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29 August, 2016

Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call Review

Artifex Mundi's brilliant hidden object puzzle game has made the leap from mobiles to the Xbox One.

Developer Artifex Mundi is the master of polish. We’ve seen this level of professionalism in its earlier titles Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden and even the original Nightmares of the Deep: The Cursed Heart. Both are just about as close as it gets to hidden object puzzle perfection, a testament to the dedication that Aritfex Mundi employs in each of its endeavours.

The Siren’s Call is no different. It’s atmospheric and tense with enough minigames to spread your brain paper-thin. And when you throw a captivating story with beautifully realised characters on top, you can just about see your own reflection in its lustre – it’s that good.

21 November, 2015

The Top 5 Indies on Xbox One You Might Have Missed

The Xbox One has turned two and we take a look at a handful of gems from the indie scene that went under the radar.

On November 22, 2015, the Xbox One had its second birthday. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out the crazy stats we assembled in our happy birthday message. One of those includes the fact that 170 games by indie publishers have been released on the format as of that date, which is a lot of choice when you’re browsing the Microsoft store. So we thought we would whittle it down to the 10 gems you simply should not miss.

1. Hand of Fate
This amazing mix of action-RPG, collectable card game and roguelike sees you playing a deck of cards as you move turn-by-turn through randomly generated dungeons, foiled at every turn by the dealer’s random challenges. But where things really differ from your standard indie is during an encounter, as you’re thrown into a third-person, fully 3D brawler and asked to defeat your foes in a landscape determined by the deal.

2. Chariot
If you’re looking for laughs, this same-couch arcade puzzler is a riot. You play a princess trying to take your father’s remains – held in a chariot – to his resting place underground. The 2D levels are full of obstacles to overcome and you must pull the titular vehicle without making too much noise – or you will disturb looters - by tethering yourself to one of the wheels. When a second player joins in and tethers to the second wheel, working as a team is essential, and typically results in many frustrated laughs.

3. Leo’s Fortune
A visually spectacular, momentum-based platformer where you look to get a round hairball called Leo through some intricately detailed levels. It’s a tad short as the game originated on mobile – you can find a making of interview in Episode 5 of Grab It for iPad - but it remains very charming. There is a lot of challenge and variety here making it well worth your time.

4. Super Time Force
This sidescrolling shooter uses a fascinating gameplay mechanic very much to its advantage, allowing you to rewind play after death and then start again as a second version of your player character fighting alongside the ghost of the first. However, that ghost will replay his final steps, interacting with the new version’s world as he goes. You can do this multiple times, and the level design and enemy placement work together to demand you think well ahead and get multiple versions of yourself fighting towards a common goal.

5. Submerged
With no combat, Submerged is remarkably different from the other games on this list. You are one of only two people in this tropical, yet desolate land, and the other being is your dying brother. It’s a game focused on exploration and survival, and one that sticks with you thanks to its atmospheric and unique take on gameplay.

If you are wondering who we are, we're primarily a digital magazine for the iPad focused on the coverage of indie video games. Run by the former editor of Game Informer, you'll find worldwide exclusives, but also an interactive media experience unlike any you have seen before. If you have an iPad, you should check out the free sample issue at the very least, or enjoy one of our other episodes as listed below.

Get Every Episode:
   - Episode 1 - Includes The Making of République (*free sample issue*)
   - Episode 2 - Includes The Making of Oceanhorn
   - Episode 3 - Includes The Making of Monument Valley
   - Episode 4 - Includes The Making of Last Inua
   - Episode 5 - Includes The Making of World of Tanks Blitz
   - Grab It Episodes 2-5 Bundle
   - Episode 6 - Includes The Making of Magic the Gathering
   - Episode 7 - Includes The Making of Tiny Troopers Alliance and Midnight Star
   - Episode 8 - The PAX AUS edition
   - Grab It Presents Nihilumbra - Classics Collection
   - Grab It Presents Ultimate Indie Game Reviews Vol 1.

21 November, 2015

The Xbox One Turns 2 Today – Celebrate With These Amazing Stats

It feels like just yesterday we were holding a new born Xbox One in our arms for the first time, right?

Depending on where you are in the world, the Xbox One has either just turned two, or will over the course of the next 24-hours. On November 22, 2013, Microsoft’s third machine and its entry into the eighth generation of home consoles, arrived. It would be the last of the big three, arriving exactly one week after closest rival, the PlayStation 4, and one year and four days after the Nintendo Wii U, a console that had struggled to catch fire like its predecessor.

