It wouldn't be hard to write Blades of Time off as a botch of a video game. Its fantasy plot is entirely forgettable, its rousing and heroic score is mixed so weirdly that it often sounds like it's filtering in from an upstairs bedroom, and its voice acting is the kind of thing people lose Equity cards over. Its character models are dead-eyed and endlessly recycled, some of its central mechanics are implemented with staggering awkwardness, and several of the game's environments feature particle effects of such bizarre over-ambition that they reduce the frame-rate to single figures just when things are starting to get exciting.
There's a lot that's wrong with Blades of Time, then, but if you fight through the drab early levels, there are also a few things that are kind of right about it too. This isn't a game that you'd necessarily want to go out and buy. OK, it's probably not even a game that you'd actually choose to rent. But if you were, oh, I don't know, left it in the will of an eccentric uncle, say, it would probably be worth taking for a spin before you traded it in.
With that ringing endorsement still echoing in your ears, let's get down to basics. Blades of Time is the 'spiritual successor to X-Blades' - a turn of phrase that means the developers have ditched the cel-shaded art, changed a lot of the story elements, but left you controlling a mirror-world version of Ayumi, the pants-and-bra hack-and-slash heroine whose character design barrels straight past the point where she might be sort of sexy and heads deep into that strange emotional territory where all you want to do is get her a cardigan. She must be freezing.
Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-16-blades-of-time-review
Newsbrief: Zynga's vice president of engineering Neil Roseman, who founded and built up the company's Seattle office, has left Zynga to spend more time with his family. Roseman played an integral part in the launch of the Zynga Platform earlier this month. He left the company just days after the launch of the platform, according to All Things Digital. Jim Veevaert, previously president at Jerry Bruckheimer Games and executive producer for Microsoft, has now taken ...
There are a ridiculous number of iPhone games available in the App Store and that number is growing faster than ever. What’s even more interesting is seeing what different and interesting things developers are doing with their games. The creativity of the developers keeps me coming back to explore new titles in the games category [...]
Last week, InterWave and Event Games's endless-running title 
Will You Switch Carriers if the Next iPhone is LTE? Although there’s no confirmation yet, everyone assumes that the next iPhone ? whatever it’s named ? is going to have LTE onboard. Where I live, Verizon dominates AT&T in that category, so making the switch for me is something of a no brainer. But what [...]
One of the key figures behind Dreamcast cult classics Shenmue and Space Channel 5, Tak Hirai, is preparing to confound the traditional gaming scene once more with his team's next Vita title: Orgarhythm. As with Square Enix's similarly hard to type 
There’s a big market for photography apps on the App Store, proven by fantastic apps like Instagram which allow on device editing and styling of your photos. However, while capturing detail in a scene isn’t an issue, photos are fairly shallow when there’s much more that can be recorded of a scene. Picle takes photography [...]
Angry Birds developer Rovio today announced the acquisition of Futuremark Games Studio, the gaming division of benchmarking software company Futuremark, which has previously released games such as Unstoppable Gorg and Shattered Horizon. Rovio said that the move will help support the company's "larger expansion plan," on the heels of its success with Angry Birds Space, which saw over 10 million downloads in the space of three days after launch. Futuremark's CEO Jukka Makinen said that ...
Post-apocalyptic adventure movie The Hunger Games is getting its 
Classic egg-shaped action hero Dizzy (complete with trademark red boxing gloves) has recently splatted onto Apple's App Store in a HD remake of 1991 Amstrad game 
If you enjoy playing Shadowgun THD on your Tegra 3-powered Android tablet, you might have been a little put out when the non-Tegra version of 
