Shedding some much needed light on tragically underappreciated bands; the artwork was created by Tiny Little Hammers and the best bit is that you can download the whole thing for free!

Review by David Apple.

We’re in the thick of 2013, new music predictions week and from what I’ve seen, it’s not good. If these predictions come true, we could be looking at a year of tasteless, Kiss FM style RnB and/or early 90s sounding alternative rock. Either way, no please, make it stop! If you thought Will.i.am’s new single with Britney Spears was a horrific perversion of sound, you’ll think it’s an inspiration compared to this swirling talent void.

Little Nikki – Intro Intro

Rascals – Fire Blaze

Wolf Alice – Leaving You

HAIM – Don’t Save Me

The Weeknd featuring Drake – The Zone

Where have all the indie bands gone?

Review by David Apple.

Plymouth is the third single to be released from Jack’s debut, self titled album and you can download it now for free from Soundcloud.

Have a listen to it using the player below.

Here is a sneaky peak into Jack’s studio.

Team Andromeda’s 1995 game Panzer Dragoon was one of the first wave of Sega Saturn games released and was certainly one of the console’s early 3D tech demos. The game was a fine example of something that was impossible on any previous platform and astonished public and critics alike. The game was an on-rails shooter where you had full 360 degree control of the camera and could shoot in every direction. The player was pulled through the level like a rollercoaster all the while having to fend off wave after wave of enemy approaching from every side with your machine gun fire and lock-on lasers. The closest any console game had come to this experience before was Starfox on the SNES so the leap to what was presented in Panzer Dragoon was gigantic.

The game had a cutting edge cinematic FMV opening, whilst many will see it as laughable by today’s standards it was done to a far higher standard than almost anything seen outside cinema when it was created, it really helped convey a certain mood and set the scene for game to follow. Despite the game’s many technical marvels they are all often forgotten, partially because the game is eclipsed by its sequels but mostly because it’s remembered for far better reasons.

The game was developed with a far greater respect and emphasis on artistic direction than computer games often were at the time and quite often are now. Yukio Futasugi’s team of designers spent months working on the game’s visual identity before moving forward with the project, every area was beautifully realised with traditional artistic methods before being transitioned over to 3D for the final game. This approach lead to the main element of the visual design the series is remembered for; many elements from stages to creatures and machines looked to be a mixture of organic and inorganic, some creatures looked more like biological machines and some vehicles and buildings looked almost as if they were made from bone. The game’s artists and designers drew from influences such as Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind”, ancient machinery and David Lynch’s Dune and despite the huge technical limitations of working on untested early hardware brought about a visually stunning game entirely due to their art direction. Not only did this new hardware allow visuals unlike what gamers were used to but also audio unlike that of other games consoles of the time, so after the game’s completion they then started work on its iconic if not experimental soundtrack specifically designing each piece to fit the feel of the stage in a way closer to that of cinema than what was traditionally been done in game development.

Less than one year later the sequel Panzer Dragoon Zwei was released, the sequel improved upon every single aspect of the original, stages now had multiple routes, enemies were more varied, your dragon travelled by foot and by air, the graphics were considerably better, it had a higher and more stable framerate, better camera control, better audio, improved visual feedback on all shooting, a far more sensible difficulty, widescreen support (In 1996), added replayablility via dozens of unlockables, stages were now incredibly varied and filled with assets and were designed to a far greater scale, your dragon evolved and changed dependant on your performance and a desperation move called the Berserk attack was added that really changed how the game played. Panzer Dragoon Zwei is still easily one of the best examples of the genre to date, its stages are varied and exciting, its bosses are amazingly designed imposing encounters. This time far more than the last it really feels as if the developers were able to give the player a grasp of the desolate yet varied world they had created, the visual design, audio design and direction of the game’s cut scenes paint a picture of a world far larger and more complex than the game would ever tell the player about. This minimalist way of approaching the depiction of world is what made it so interesting, it felt as if you were being given only a few key pages of a brilliant story and left to piece it together as best you could.

The overall feel of the soundtrack is also radically different to that of the first game and far more in line with that of the rest of the series that follows as well as being far more consistent in style throughout the game itself. There are some particularly amazing pieces in this game such as music in the the forest stage in the video on the left and quite possibly the most imposing final boss music I’ve ever come across in any game.

Whilst Team Andromeda were making Panzer Dragoon Zwei they were also working on the far more ambitious and risky project of creating an entirely new type of game for the series. The third game in the series in the west is known as Panzer Dragoon Saga unlike its predecessors Saga was not a rail shooter, instead the game was an incredibly unique RPG and quickly became a cult classic. Released in the twilight of the Sega Saturn’s life cycle the number of western copies printed was far lower than the previous two games in the series, due to this European copies of the game have been sold via Ebay for amounts ranging from £90-£250+ as demand fluctuates. Saga is remembered as one of the most well realised JRPGs of that generation, the player takes control of the young hunter called Edge, an orphaned teen taken into a small excavation team almost as a surrogate family. After the team stumble across a beautiful female humanoid drone Azel encapsulated within the ruins his life takes a turn for worse, they suffer a monster attack and when backup arrives they kill Edge’s entire team all so they can secretly steal the enigmatic and unconscious Azel for a then-unknown reason.

Edge is left for dead but is before long rescued by the ever-mysterious dragon, it is almost as if the dragon recruits Edge for their shared mission… A mission that grows into something far larger than a simple revenge story. The very nature of the genre Saga inhabits allows the player to explore the game’s world far more than any other game in the series allowed, the desolate nature of the game’s setting coupled with the audio design brings upon a sense of melancholy that few games would evoke, this is further built upon when the player begins to socialise with other humans that inhabit the world; the mysterious seeker Gash that gives the player insights into how the world ended up in the broken state its currently in, the members of the Caravan travelling in desperate hope of finding a new home whilst keeping their family safe or the hard working yet run down people of the city of Zoah.

Once again the game only gives you so much story, whilst there are dozens of books to find throughout the world, hours of spoken dialogue with many characters, an encyclopaedia entry about each enemy and far more emphasis on teaching the player about the world it leaves several mysteries unsolved, never fully explaining any one thing thus leading to people today still theorising about the game’s world and characters. The series has a far darker tone compared to most games of the time, its post apocalyptic setting and depressing back-stories of the majority of its cast made it a far more mature experience, no character feels safe, the world is not a nice place and no happy endings felt guaranteed. The empathy the player can feel towards even the most minor character may also be helped due the fact that every character was fully voice acted, whilst the vocal language is Japanese albeit with English subtitles the emotions of the characters still come across better than they maybe would have in a purely text based form.