The Xbox One wasn’t the prettiest of the bunch; bigger, louder and with an archaic power brick. It had a rocky gestation, too, with the “always-on” strategy bringing with it a healthy dose of negative press, and the promise of a far more advanced Kinect 2.0 never truly utilised in exciting ways by developers. But it had an excellent controller, 22 solid launch games and a great online ecosystem, which was enough to keep fans smiling ear-to-ear through Christmas.

25 September, 2015

Rise of the Tomb Raider Install Size isn’t that Bad

The sequel to the second coming of Lara Croft isn’t about to send your hard drive to the tombs.

An update to the database of Xbox game install sizes has revealed a number of new titles, including the highly anticipated Rise of the Tomb Raider. The game will come in at just 20.47GB when installed, which is quite light in comparison to other blockbusters. The update also includes Halo 5: Guardians, which is more than double that at 46GB, so you can see why we’re impressed.

We’re very much looking forward to the new Tomb Raider instalment. The reboot was an absolute gem, second only to the Uncharted series in that kind of cinematic action adventure subgenre. So good that Microsoft paid big dollars to turn it into a console exclusives – timed as it may turn out to be. Speaking of which, the original weighed in at 14GB, which hopefully means this sequel is significantly bigger.

If you are wondering who we are, we're primarily a digital magazine for the iPad focused on the coverage of indie video games. Run by the former editor of Game Informer, you'll find worldwide exclusives, but also an interactive media experience unlike any you have seen before. If you have an iPad, you should check out the free sample issue at the very least, or enjoy one of our other episodes as listed below.

Get Every Episode:
- Episode 1 - Includes The Making of République (*free sample issue*)
- Episode 2 - Includes The Making of Oceanhorn
- Episode 3 - Includes The Making of Monument Valley
- Episode 4 - Includes The Making of Last Inua
- Episode 5 - Includes The Making of World of Tanks Blitz
- Grab It Episodes 2-5 Bundle
- Episode 6 - Includes The Making of Magic the Gathering
- Episode 7 - Includes The Making of Tiny Troopers Alliance and Midnight Star
- Episode 8 - The PAX AUS edition
- Grab It Presents Nihilumbra - Classics Collection
- Grab It Presents Ultimate Indie Game Reviews Vol 1.

24 September, 2015

54% of PS4 and XBO Games Are Indies - Will Publishers Ever Fight Back?

There are more games than you might expect out this generation, and it’s no small thanks to the indie revolution. Will Publishers Ever Fight Back?

We’re all about the indie games here at Grab It, which until recently was blossoming just on mobiles and PCs. However, it would now appear that the current-generation of consoles has come to the party, too. At the pre-launch E3 conferences of both Microsoft and Sony, the companies talked up their claims of having the best console option for fans of indie games. Shortly after launch, however, I remember thinking that it had all been talk, and by E3 2015, the indies were barely mentioned at all.

However, a recent report shows that 550 games have been released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (combined) since they launched in November 2013, and of those, 297 have come out of the indie scene. That’s 54% of the games available to consumers right now or, to put it more bluntly, the majority.

It’s quality gaming, too. For last year’s PAX AUS event, Grab It published the official indie show guide as an iPad app. In it we featured the games and interviewed the creators of the 68 indie titles that were to be on display at the show. It’s an epic read, and you can still check it out now. At the time, I was concerned that there would be a handful of gems, a bunch of mediocre titles and a lot of dross that was going to be painful to cover. I was wrong.

All 68 titles were genuinely interesting, and made by people with fascinating personal stories to tell about their development. It was clear to me then that indie gaming was set to conquer the industry. So here we are; proof that more indie games are being released than those through the major publishers. It’s a beautiful thing.

However, will the publishers ever fight back and retake their position as being the number one outlet for console gaming experiences? Potentially, but not through the older model of delivering giant, expensive blockbusters at large intervals, or through churning out sequels. They’re going to have to diversify their offerings and provide experiences that appeal to those with indie sensibilities. But how?

A few years ago EA went on a rampage, buying up indies like Firemint and Iron Monkeys, and the industry giant has now started to show the results of those acquisitions with indie-like titles such as Unravel. Ubisoft has taken the indie concept internal, building the UbiArt engine and then using it to provide gamers with sweet indie-likes such as Child of Light and Valiant Hearts. Elsewhere licensed affairs such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Adventure Time have gone indie-like by reverting to old-school genres and visuals.

