The online portfolio of Mark Brown

Infinity Blade iPhone review for Eurogamer

007 373 5963. That’s the code, passed around schoolyards like Chinese whispers, to catapult you to Punch-Out!!’s final bout. You’ll whizz past Piston Honda, skip Don Flamenco and bypass the rest of the NES game’s vaguely racist stereotypes to find yourself staring up at the pre-tattooed mug of Mike Tyson.

Rage iPhone review for Eurogamer

Coming from John Carmack, it almost feels like Doom: Championship Edition – a tired old game that’s been sped up and retrofitted with a tasty layer of meta-game, while instead of Pac-Man’s dizzying rave theme, Rage goes for cheering crowds and bellowing commentary. It could have been a proud salute to the genre Carmack christened.

In pictures: The evolution of Lara Croft for Wired

Lara might have worn skimpy hot pants and bulged out of her aqua tank top, but she quickly became a cultural icon for girls in gaming. Not since Samus Aran popped out of her spacesuit and stripped down to her knickers in Metroid had this nascent medium seen such a powerful, feminine protagonist. 

Espgaluda II iPhone review for Eurogamer

Espgaluda II comes in bullet-hell flavour, an ancestual spin-off of the coin-op shooter that isn’t so much about firing those bullets as it is about expertly dodging screens full of them. You’re weaving in and out of waves of them, sprawling tendrils of them, and concentrated walls of them. It’s like BBC 1’s Hole in the Wall, in fast forward, and on acid.

Red Dead Redemption Xbox 360 review for Wired

Not particularly interested in being contained to the chaotic badlands of Cowboys vs Indians, Redemption paints a country wrapped in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, and a population already cynical about changes to their way of life. The writing is, as to be expected from Rockstar, already in the highest pantheon of game dialogue and the characters are perhaps even more fleshed out and interesting than GTA’s band of hoodlums and drug lords.

Top 10 multiplayer iPad games for Pocket Gamer

Thanks to the magic of push notifications, servers, the internet and tubes laid under the sea, you can make your move without your partner being on their iPad, awake or even alive. When they finally awake from their mortal slumber, your next move will be flashing on their iPad’s screen. You can even play between different Apple gadgets like some kind of salacious cross-device smut between a first generation iPod touch and a 3G iPad. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Xbox Indies: The champions of the hidden marketplace for Wired

Compared to Xbox Live Arcade, a dazzling supermarket crammed with consumer-friendly treats and familiar brands, the Xbox Indie Games store often feels more like a back alley marketplace or a dingy pawn shop in Camden. Filled with intriguing curios and mystifying knick-knacks, from massage simulators to retro-styled platformers, this almost hidden corner of your Xbox 360 is home to over 800 games made by the Xbox community.

Wet Xbox 360 review for Resolution Magazine

Rubi, an acrobatic, samurai sword-wielding fixer, voiced by Eliza Dushku of Dollhouse and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, is caught up in a web of betrayal and double-crosses. She’s looking for gruesome, limbless, blood-geysering vengeance and will flip off a wall and slide under a table while she does it. She’s the dazzling femme fatale on a roaring rampage of revenge. She’s pretty much Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

Hacked off: How PC game modders are evolving for Wired

Radiator opens on a gay couple having an awkward date under the stars. It’s certainly not the most conventional opener to a computer game, to say the least. Then again, nothing in Radiator is particularly orthodox; gameplay involves gazing at consolations rather than blasting bad guys, and the first chapter ends on an inconclusive and ambiguous note, instead of your date being whisked away by crooked cops or slimy aliens.

No funny business (the hunt for hilarious games) for Resolution Magazine

Modern genres also offer far more freedom and dynamism, which makes telling a traditional story tricky, let alone one with recurring jokes and carefully paced moments of comedy. Games like Grand Theft Auto have to make do with less conventional types of humour: witty radio stations, superfluous comedy clubs and Rockstar’s endless stream of parody and caricature. Rhianna Pratchett, writer of the humorous Overlord games, explains that “you don’t get as much control writing a funny game as you would writing a sitcom, because you don’t have control of all the elements. Things like timing and context can be difficult to keep control of in a game world.”

Shank Xbox Live Arcade preview (London based event) for Resolution Magazine

But instead of stubbornly sticking to the ideas and concepts of the antique fighters Klei Entertainment so evidently admires, Shank is perfectly aware of the mutations its genre has faced. Like Devil May Cry, Shank comes packed with a combo system and nifty tricks to juggle your enemies mid-air with a shower of bullets. And despite his top-heavy physique, Shank moves with the style and grace of Bayonetta, rather than the awkward, stodgy trot of a Double Dragon hero.

Alan Wake Xbox 360 preview (London based event) for Wired

The game, which I got to play an unfinished version of this week, mixes its scares effectively, bouncing from spooky forest whispers to hectic pitch battles at a moment’s notice. One moment you’re frantically replacing bullets, and torch batteries, to hold off hordes of nightmarish creatures, before descending onto a curiously quiet junkyard the next.

The Top 7 weirdest music games ever for GamesRadar

However, slapping a celebrity musician’s face on the box of your shiny new game isn’t actually that novel; in fact, since Journey Escape on the Atari 2600, every notable band from Aerosmith and Queen to Kris Kross and INXS has graced the world of videogames in a vain attempt to shift copies. Heck, there was even another Beatles game, long before Harmonix entered the scene.

The Littlest, Biggest Gift of All for The Escapist

If there’s one infallible calendar to track your gruelling trek into adulthood, forget facial hair and cracking voices - apathy towards Christmas wins every time. Once a magical day filled with surprise and elation, presents and cards, sausages wrapped in bacon and sausage rolls glazed with egg, this once joyous (and apparently over-porked) holiday has slowly crept into mundanity with each passing year. My brother and I no longer bounce down the hallway at 6 a.m, tug at our parents’ bed sheets and race downstairs to marvel at the array of gift-wrapped boxes and curiously shaped lumps. Heck, my brother doesn’t even live here anymore; he usually swings by around noon with a handful of crudely wrapped but thoughtfully purchased gifts.