Saga also has one of the best designed RPG battle systems around; the creative use of the same two basic attacks (Shot and lock on lasers) the series has always used,a plethora of Berserk magics and many types of items would already have made it deeper than most RPGs of the time but its brilliance comes with its movement system. Players are able to fly around the enemies to ever-changing points of safety or find weak points adding a tactical layer to battles where the player often has to balance risk and reward. this lead to battles feelng far more cinematic than any other RPG of the time as the player’s dragon and enemies are all fully animated throughout the battle complete with cinematic camera angles used for attacks.

Another layer to the available tactics used in battle was the ability to morph your dragon to suit the battle or your specific play style, specialising in speed, power, magic, defence or a mixture of different stats, the most impressive thing about this was the fluidity of how your dragon morphed before your eyes in real-time, changing colour, growing extra horns and at certain levels of evolution totally changing its body shape, the effect they managed to create is as impressive today as it was when it was new and would likely still be lauded as a technological marvel in a modern game today.

The soundtrack to the game also cannot go without mention; the game’s composer Saori Kobayashi created perfectly fitting music for every element of the game, somehow managing to create a coherent musical style that included grand orchestral themes with traditional percussion, more subdued and peaceful pieces of music used in villages and camps and pieces that mix both vocal and electronic sampling. The far more varied soundtrack takes influence from the previous games but has a very distinctive style that managed to fit moments of tense action and relaxed exploration.

After almost 5 years one last Panzer Dragoon game was to be released… Panzer Dragoon Orta; unlike the rest of the series that had been released on the Sega Saturn Orta was released on Microsoft’s Xbox as Sega had pulled out of the hardware business following the poor sales of the Dreamcast. The game no longer had the original creator Yukio Futasugi at the helm but the game’s new team Smilebit was largely created from the staff of Team Andromeda so some of the pre-existing talent still remained. The game once again took up the reigns as an on-rails shooter, but brought with it some of the additions from Panzer Dragoon Saga’s RPG battle system, the player could now boost for more speed and stall mid flight, usually these abilities were only used to avoid attacks or ram enemies but during boss encounters the player could use these to replicate the movement of the RPG battle system allowing the player to orbit around the boss in search of weak points, the player could also now switch between three different dragon forms at the press of a button mimicking the morphing seen in Panzer Dragoon Saga. These additions built upon the foundations of Panzer Dragoon Zwei’s gameplay and made Orta a very difficult game to fully master, adding a lot of longevity to the more hardcore player but unfortunately making the game rather daunting for newer players.

Orta stepped away from the more arcade-y feel of Zwei, it was much longer than any of the previous shooter entries and the pacing of some levels was far slower than any of the previous games which lead to it feeling like it was designed to be played in bursts rather than in a single or a couple of sittings. Orta’s design is far more in line with modern games where games are often judged primarily on their longevity or content, to add to this the game had a wide variety of unlockables that include the entire of the original Panzer Dragoon game, an impressive encyclopaedia about the game’s world and the creatures that reside within, FMVs and art from past games, a variety of gameplay modifiers including new dragons and a fully playable side story staring a dying orphan child on a journey through the military academy and beyond looking for Orta and her Dragon that blames for his father’s death.

Whilst the original creator was no longer on the team the composer from Panzer Dragoon Saga returned and once again brought with her a unique soundtrack with the distinctive feel of the series. Orta’s music however lacks some of the variation of past entries rarely shining through in the same way the music of Zwei and Saga did, this is likely to allow it to fit in with the quite different tone of the game however despite this the soundtrack is still incredibly impressive.

Possibly the most impressive thing about Panzer Dragoon Orta is that this 10 year old game is still more visually impressive than many games released today. The level of detail on every enemy and every stage element is far beyond what would likely ever be noticed, the lighting is superb and there’s excellent use of many visual effects such as motion blur. Based several years after the events of Saga there has been some changes to the world but Orta does a wonderful job reimagining the designs of the previous games and updating some aspects to best show the mix between organic and inorganic that the series became known for using the far more powerful hardware of the Xbox. It would be great to see this game somehow being ported to Xbox live today in high definition if only to see just how well the game does hold up against the games of today. The game is technically supported by the backwards compatibility of the Xbox360 but unfortunately contains a few visual glitches and is impossible to play through due to a Crash that happens at the end of Episode 3 in the European version, there are some rather awkward work-around to play the later stages but unfortunately this game is still best played on the original Xbox.

It would be wonderful to see the series resurrected once again, the inclusion of a Panzer Dragoon inspired track Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed shows the series has not been totally forgotten by Sega and makes me hopeful of an Xbox live port as part of the Sega Heritage collection. This however would have some major hurdles as porting anything from the awkward hardware of the Saturn is very difficult and worse than that shortly after Panzer Dragoon Saga’s completion the source code of the game was lost meaning the game would either have to be fully reverse engineered or most likely emulated in some way. Other than the off-hand hope of porting the games to modern consoles there’s a game just over the horizon that may very well be a worthy spiritual successor to the series with the same design philosophy…

Panzer Dragoon’s original creator Yukio Futasugi’s and The composer from Panzer Dragoon Saga and Orta Saori Kobayashi have once again teamed up for the new game Crimson Dragon (Originally known as Project Draco). Working away from Sega and therefore unable to use the Panzer Dragoon licence this new game looks like it may be a successor to the series in all but title. Originally scheduled to come out in June 2012 on Xbox-Live arcade, its release date is currently unknown with any information about the game pretty thin on the ground. In September of this year a spin off side scrolling shooter called Crimson Dragon: Side Story was released for windows phones but since then there has been little to no news about the main game. What little was known (and could very well be different now) was that the game would be controlled with the Kinect sensor in a way similar to the beautiful Kinect game Child of Eden and would contain several types of dragons, hundreds of skills and possibly have online co-op play.

