield 4 since release, there have often been new issues introduced with every patch. Arguably, up until the launch of the community test environment (CTE) in June, it seemed as though the state of the game would remain at an unacceptable level. For me, a person whose first experience of the franchise was with Battlefield 3 on PS3 (a game that saw me sink in more than three hundred and fifty hours), the quality has not been at a level that I can accept. Battlefield 3 was known to have some netcode and gameplay issues of its own, but nothing on the scale of the most recent release in the series.