Team17 are no doubt destined to forever be known as ‘the Worms guys’, and Alien Breed Evolution (Episode 1), a return to their series of games from the 90’s, isn’t about to change that.  A basic top-down shooter, the only variety comes from simple ‘ find key A to open door A’ fetch tasks, though in truth they feel more like chores as everything is marked on the map for you when you need it, removing any real challenge.  The twin-analog stick gunplay is fun enough, but Alien Breed Evolution commits the ultimate sin of being utterly average – everything works as it should, but the whole package is completely underwhelming and forgettable.

The publisher provided us with a download code for Alien Breed Evolution – Episode 1

Rather than make a doomed-to-fail effort to compete with the big boys of online games journalism and mimic their often anodyne, cut-and-paste approach to games writing, No Added Sugar has an alternative vision for videogame criticism: instead of trying to comprehensively cover news, previews and reviews of all upcoming titles, we only write on the videogames that interest us. Just as well, then, that between us, our tastes cover a broad range, from the most casual titles to the most hardcore, and quite a lot in between- from the newest indie game to mainstream mega-publisher blockbusters.

We’re less concerned about meeting arbitrary deadlines for articles and more interested in ensuring that we’ve put enough time into the game in order to write intelligently on it. We try to keep No Added Sugar a cliché and hype-free zone. That’s not to say we don’t get excited- the No Added Sugar team are all dedicated gamers, doing this not for personal gain but for the love of the game, and a belief that games and gamers deserve quality discussion of videogames.

We believe in transparency, too: whilst members of the No Added Sugar team often accept review copies from publishers and developers, we never enter into commitments to offer coverage to particular titles. We also believe our readers have the right to know when we’ve received any kind of benefits- games, trips, etc- from companies in the industry. That’s why we always mention this within our articles. More on this here.

We believe that with the emergence of the first generation of adults proud to call themselves gamers, there’s an appetite for intelligent videogames writing that isn’t afraid to explore deeper issues within videogames that go beyond the interminable top ten lists that so many other sites are fond of.

Our name, No Added Sugar, arose from our desire for saccharine-free games coverage. Games journalism is still in its infancy, just as the medium of videogames. If No Added Sugar can play a small part in progressing videogames criticism towards something more reflective, adult, and inclusive, we’ll be satisfied that we’ve done our job.  We hope you stick around and become part of the debate.

From beautiful Co. Meath in Ireland, I’m the founder of the site your browser is currently parked on. I feel there is a serious need for a videogames site that strives not to be a jack of all trades (and ends up being a master of none) but one that focuses on quality writing and quality analysis of both games and the games industry. My academic background is sociology, but I’ve been a student of videogames a lot longer. I’ve no time or interest in the platform wars- I enjoy quality games, regardless of which megacorporation built the box that I play them on.  No Added Sugar is all about getting down to the serious work of playing them, writing about them- and most importantly of all, enjoying them.

I’m James. I recently graduated with an English degree and failed
miserably to hold down a full time job. Blame the recession, blame my
choice of subject, just don’t blame me. I had always wanted to go into
journalism, so I asked myself ‘what’s hot? What’s new? What’s
exciting?’ The answer was, of course, the internet. And I was told it
was the best place to get a start in the profession. I had written,
and section-edited, for the University of Birmingham’s student
newspaper, Redbrick, while I studied there, and now I hope to use that
experience to turn to a subject that I think deserves a lot more
respect, videogames. I completely echo Mark’s philosophy for the site,
and hope to contribute the kind of entertaining, thoughtful writing
that we both feel is missing from other parts of the gaming press. I
currently live in London, and as well as writing for No Added Sugar, I
work two half-jobs.

I’m Chris Evans (no, not that one) from sunny Birmingham. I’ve been writing about games for a few years now, but it didn’t take long for me to become somewhat disillusioned with the way the way most websites approach things.  After being involved with a staff discussion (on a website which shall remain nameless) that begun with “what can we write a top ten list of this week?”, I felt it was time to move on. Which is where No Added Sugar came in. Videogames deserve to be taken seriously, and there’s space for intelligent and thoughtful discussion, but lets not forget that all we’re really looking for is a bit of entertainment.

I’m Tarnya and I currently study Art History at Kingston University in London.  I’ve always been interested in video games- despite gentle persuasion against it. I even remember trading in my (very small, honest!) collection of Barbie dolls for a Sega Game Gear.  I may be a ‘girl gamer’ but that doesn’t mean I just sit around playing Nintendogs- I enjoy smashing a Zombie in the face with an axe as much as the next person. I’ve always taken videogames reviews with a pinch of salt, which is why I’m so glad to be part of a site with a fresh and exciting approach to games journalism.