From what little we’ve seen the game looks beautiful, keeping up the high degree of visual fidelity that the Panzer Dragoon games were known for in-game and in its beautiful concept art also… soundtrack-wise the game seems somewhat reminiscent of the Panzer Dragoon series from the few clips that have been shown. We can only hope that the game will play as well as its spiritual predecessors and be successful enough to fund a new wave of beautifully crafted games. The trailer below is the last footage of this game that has been released, I certainly hope it’ll be out soon and it hasn’t been lost to the void of ever-delayed games.

All Hail by Chris Lenaghan.

Once again the player takes charge of Master Chief, a stoic stern Spartan, a man experimented on throughout his life to create a super soldier and the last of his kind… This time around the game really tries to tell a story, spending far more time on character development than any past entry, specifically the connection between Master Chief and the AI Cortana. Hearing about the new far more story driven direction the game had me worried as I have not played Halo 3, Halo ODST or Halo Reach let alone partook in any of its supplementary media. My fears were for the most part unnecessary as the core story is focused on the relationship between Chief and Cortana and their journey to defeat the larger than life villain who would not be out of place in a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon for all the subtlety of his evil.

The story starts a few years after the end of Halo 3 where after saving the day and befriending the alien (Covenant) antagonists of series the game ended on a bitter sweet note. The war was over, the galaxy was safe but Chief and Cortana were left alone stranded adrift in space with little to no hope of rescue leaving chief to put himself into Cryosleep in the care of Cortana in hopes that some day they are found. After a couple of years floating aimlessly in space Chief is woken up to find himself thrown into battle once again, his enemies now being a mixture between a fanatical cult of the enemies from previous entries in the series and the forerunners; an ancient race long thought to be dead. The very race that built the Halo superweapons the series is named after.

The setting and reason for your newest adventure takes a back seat to the story of the relationship between Chief and Cortana. In the world of Halo an AI has a 7 year lifespan, after which they begin to degrade and fall into a state of “Rampancy” this means their collective knowledge has become so vast they begin thinking themselves to death, their personality violently changes and they become incredibly unstable in every way. As the game begins Cortana has been active for almost 8 years and the co-dependency between the damaged AI and loner soldier takes centre stage. Straight away from the game’s stunning yet eerie opening FMV that certainly straddles the uncanny valley it begins to paint Chief not merely as the stoic hero; but as a socially isolated flawed man who has known only battle, with Cortana being his one link to humanity and possibly the only thing he truly cares about a sense of desperation surrounds the game as they journey to save the Earth once again and try to return Cortana to her creator Dr Halsey, the woman who also created the Spartans and what could be seen as dysfunctional mother figure to both characters. The story telling for the pair flips from being subtle and understated to being incredibly ham-fisted at times, neither the less it does its job in making the player care about their plight.

Greater knowledge of the surrounding media for the most part didn’t seem especially crucial, I am sure it would have enriched the experience especially during some of the later harder to digest cutscenes but as the early trailers proudly announced, this is the beginning of a new trilogy and a new journey. With a new journey comes a new team in control of the game’s creation and design, the original team Bungee sold the rights to the series to Microsoft and left to pursue new ventures, this left Microsoft to create a new development team to handle their flagship IP. To do this they recruited internally worldwide from every Microsoft game studio as well as hiring several new staff to create 343 Industries to exclusively handle the Halo franchise, their logo is plastered throughout the game with alarming regularity but in their messages inside and outside the game they really seem to be aware of the weight many of the fans put into this series.

The first Halo was very important for the industry, it’s very likely the game that’s mostly responsible for the modern FPS, regenerating health, limited weapon slots, co-op gamplay and vehicle sections were all popularised by the game. The game had some of the most impressive outdoor level design FPS had seen for the time and a totally different feel sense of pacing to any of its competition. Enemies would run and hide, attempt to flank your position and each enemy type was incredibly different and well defined. Unfortunately the sequel came around and with it brought incredibly uninspired level design and a heavy emphasis on a new and incredibly boring enemy type that destroyed any sense of flow to the game; this didn’t stop the game from becoming a gigantic hit however for it was an early bastion of Xbox-Live. Halo 2’s competitive multiplayer scene brought online gameplay to the masses in a way no console game had before.

The gameplay still feels similar but is far more polished than the previous instalments, no more holding forward and walking through enemies with the assault rifle or sporadically tapping fire with the magnum to decimate the enemy lines. You’ll still mostly be popping in and out of cover behind walls trying to flank small groups of enemies at mid distance before running in close to deal with the stragglers before making a mad dash to the nearest wall to hide and wait (what feels like quite a long time) to heal before being peppered with a rain of brightly coloured bullets, so despite the game’s many changes and additions the game will still feel familiar to veterans and those such as me who’ve been away from the series. One of my lasting memories of Halo 1 & 2 were of their low difficulty so this time I chose to play through on the game’s hard mode “Heroic” (Not the masochistic Legendary mode), I played some chapters in 2-4 player online co-op with friends but in my first playthrough most of the game in was played in Solo. The game has a very forgiving checkpoint system however it can still feel very frustrating, the health of some enemies seems just a little bit too high and can slow the pace of game to a crawl and certain rooms are laid out in a way that betrays their open plan nature and feel like they have to be approached with trial and error to find the route the designers wanted you take as to not be killed in seconds.

The returning enemies AI remains brilliant, each enemy type displaying totally different styles of combat with the thankful return of the incredibly fun to fight Elites and removal of the awful Brutes. The forerunner enemies are very different to fight against but unfortunately they lack much variety with only a handful of variants; the small but fast dog-like creatures that climb walls and ceilings, the large teleporting heavily armoured enemies that take far too long to go down and the flying drones that heal, protect and revive these enemies as well as throw your grenades back at you. The lack of variation in enemies does mean that only a few stages into the game you’ve seen all the game has to offer in terms of opposition and by the end of the game other than having the game throw more and more enemies at you in progressively awkward configurations a feeling of lethargy does begin to build up. This isn’t helped by the lack of variety in objectives, 90% of the tasks you are given throughout the game are merely getting to a particular point to plug Cortana into a console to open a door and move onto another point. This said the campaign certainly has some highlights; the game’s take on the iconic Halo 1 Warthog finale I felt was almost good enough to float an entire game.

Whilst the concept of discussing how satisfying the act of using various guns in game is certainly an uncomfortable issue a criticism past Halo games have had is that some of the brightly coloured Alien weapons were unsatisfying to use, before this game I had never really experienced this but I have to admit some of covenant and (amazingly well animated) promethean weapons did fall quite flat. The lacklustre damage or poor fire rate of some weapons really did create a distinct division between weapons used merely to carry yourself through the level out of necessity and those that were usually more finite in nature but far more entertaining to use.