For gamers it’s all good news. With 550 play options already available on the two stores, and incredible diversity coming from the indies making up the majority of that number, it’s something of a Golden Age. If the publishers start to sprinkle their release schedules with indie-likes as well then the good times will continue.

22 September, 2015

Xbox One Getting Flogged By PlayStation 4 in Install Sizes

Some of the differences between install sizes of games on current-generation consoles are mind-boggling.

Installing games on consoles is just horrible. Gone are the days when playing a newly purchased game for the first time could occur moments after arriving home with it. Now gigabytes of data needs to be transferred to your hard drive (possibly after burning desperate minutes deleting or moving something first), and then likely a patch needs to be downloaded and installed, too. Isn’t avoiding this laborious process why gamers stopped playing on PCs and move to consoles in the first place?

But installs and huge downloads are now a part of the modern gamer lifestyle, and it turns out that Xbox One users need to do a fair bit more of that than their PlayStation 4 counterparts.

Finder.com has published some data comparing the top 20 disparities in install sizes between games on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. So these are games that are multiformat and appear on both machines, yet require different amounts of hard drive space to do so. And the differences are quite staggering. Warframe takes top spot, with a 19.63GB variance between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But it’s not alone, with The Elder Scrolls Online at 18.58GB and Alien Isolation at 16.35GB.

These are real differences, which users would experience right now if they were to download both games from their respective stores. Click here for the full list.

What’s more concerning - at least from an Xbox One fan’s perspective – is that only two of the top twenty games are bigger on PlayStation 4. Batman: Arkham Knight (6.07GB) at 15th, and Destiny (5.57GB) at 18th. So what gives? Why is the Xbox One so much more challenging to compress for; or is Microsoft just more lax on what it enforces of its developers?

Considering that these titles are more-or-less identical, some of these disparities just don’t add up.

10 September, 2015

Destiny: The Taken King Install Size Revealed and it's Huge

You know a universe is big when your expansions requires more hard drive space than most full games.

One of the interesting pieces of information to emerge today after the publishing of The Full List of PS4 Game Install Sizes (some 460 games) was an install size for upcoming expansion Destiny: The Taken King. Despite being able to leverage all the exciting code and assets already installed on your system, it will still be a 17.4GB install, a hefty sum.

A full list of Xbox One game install sizes exists too, but does not feature Destiny: The Taken King. Surely it will be very similar, however.

 

09 September, 2015

FIFA 16 Install Size Revealed - Almost 10GB More than FIFA 15

The World Game is serviced extremely well in video gaming thanks to two competing titles, FIFA and PES. And we have the install size for the former.

A number of install sizes for upcoming Xbox One games have just been unearthed, and it includes FIFA 16, a title we're particularly interested in here at Grab It. On Xbox One at least, the game will cost you 21.84GB of space, which is sure to grow after launch as it updates every other week. No size has been announced for PlayStation 4 as yet, but it is believed to be around the same.

This should be an easy one to make some space for as you can just delete FIFA 15 to upgrade, but interestingly this follow-up is almost 10GB more than its predecessor. FIFA 15 launched at 12.67GB - so what gives? Is EA getting lazy with its compression? Have the assets nearly doubled in quality. Or has including 12 different women's teams added significantly more new data.

09 September, 2015

137 and Counting - The Backwards Compatibility List Getting it Right

Predicting which Xbox 360 games are getting backwards compatibility on Xbox One is becoming quite the sport.

We've been following the coming Xbox 360 compatibility feature - due on the Xbox One this November - closely, and it would appear that one site has its finger on the pulse. For a number of weeks, Finder.com.au has been updating a growing list of compatible Xbox 360 games, which currently sits at 137. With the officially announced titles barely over 30, the other one hundred have come from a range of other sources, but these sources appear to be correct. The site already featured Borderlands on its list ahead of the reveal last week, and the Ubisoft titles just teased were on their weeks ago.

Perhaps this list is the best indication of what to expect out there. We'll continue to update you as news rolls in.

Also Read: Splitscreen Gaming is a Culture Not a Mode – How Halo 5: Guardians is Getting It Wrong

Also Read: Gears of War 4 Will Have Splitscreen Gaming

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