Bret’s bio is coming soon.  Mark my words, it’ll be worth the wait.

There are a few explanations that come to mind when pondering the inclusion of a framing narrative in the Assassin’s Creed story: it allows subsequent games to jump anywhere in history; it provides another layer of both plot and gameplay on top of the rich historical settings; it acts as a legitimiser for the historical parts of the game; it gives the player control of a novice, equally confused about what is happening to him; and it even perhaps acts as a metaphor for videogames themselves. All well and good, but I’m going to debunk as many as I can. I think Assassin’s Creed 2 is a much riper fruit for this kind of criticism, so that’s where I’ll source most of the examples I’ll be using.

Desmond’s genetic memory is used to allow him access to his ancestors’ lives, to become them and live their lives as they lived. You could argue that without such a device, it would be difficult for the game to leap from era to era as it has; from 12^th century Holy Land to Renaissance Italy. While it is an imaginative way to link subsequent titles to the original, why not have Ezio realise he is Altair’s descendant through the multiple plot reveals regarding the Assassins throughout the narrative? AC2 echoes its predecessor in enough ways, both distinctly and subtly, for the player to understand the connection between them, without needing such a clunky mechanic to do it for them.

The frame creates two distinct stories in each game; history and future. The histories (especially Ezio’s) are thoroughly researched, brilliantly realised slices of the past that present events just about ridiculous enough to be unbelievable. The future gives us a few characters that are one dimensional; sarcastic, sympathetic, sinister, and a protagonist who isn’t much more than an everyman empty vessel; first for the player, then for his ancestors and their knowledge and violent free-running abilities. Desmond’s reaction to what he witnesses in the Animus at AC2’s climax – ‘What the fuck?’ – is a pretty apt response when everything seems to go a bit Deus Ex. The Knights Templar, the Catholic Church, aliens. Hasn’t the ancient global conspiracy being unearthed in modern times plot been done? Keep it in the past, and it might have been more interesting. Including Leonardo Da Vinci as a character is a bold move, and a clever way to bridge the gap between the fictional characters and the other less well-known (based-on) historical characters. I’ll admit that the escape from the warehouse at the end of AC2 was surprisingly exhilarating, but apart from this sequence the whole idea seems so half-hearted, if you’re going to the trouble of creating a modern storyline, attaching some worthwhile gaming to it seems obvious.

In the last decade there have been around 20 big-budget blockbuster movies based on well-known comic book characters, and the vast majority of them have been given the inevitable tie-in game treatment.  Some, like X Men Origins: Wolverine and Spiderman 2 are actually worth a look, if still ultimately too flawed to really stand up to the best that the world video games can offer, while the likes of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Watchmen: The End Is Nigh offer little to entice us beyond an official licence.

Batman, however, has been lucky.  Rocksteady Studios opted to cut out a stage in the usual game-based-on-a-movie-based-on-a-comic routine, instead going straight to the source material.  The result is Batman: Arkham Asylum – in my and many others opinion, easily the best comic book game ever made.

Rocksteady Studios are a relatively new developer, founded in 2004 in London, with the forgettable (but by no means terrible) PS2 and Xbox shooter Urban Chaos: Riot Response their only previous title.  But their youth is somewhat deceiving, as they were in fact founded by former members of Argonaut Games, a company that dates back to 1982, but who were forced to close in 2004 due to cash-flow problems.  Their greatest achievement was their work on Starfox for the SNES, not only as programmers but also as designers of the Super FX chip, the power behind its revolutionary graphics.  Impressive stuff indeed, but a look down their list of titles closer to the their demise is not exactly thrilling reading.  Still, it’s refreshing in a time of studio closures worldwide for a group of developers to go from facing unemployment to a huge international success in such a short space of time.

It’s a sense of individuality that makes Arkham Asylum stand out from the superhero crowd.  Without a pre-written story or pre-determined personalities for the characters, the game is able to be its own interpretation of the Batman canon, and is therefore built around being a video game first and foremost.  The locations, characters and plot all compliment each other in a way that could never have been achieved had any of the three been pre-determined.

Doesn’t anyone else find Apple supremely irritating?

Sure, their products typically exhibit the cutting edge in industrial design, and their user interface design prowess is famously unrivalled.  Yet, call me a curmudgeon, a Free Software communist, or just a sore loser, but given the restrictive choices that Apple products typically offer-our way or the highway- I choose the highway every time.

It’s not just the way that the company exerts paranoid control over its products through its insistence on closed software ecosystems; or the way that they thumb their nose at established computing standards in favour of proprietary alternatives. Hell, it’s not even the infamous ‘Apple Tax’ which sees Apple product users pay exorbitant prices for basic accessories like adapters and cables, as well as the computers themselves.