Once again online multiplayer (both co-op and competitive including 4 player split screen online) is a major focus of the game, with a slew of modes and maps to play with 10,000s of people playing at any one time you will certainly never struggle to find a game (Even whilst writing this review at 8am when most of America are asleep and the UK are just waking up for work there are over 50,000 people playing Halo 4 online). With more than 10 different online modes there’s certainly more variety than you would expect from a game that has the primary function of shoot everything that moves so you’ll likely find a mode or two to suit your taste. With this entry in the series an online levelling and experience system has been added to the dismay of many, people cry that this is the influence of Call of Duty and Battlefield and that it may be but it’s hardly intrusive; the player quickly gains access to the new abilities and guns they can equip to best suit their playstyle, and the ability to change and customise your character is actually very welcome as it not only helps set you apart both visually but helps you specialise in a way that was previously impossible.

The online support to the game will continue for some time, more online maps are incoming very soon with several packs expected through DLC far into the coming year and they’ve not even released all of the “Season 1” co-op stages for the game’s franticly busy Spartan Ops mode. The Spartan Ops missions being a side story of the missions of the new batch of Spartans that have been created whilst Chief was away, the missions they are sent on that run parallel with the game’s main story where you assume the role of your created character that you use in multiplayer. These missions are usually a singular objective and are balanced for a team of 4, whilst they’re certainly frantic and easily some of the most challenging things in the game they fall quite flat and feel pretty soulless when compared to how well directed the main campaign is as they often lack focus and just put the player in a large area swarmed by enemies.

Whilst I do not see Halo 4 as the almighty god send many do it really did exceed my expectations, FPS are not usually my genre of choice with only a few games of the genre this generation capturing my interest at all. I do have complaints about the game but I can’t deny how well built it is. The story is quite gripping, characters show a surprising amount of depth, the level design is varied and entertaining and the online and multiplayer features are incredibly impressive. Also on a technical side the game is a marvel and can be jaw droopingly beautiful at times with stunning vistas and impressive lighting effects, it really manages to push the 360 further than many thought it could all the while maintaining a solid framerate. If you’re at all into FPS games and own an Xbox360 you should probably get Halo 4, if only for a refreshing change to the gritty realism of many FPS nowadays.

Review by Chris Lenaghan.

Vice Magazine celebrated 10 years of their UK operations by holding a party in London on Thursday. Readers were invited to apply for free tickets online and a handful on entrants were chosen on Monday. Doors were supposed to open at 9pm with a disclaimer that these events are notoriously rammed so it’s advisable start queuing super early to ensure that you get in.

Reviews are boring so here is a traditional Vice style do’s and don’ts.

Do start queuing at 7.30 with a bag of booze from Tescos
Don’t bother applying for tickets, just join the green queue
Don’t forget you ID
Do harass Andrew WK as he walks past the queue doing his PR piece to the noisey crew, but don’t sign the release form
Do abuse the free bar
Don’t piss yourself in the queue
Do enjoy the lovely warm hand dryer one you get in after 2 hours queueing in the freezing cold
Don’t worry that there’s no music in the main room
Do somehow manage to crowd surf in a mosh pit of about 5 or 6 people
Do be surprisingly impressed by the support bands
Don’t attend #Vice10 with only your inner-monologue and the Powernote app on your HTC Desire for company as you will only end up writing this unexpectedly popular article and not have a good time
Do let this article turn into the script from Peep Show
Don’t bottle Andrew WK as he performs on stage, tut tut
Do send drunk emails
Don’t question why Jamie of Klaxons is DJing mind numbingly repetitive oonst tracks while indicating to the audience that he rates them about a three and a half out of ten
Don’t be afraid that the free free bar is still going as the party ends at 2.15am
Do let photographers pour bottles of Absolut vodca down your throat from behind the bar, the staff won’t mind
Don’t forget that Vice Magazine is the best magazine in the world

Review by David Apple.

SART(Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed) is the sequel to Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing that was released in 2010, the game had quite the following but didn’t set the world ablaze. Many people brushed it off as another MarioKart clone or merely asked “Why is Sonic in a car?” its sales were quite impressive but even so it seemed like an unlikely candidate for a sequel. When SART was announced I was quite surprised, I wasn’t expecting much but with every single reveal and every trailer my interested was piqued a little more. However them showing a track based on the almost forgotten about Panzer Dragoon series quite early on did set my nostalgia to overdrive straight away as the Panzer Dragoon series are possibly some of my all-time favourite games.

This is where the game will hook many; it does a brilliant job of capturing the player with nostalgia, nostalgia that may only stretch as far back as Gamecube for games like Billy Hatcher or Super monkey ball or as far as back as the 1980s arcade releases of Golden Axe and Afterburner. This is where the game begins to shine too; there are so many little touches to characters and stages that show that this is more than a soulless cash-in but rather a labour of love where great a great deal of care has been taken. This shows in spades with the amazingly unique last character to be unlocked. A character which has be one of gaming’s best cameos with many a wonderful in-joke that may go over the head of most people.

As far as the cast goes the usual gang are still there, Sonic and some of his more popular friends, representatives from Jet set Radio, Space Channel 5, Super Monkey ball, Nights into Dreams, Golden Axe, Samba Di Amigo, Shinobi, Crazy Taxi and a welcome return to fan favourite “Vyse” from Skies of Arcadia. There are a few notable absences such as the Fork-Lift driving sailor searching Ryo Hazuki from Shenmue and anyone from Virtua Fighter. These omissions are especially surprising considering the surreal inclusion of the real female life NASCAR driver Danica Patrick and the incredibly apt inclusion Ralph from the soon-to-be-hit animated Disney Film “Wreck it Ralph” (about an unsatisfied computer game villain jumping into other games to escape his bad guy persona). There are a few other special gifts coming soon as far as characters go but some of missing cast could very well make their way back into the game in the form of DLC, Sumo digital have said they will submit a request to add any characters that reach a certain level of popularity in a Poll on Sega’s official forums. This is especially good news as the Japanese Sega Saturn mascot Segata Sanshiro is currently in the top 3 after ascending to fan-favouite cult classic in the years following the Sega Saturn’s demise.

A major part of the game’s ability to take you back to your childhood lays within its soundtrack and is thanks to the return of veteran composer Richard Jacques who’s worked with Sega dozens of times in the past, a wonderful job has been done in remixing the iconic themes of past games with a few especially wonderful pieces. The almost criminally good Golden Axe remix linked here was very cleverly used in the demo and has done a brilliant job of capturing many of the older more bitter gamers who still remember playing through the first level of the game on their Mega Drive several hundred times.

The game was made by Sumo digital under the direction of Sega, it may seem strange to some that a company such as Sega would allow another to direct a game containing such a wide variety of its IPs but ever since Sumo Digital handled the amazing ports of the Arcade Classic Outrun 2 in 2004 they’ve more than earned that trust. Another reason why the game escapes the shackles of being classified as just another Kart racing game is the talent behind it. The game can really stand up as a racing game in its own right with its many references and cameos only being the icing on the cake. With a staff of big names cherry picked from the plethora of past UK racing game studios the recipe for success may have been guaranteed, the positive influence of Gareth Wilson (Former Bizzare Creations desiner) in the lead designer role is maybe the most prominent, with lessons learnt from the ill-fated 2010 racer Blur the mix of arcade racing and kart racing combat has been polished to near perfection.

The weapons and power ups all have their use and are wonderfully well realised with one of the only gripes being a lack of variety and some of the issues that inherently plague the genre. If the player is caught in a tight group of others racers your chances of coming through the pack unscaved are pretty slim, everything can get a little messy and quite frustrating especially on some of the thinner less adventurous tracks.

Another issue that arises from any combative racing game is that when anyone manages to build up quite the lead they are now also playing with the huge advantage of not having to deal with the chaos the other racers are creating. To combat this as the race goes on the game throws out some ingenious level design with extra obstacles for the leaders of the pack to react to; Robots may begin to fire at the leader of the pack on one stage, the stages may start changing shape, boulders, barrels and other obstacles may roll around the track or the route through the stage may only become clear metres ahead of where your driving. Another measure they’ve added to lessen the advantage of the leader is this game’s variant of Mario Kart’s infamous Blue Shell, rather than the game breaking and frustrating Blue Shell that all but destroyed any element of fairness or skilful victory the “Sky Tigers” or swarm attack merely places dozens of large wasps ahead of the leaders of the pack to avoid, this helps shorten the distance between the leaders and the rest of the pack by slowing the leaders down as well as being quite fair and fully avoidable.

One possible problem people may find is that the game’s difficulty is far beyond what the appearance of the game may suggest, to merely unlock all the characters the player will have to do many of the game’s races on the highest difficulty. Even on the middling difficulties the game is incredibly unforgiving, a single mistake can steal any possible victory from the player causing a chain reaction of other racers bumping into you and pummelling you with weapon after weapon with the AI racing a solid race hitting several boosts as they go.

The mastery of the game comes from knowing when to drift and boost, charging up higher levels of boost and trying to fit in as many tricks and boosts into every single jump and transformation. This leads to some of the interesting aspects of the game’s balancing, the majority of racing games of this type have the starting cars/characters as slower more balanced racers, allowing the player to skill up before trying the harder to use faster cars which fall short in corners where a real mastery of the game is needed to maintain a stable race… With the title character of game being Sonic the Hedgehog this obviously can’t be the case, every child who buys the game will likely buy the game and want to almost exclusively play as the fast blue hedgehog who must be given the highest speed stat. Sumo have had to balance the game in an inverse way to almost every other racing game, as the player gets better at boosting and maximising every opportunity they’ll find themselves moving away from the cars that perform well in the straights and begin moving to some of the slower cars that can drive more aggressively throughout the corners.

There are many fine nuances in the game’s balancing but it does a great job of setting itself apart from the crowd, the main way it does this is with its title feature… the “Transformed” tag in the title that refers to the 3 modes of transport the game. The game fluidly changes between a normal racing game, a boat racing game and a flying game at various differing points throughout the 3 laps of a race.

The water races take heavy influence from games such as Hydro thunder and Wave race, the handling becoming totally different from the usual racing sections and far more difficult to accurately control. The player has to try and figure out how to best take advantage of the ever changing course of waves in the water, trying to judge if they boost and trick from little ripples as well as dealing with the tricky new controls. The flying sections are a happy surprise; they’re incredibly easy to control and have some of the most rewarding sections of the game, whilst they’ll never push your reactions or be as nail biting as any of the other sections weaving between other players and between stage obstacles does leave you with a sense of accomplishment.

The game’s career mode has quite the variety of different race types, boost races, ring races, no weapon races, and a few others spread across the game’s many tracks and their mirrored variants, there’s also a grand prix mode and local 4 player split screen verses. The game also has online multiplayer across a variety of different race and arena battle types that can also be played split screen so several players can play online together at once. The game really has a surprising amount of content for what could have been a very barebones game. Whilst you can’t compare it to the sheer amount of content you will get in the usual AAA racer such as Forza or Gran Turismo with dozens of tracks and 100s of cars, this is a game for everyone. Maybe SART not a game to be taken as seriously as some but it’s certainly one anyone can enjoy.

I’ve been playing the Xbox 360 version and if you’re stuck for Christmas present ideas for a younger member of the family of fully grown man-child with a history of playing Sega games I’d suggest this could be good game to buy. Be aware however the Wii-U version currently has some pretty game-breaking bugs but a patch to fix these issues should be out pretty soon.

The game is out for Xbox 360, PS3, Wii-U, Nintendo 3DS, Playstation Vita, IOS and Windows PC (The Portable versions may vary to a certain degree)

And I shall leave you with this trailer… (Please excuse the music used within, the game’s music is much better)

Review by Chris Lenaghan.

The result is a sizable collection of CDs and vinyl that I should be proud of. Unfortunately, I’m not and here’s why.

The international music industry has evolved from the days of physical formats and now music exists primarily as MP3 files. Computers have developed to facilitate this progression (both in terms of processing speed and storage) to a point where I can store and play my entire record collection in my pocket for under £200!

In the late 90′s I envisaged this and started the laborious process of copying my CDs to MP3 files. In fact, I was the first one of my mates to own an MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300. The future was coming and I embraced it. The music industry was yet to cash in on this new technology and file sharing laws were written in fear of a fall in record sales. It was similar to the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign by the British Phonographic Industry in the 80′s. When customers have more initiative than companies; companies fight back with law.