What really gets my goat is the religious fervour that greets Apple product launches, where Apple’s well-oiled hype machine has the world’s media quite literally eating out of their hand, repeating verbatim whatever hubris and hyperbole-laden superlatives that Steve Jobs and co. have offered on that particular day.

It’s the suffocating aura of smugness that pervades these presentations that I can’t stand- the studied cool, the carefully engineered choreography, and the ever-so-slightly religious undertones that represent to me at least, the ultimate in commodity fetishism.

But here’s a thought: Perhaps Apple were always destined to become a major player in the videogames space. After all, for gamers, proprietary hardware, software, restrictive DRM and closed ecosystems are a fact of life, whether your system of choice is manufactured by Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft.

“Mario Kart without the charm” was the snap judgement of my younger brother as he watched me slip-sliding around ModNation Racer’s circuits, struggling to get used to the powersliding mechanic. It was a comment that made me smile- there’s certainly a ring of truth to it- but after properly getting to grips with the beta version of Sony’s great white hope for a new casual-focused racing I.P for 2010, I realised that it’s a title that deserves considerably more than a pithy put-down to summarise it.

Whilst all karting games will inevitably be compared to the multicoloured elephant in the room in the form of Mario Kart, it is in another game that ModNation has principally sought inspiration- for this game seeks to transplant the create/play/share philosophy that made LittleBigPlanet the PlayStation’s darling of the games media. Indeed, the developers, United Front, openly discuss their close relationship with Sackboy’s parents, Media Molecule.

The graphical style is cutesy, but not overly so- whilst the playable racers are clearly the (more colourful) love-children of Miis and Sackboy, the style of the actual courses designs are a little inconsistent, with some adopting a realistic style, and others a more cartoon aesthetic. The result is something that feels less visually distinctive than it should be, and not a patch- pun very much intended- on LittleBigPlanet’s astonishing look.

Racing titles with fully-fledged track creation tools are rarer than hen’s teeth, so I made a beeline for that particular mode. These kind of modes tend to be ill-suited to traditional game controllers, and ModNation is no exception. With every button on the controller mapped to a different function, it does take a little getting used to- fortunately however, it stops short of being overwhelming. Creating a track is as simple as ‘driving’ a track-making machine (bear with me) around a barren landscape. It certainly beats painstakingly placing each piece of track on a 2D map, as is how these things usually work. There’s a pleasing amount of customization on offer, with the land-morphing tools particularly satisfying to use.

In fact, I daresay it’s more intuitive than the equivalent mode in LittleBigPlanet- an impressive achievement considering that players have to grapple with designing levels in the third dimension.

The paucity of usable items and trackside objects in the beta means its impossible to say if the track creation tool will result in anything equivalent to the extraordinarily imaginative and varied creations that LittleBigPlanet has become famous for.  Let’s hope that the increased accessibility doesn’t come at the expense of reduced flexibility.

It’s a new year, a new decade, and a potentially top-notch 12 months for videogames.

With all three main consoles in rude health going into 2010, the focus this year will very much be on games, rather than hardware. That said, developments like Microsoft’s Project Natal, Sony’s as-yet-unnamed motion controller, and even Nintendo’s Vitality Sensor (no sniggering down the back) promise to extend the lifespan of this console cycle well beyond what has become normal in this industry- a welcome development for cash-strapped punters.

We’re looking forward to a whole lot more than 20 games in 2010- but, our focus groups tell us that articles with lots of lists in them play well with all sorts of demographics, so we’re willing to make a temporary exemption in our usually strict list-free policy to make room for a brief preview of the year ahead in gaming.

In no particular order, and with all the usual caveats of subjectivity, we offer below our personal picks for 2010.

1) Heavy Rain (PS3)

With Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream aim to revolutionise how videogames tell stories. As we noted in our hands-on preview, the talented French developer have pulled out all the stops to create a visually arresting and extraordinarily cinematic title that has the potential to inaugurate a new type of story-centric interactive entertainment. Even if its grand potential isn’t quite realised, this one is surely worth paying close attention to: especially given the pedigree of the developers.

2) Epic Mickey (Wii)

What do you get when you mix the mastermind behind Deus Ex, the Wii and one of the most recognised cartoon characters the world has ever known? Actually, we haven’t a clue- but we’re dying to find out. Epic Mickey wins our vote for a game to watch out for in 2010, not just because of its deliciously unorthodox pairing of developer, character and concept, but because we think it could actually be a great game. If the Wii Remote world-painting mechanic works, and the new, darker vision for the clapped-out Mickey character succeeds, then this could be quite the revelation in 2010. Colour us intrigued. Sorry.