Thankfully the music industry have now caught up. Apple were the pioneers, introducing iTunes, an application that let users pay for music downloads. This concept took off and now music charts are dominated by music download sales. The clever part of this business model is that music downloads are rarely MP3 files, but encrypted file formats that limit the customer’s ability to share it.

With this in mind, my record collection is still a logical investment. I can copy my CDs to MP3 and play them on any device without limitations. However, cloud technology has thrown a spanner in the works.

Along with the development of computers has come the development of the internet. People around the world are able to receive data from the web to their computers, tablets and phones faster than ever before. So fast in fact, that streaming music at CD quality is normal. This has removed the need for people to store music. Why go to the trouble of paying and downloading an album when you can simply play it immediately for free on Spotify?

Spotify was launched in 2008 by Daniel Ek (pictured). It enables people to listen to a seemingly infinite catalogue of music continually updated music instantly on any compatible device  for free! OK, so there are a few ads but that’s a small price to pay for the benefits. However if you really do want all of that music for free, it’s only $9.99 per month!

I have a love hate relationship with Spotify. I love it because it is amazing and hate it because it has made my record collection obsolete. Now when i look at my record collection, all I see is a lot of hassle compared with typing the title of the record into the Swedish application. But that’s progress for ya.

To rub salt in the wound, I looked up the price of my record collection on Music Magpie… If only records were made of wood, I could have a fire.

All hail by David Apple.

The band will start their mini tour at the end of this month, starting at the Sheffield Queens Social Club and ending at the Tumbridge Wells Forum on Tuesday 11th December. In January they are set to play a handful of shows in Australia before returning to the UK to play the Royal Albert Hall on Thursday 28th March.

Today, the band announced that the first single to be taken from their new album Holy Fire will be Inhaler. Check out Foals’ brand spanking new music video below.

Here is some more info lifted from the band’s newsletter.

You can pre-order your copy of HOLY FIRE from the usual places (check them out here), but you get our new single INHALER right this very minute when you pre-order from iTunes here.  This is the future right here this very moment mmhmm.

Review by David Apple.

Photos by Doze.

Check out Doze’s Facebook page.

I still remember listening to John Peel play Drunk Trumpet on Radio 1 and thinking that this sounds like nothing else. I caught the train to Tempest records in Birmingham the next day and bought a copy of his pivotal début album Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, released on Ninja Tune records. It’s humbling to see Eric San just as passionate, obsessively geeky and silly; over ten years later through the same label.

Kid Koala kicked off his new Vinyl Vaudeville tour at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the ideal venue for his latest flamboyant and interactive show. With help from New York based comedy act Adira Amram and The Experience; Kid Koala’s set features a lot of dancing, costumes, puppets, glitter, audience participation and kazoos. I caught his show at the O2 Academy in Islington ahead of his next two UK dates in Bristol and Manchester, before he tours America.

I was front row, next to the barrier at the O2 Academy. Adira Amram was the first to take the stage (after a quick intro by Kid Koala) for a short but very energetic set. She started by rapping, concealing her eyes with a hoodie, before two leotard wearing dance girls (The Experience) joined her and ripped off her hoode to reveal a third leotard. Their set was very funny, the highlight being either the Fingerbash song or Adira playing the burger kazoo (a kazoo disguised as a plastic burger). Their set ended with The Experience crowd surfing and Adira being carried like a baby by a strong man to the back of the room.

Kid Koala appeared on stage immediately and blasted out some of his very distinctive sounds. After the first set piece, he apprehensively asked us if it’s OK to plays some record to us! We all laugh. There are a couple of small cameras mounded to his setup and a couple of small projectors either side of the stage, giving the audience a glimpse of his fingers at work. His ability to scratch and mix records has to be seen to be believed.

The tour celebrates the release of his fifth studio album 12 Bit Blues. An album meticulously crafted in the same way that he has crafted his previous four album, using record players, reel to reel tape recorders, vintage samplers and no short cuts. I had the privilege of interviewing Eric at a night called San Miguel Hidden Depths at T Bar in Shoreditch back in 2007. He told me that he actually finds it faster working with a multi-track reel to reel tape recorder because it closes off options and makes you think harder about what you’re trying to achieve.

Whenever he played a track from his new 12 Bit Blues album, Adira Amram and The Experience joined him on stage for some choreography. It was a great way of breaking up the set, holding our interest and making the show memorable. A few of the set pieces involved puppets and on occasion, it looked a little like Ninja Tune asked the producers of Avenue Q to create an advert for the album.

View our photo gallery of Kid Koala performing at the O2 Academy in London by Doze.

8 Bit Blues was the last song of the set, Adira Amram and The Experience appeared dressed as flight attendants launching paper air-planes into the crowed. Everyone called out for an encore and to our delight, our demands were met. Adira Amram and The Experience jumped into the crowed and started a conga line. Eric followed, keeping the music going by playing a battery powered Yamaha SU10 sampler with a radio mic sellotaped to the back. Various members of the audience had the opportunity to simulate the scratched trumpet sound using kazoos into the microphone and the winner was rewarded with gifts from the merch stand. The crowd followed Eric and the girls to the back room to form a massive swarm of people, each waiting for their turn to shake his hand ask him to sign their copy of the 12 Bit Blues. Myself included, yeah I’m a nerdball too.

Review by David Apple.

Live photo by Doze.

After accidentally spending the afternoon browsing through dozens of animations and music videos looking for inspiration for something I was working on it occurred to me that everyone else should see some of these videos and bask in their deisgn!

A fantastic emotional video

“Float” by Flogging Molly is a video  of a little old character on journey collecting more and more junk about him as he travels, I’ve always been a sucker for a good story about a long journey and this one is no different. The video itself is a shockingly well done stop motion animation with a wonderfully designed character where every shot is a piece of art. You can read a variety of things into the lyrics of the song and the imagery used throughout the video but the two suit each other perfectly. The direction and design of every shot are well done with brilliant use of focus, colour and compositing making it both an artistic and technical success!

A music video that may make you worried to ever use the loo at work again.