Over the last few years, blogs and websites on the internet have begun to define themselves as ‘critics’ of games, rather than simply reviewers or writers on the subject. It’s a muddy area, and an interesting one, because this self-imposed dichotomy is just as inconsistent as in other media. A film critic writes reviews of films. Book reviews in broadsheet newspapers are often written by academics, critics in their field. There is an interesting perception that games (and, I’d suggest, games writers) have an inferiority complex about this. The currently accepted idea seems to be that reviewing is reactionary; a summary of a game’s strengths and faults, published quickly after its release. And criticism is seen as more considered; a personal or cultural assessment of the game’s impact and influences. Reviews are for people who are considering buying the game, criticism is for those that have played it and want something to think about.

The urge to disassociate yourself from what boils down to a buyer’s guide is understandable. But in trying to move away from reviews and towards criticism, these writers have come upon a third place. Criticism of other media works because academic culture has been built up slowly around them. For every blogger about books there’s a Literature professor who is given the time and money to write books on the subject. Games just don’t have that power yet. I think it is something that can’t be forced, and that overreaching isn’t the way to let it evolve naturally.

Bioshock’s story and scenario has inspired much pseudo-intellectual debate.

One early example of this overreaching goes back to Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking’s blog post about the dynamic between Bioshock’s story and its gameplay, which introduced us to the rather preposterous term ludonarrative dissonance. As pompous and unnecessary as this phrase truly is, it’s worth explaining for two reasons. Firstly, the article makes a good point about the contradiction between what you’re told and what you actually do in the game, regardless of its own clever comment on the linearity of the medium, and secondly because of the painful irony of this useless phrase inspiring a lot of discussion.

For a game that tried so hard to court the casual audience so enamoured with the Brain Training phenomenon, Nintendo’s last DS Zelda outing, Phantom Hourglass, managed to irritate players as much as it awed them.

Whilst the excellent Wind Waker-inspired cel-shaded art style won plaudits, its ambitious sailing mechanic won admiration and its new focus on more cerebral puzzles freshened up proceedings markedly, the game’s insistence on you repeating the central dungeon again, again and again- and with a strict time limit no less- managed to put off many a gamer from seeing through an otherwise top-quality adventure to its end.

So this reviewer was understandably concerned when Nintendo announced that their next Hyrulian adventure on the dual-screened handheld would not only follow the tracks (ahem) laid out by  its predecessor, but that it too would feature a central dungeon that would have to be conquered gradually through repeat visits.

It turns out that such concerns were unnecessary, because in Spirit Tracks, Nintendo have crafted a sequel that rights just about all the wrongs of its predecessor. Remarkably, it does so whilst remaining utterly true to the template laid down in the previous game. You see, everything in Spirit Tracks has its direct analogue in Phantom Hourglass. Structurally, it’s nearly identical, with the game sending you out on a map-collecting quest in order to gain access to the lands at each of the four cardinal compass points. Temples reside in each of these lands, and after each one is beaten, you’ll need to travel back to the Tower of Spirits, the game’s answer to the much-hated Temple of the Ocean King.

Similarly, the game’s new mode of transport, the train, is a direct transplant of the previous sailing mechanic, albeit less flexible, given the literally on-rails nature of the tracks. Using the stylus, you plot a course around the game’s world map, which, like the last game, is represented in gloriously pixellated 3D. Then you wait until you reach your destination, taking the time to pick off the occasional enemy with a tap of the stylus and a blast of the cannon.

The core gameplay, too, is impossible to distinguish from its forebear, with the same stylus controls, the same moveset, and the same engine powering the game’s- identical- 3D graphics on a 2D plane.

On paper at least, it sounds disappointingly similar. Fortunately, in the execution, if not the concept, Spirit Tracks manages to become a wholly more satisfying proposition than the last iteration.

From today, mobile phone owners have a new way to browse No Added Sugar- via a brand-new mobile browser interface.

The streamlined design cuts out most of the loading that used to plague mobile visitors to the site. The interface is best used with touchscreen devices like the iPhone/ iPod Touch, as well as phones running the Android operating system.  It enables fast and easy access to all posts on the site, as well as posting comments of your own.

Fortunately, you don’t need a fancy schmancy touchscreen phone to avail of the new interface. Any Java-equipped phone is also capable of taking advantage of the new optimised layout- just by visiting the site using the Opera Mini browser. Just watch out for those pesky data charges, folks: we really don’t want to be responsible for extortionate bills from your mobile phone provider.

Gaining access to No Added Sugar Mobile is simple: just point your browser to noaddedsugar.ie as normal, and your compatible device will automatically load up the mobile edition.

We’ll be adding more device compatibility as we go along- and if yours isn’t supported, let us know and we’ll look into it.

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