“Second Lives” by Vitalic, a comedic and hopefully exaggerated look at what could very well be happening in the toilets at your inner-city workplace. The entire video is from a singular viewpoint cutting between footage of all the various things that could be happening in the loo right now. It doesn’t take an imaginative jump to arrive at just a few of them.  Someone bunking off work for a quick nap? Check! A pervert licking the seat? Check! A man trying to drown himself in the toilet bowl? Check!  All of which makes you feel for the stoic long suffering cleaner, and if you’re watching this at work wonder which of your colleagues matches which particular character in the video. Possibly NSFW if you didn’t realise however.

Let’s have something weird! REALLY weird.

“Fantasy” from Dye, a really stylish rather disturbing animated music video, the concept is simple; four teenagers break into a pool at night for some rather rude teenage shenanigans. The animation perfectly captures the awkwardness of being a teenager in such a situation… The over confident drunken teenager and the reserved teen in too deep, dragged along by their all-too-eager friends to be a chaperone/audience. But quite suddenly the video manages to twist itself into being the purest form of nightmare fuel giving the subdued soft electronic music a whole new context. Warning this is more than a bit NSFW.

Something a little more fun!

“The Greeks” by Is Tropical A genius mixed media video, with some smooth and well done animation mixed with live action ala “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. The idea behind the video is genius, using the bright cartoonish colours to display the carnage, gore and destruction envisioned in the imaginations of young boys playing war, throw in a few nods to action films, darker moments of the modern day wars and superimpose it over the mundanity of modern day life. Whenever I see a child with a toy gun this video instantly comes to mind.

I Suppose that’s enough for now.

All Hail by Chris Lenaghan.

I am of course referring to Gym Trial Surfing. The Practice of attending as many free gym trials as possible in a week or a month. This urban sport lives in that grey area of being frowned upon but unlike base jumping, urban climbing or mass skateboarding; Gym Trial Surfing is about not being noticed.

It’s pretty easy to get into. You can find free trials for gyms on the Internet, on the street and in newspapers and magazines. In fact, you can even go to the gym, tell the receptionist that you live round the corner, ask about membership and they’re likely to give you a free trial as easy as that. You might have difficulty attempting to get two free trials at one gym but this is where the sport comes into it. How many can you do?

Photo taken from Gym Heroes.

The Zine features a few teasers for this site (such as our interview with Zoëtrøpe and our Brandon Generator review) plus a few special extra creative bits in the spirit of zine culture. The black and white zine folds open to become an amazing poster of Liam Finn drumming (photo by Amanda Ratcliffe). They are well worth getting your hands on. So if you are out and about in London this summer; get hunting for one of our one thousand copies.

If you’re really struggling to find a copy, you could always tweet a request to @houseoftracks and we might post one to you. Feel free to download the pdf file too.

House of Tracks Zine summer autumn 2012

London Distribution (from north to south)

The Enterprise
2 Haverstock Hill, London, NW3 2BL, United Kingdom
020 7485 2659

The Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road, London, Borough of Camden, London NW1, United Kingdom
020 7424 8477

The Lock Tavern
35 Chalk Farm Road London NW1 8AJ, United Kingdom
020 7482 7163

KOKO
1a Camden High Street London NW1 7JE, United Kingdom
0870 432 5527

American Apparel Kings Cross (Staff room)
C/O Network Rail West Side Offices Kings Cross Railway Station
020 7278 4976

The Star of Kings
126 York Way, London, Greater London, N1 0AX, United Kingdom
020 7278 9708

The Lexington (I will have to check with Stacy first)
96-98 Pentonville Road, London, Greater London, N1 9JB, United Kingdom
020 7837 5371

The Big Chill House
257-259 Pentonville Road, City of London, Greater London
020 7427 2540

Scala (Check the boxes on the wall outside the venue)
Northburgh House/10 Northburgh St, London, EC1V 0AT, United Kingdom
020 7490 9900

Monto Water Rats
328 Gray’s Inn Road, London, Greater London, WC1X 8BZ, United Kingdom
020 3589 5983

Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen
2-4 Hoxton Square,  London, Greater London, N1 6NU, United Kingdom
020 7613 0709

XOYO
32-37 Cowper St, Islington, Greater London, EC2A 4AW, UK  United Kingdom
020 7490 1198

93 Feet East
150 Brick Lane, London, E1 6QL, United Kingdom
020 7770 6006

Vibe Bar
91 – 95 Brick Lane,  London, E1 6QL, United Kingdom
020 7247 3479

Rough Trade East
Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, City of London, E1 6QL, United Kingdom
020 7392 7788

The Social
5 Little Portland Street London W1W 7JD, United Kingdom
020 7636 4992

Phonica Records
51 Poland Street London W1F 7LZ, United Kingdom
020 7025 6070

Sister Ray (As soon as the flyer table is fixed)
34 Berwick Street London, W1F 8RP, United Kingdom
020 7734 3297

American Apparel Carnaby Street (Staff room)
4 Carnaby St City of Westminster, W1F 9PB, United Kingdom
020 7734 4477

We endeavour to distribute without being total dicks. We always ask for permission from staff and only leave a maximum of twenty copies per location. Hopefully, this method will reduce the chances of the zines being immediately thrown away.

Man Like Me front man Johnny Langer is a Camden boy so he was playing to his home crowd and tonight was his birthday too! Peter Duffy and new edition to the line up Ade Omotayo sang happy birthday half way though the set, causing Johnny to hide behind a curtain with embarrassment.

It’s incredible (and quite scary) to think that the outfit has been going for seven years already! Their debut single Oh My Gosh was on the House of Tracks stereo when we were just starting out. Now they’re signed to Mike Skinner’s label The Beats and featuring in IKEA adverts.

Here is the video to their latest single Squeeze.

Review by David Apple.

I took some time to look a little deeper into this story and discovered something much more interesting. Dan Deacon’s remix is actually part of a wonderful 43 track Call Me Maybe remix collection put together by LA based noise artist Kyle H. Mabson. He ran a Carly Rae Jepsen remix competition fueled by his Twitter page and the collection is the result.

My favourite remixes are by DJ Colostomy Bagpipes (doing an old school MIDI version), Whqles, Clark Maybe, C.O.M-Rad (who combine hardcore with harmonica and somehow make it work), Ironing (jumping erratically from normal speed to very slow like a toddler playing with vinyl), Party Trash (with their epic chopped and screwed soundscape) and the SatisHouse one is so fucked up.

This collection follows Kyle Mabson’s equally as entertaining collection of Gotye (ft. Kimbra) Somebody That I Used To Know remixes. My favourite being Large Talons‘ Scrotye Mix.

Review by David Apple.

It’s been a fairly uneventful month for us. Hot Chip and Friendly Fires headlined Lovebox in London but we didn’t make it because the weather was a bit hit and miss. I went to the afterparty at XOYO but it wasn’t worthy of a review.

Fortunately, Dedee W made it to an epic homecoming gig by Flight of the Conchords at the Auckland Town Hall and she took some great photos from the front row. Cat reviews Slow Club’s new music video featuring Daniel Radcliffe. Chris Lenaghan has bought a PlayStation Vita and written a great review of Gravity Rush, the video game. He has also written a review of the beautifully simple video game Thomas Was Alone. Talking of video games, we All Hail Chris Sawyer, the man behind the ground breaking 1994 simulation game Transport Tycoon and Ludvig Strigeus, the Swedish genius that hacked/developed it.

Edgar Wright and Tommy Lee Edwards have created The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator a fascinating internet, comic book style story that evolves with public submissions. Dedee summarises the whole thing very elegantly.

There’s a lot of exciting stuff to come in July. We’re not going to ruin the surprise by telling you.

Oh yeah and we’re giving away an electric guitar!

Thomas Was Alone is a platform game split up into small bite size stages each with a very simple concept. Get from point A to point B. It all starts simple enough with the player being given control of a little red block called Thomas, moving through some increasingly awkward stages to let you get to grips with the controls.

Before long the player is introduced to some more blocks, some with unique abilities be it huge jumps, floating in water, being small enough to fit through small gaps or acting as a trampoline to name but a few. At this point the game really starts to come into its own and it really does show it’s a game about friendship and jumping. With the press of a button the player’s control shifts between the various blocks; allowing you to pass obstacles that some (or all) of them would have been stuck on alone – either by stacking them up, using each other as steps or even activating a switch to open up a stage that only one of the blocks could reach. Amazingly, a real sense of camaraderie does begin to build up, be it helping with the frustratingly small jump of Chris (the orange square), or just giving a little extra height to the huge jumps of John (the yellow rectangle). In order to progress with your little party of quadrilaterals they must each reach a portal created in their image at the end of a stage. Each block has a corresponding portal. The player has to figure out the increasingly devilish puzzle of how to use the shapes to their advantage in order to reach the end of each level using the various attributes of each block.

The first thing you will notice about this game is it’s minimalist aesthetic. The player is placed in a world which for the most part is fully made of right angles where you play a group of coloured squares and rectangles jumping around on black structures pieced together from larger squares and rectangles which sounds simple enough, but the game is quite beautiful. The colours have all been so carefully picked to work in unison, the backgrounds subtly shimmer with shapes fading in and out, I was also in a constant state of awe over how pretty any stage that showed off its impressive lighting could be. The simplistic silhouettes allow the player to read every situation and be instantly understood, a game is merely a set of rules and once you realise that you can perch your blocks on a single pixel without them tipping or sliding off of one another your mind will start to show you the possibilities of how to progress.

However, what may enamour most people to the game is the wonderful audio; the music (by David Housden) manages to straddle being both orchestral and electronic with a real sense of grandeur and scope when the game is trying to push you on with a sense of urgency whilst never seeming overstated or distracting from its surroundings. However what most people will take away from Thomas Was Alone’s audio is the amazing narration by comedian, producer, writer and journalist Danny Wallace; whom first came to my attention in the 2001 BBC television series “Are you Dave Gorman”. Throughout the game the thoughts and personalities of the various blocks you meet is conveyed by the narration of Danny Wallace. The sense of camaraderie mentioned above is (in part) thanks to the amazing script writing and narration. It’s a fine example of script writing and gameplay working side by side to strengthen the end product of the game. Every cube is given third person narration to their inner thoughts; what they think of their world, their life of jumping and the other cubes they’ve met giving you an almost storybook understanding of the characters. Worryingly, whilst playing I felt an immediate identification with the misanthropic bitter orange square Chris, which (other than being my namesake) bore a strikingly similar colour to the T-shirt I was wearing whilst doing my playthrough for this review.

The game will inevitably be compared to Portal and Portal 2 as all indie games that work a series mechanics in increasingly difficult puzzle rooms are “Like Portal but 2D with squares” made all the more prevalent by having a Charming narration by an English celebrity. Thomas however is really a game I feel deserves to escape the black hole of indie games being compared in some way to Portal. Whilst it’s no bad thing to be compared to some of the greatest games of this generation “Like Portal but…” I feel it no longer does any good for a game’s reputation. Thomas really seems to sidestep many of the negative aspects of design so many indie games suffer from, the game does not seem drawn out, there’s a maturity to every aspect of the design from the pallet to the typography and it really feels professional. Even something which may seem as simple as jumping is executed so well. It’s not too twitchy, there’s a nice amount of control and it almost feels analogue in its jumping arcs.

The game doesn’t feel drawn out. Something new is introduced every time you think you’ve reached the limit of what can be done or you think you have a full grasp of the game. A new block with new abilities, a new type of level design and at points entirely new mechanics are added just at the right time, helped by the soundtrack and narration almost seem to be egging on the player to carry on playing for just one more level the game does a good job at keeping the player motivated. This is especially true nearer the end where the music manages to impose a certain degree of urgency upon the player.

There can be the odd awkward moment where a block falls from a platform it wasn’t meant to or points when pushing around a block can be a little awkward but any gripe or problem you may have is so minor it’s almost inconsequential. My only real issue and this is purely subjective (and I know there are workarounds I could use) was the lack of gamepad support, I tried with my PS3 pad, Xbox360 pad and a 3rd party pad but to no avail, the setup of the game would not detect their inputs. Years of playing games have seemingly had a toll on my hands and after a short time of being perched over my PC keyboard my hands began to painfully ache and burn. I will never understand how PC gamers and the majority of people can comfortably sit at a keyboard and play, but I am also quite aware this is a problem that is probably quite unique to me which is both a shame for me and also makes me think about how well suited Thomas could be to a pad.

Thomas Was Alone is an amazingly well polished experience across around 100 levels, having seen its humble beginnings and how it’s built up to the game it is today is something astounding. I would highly recommended to all who like platformers and everyone who wants a nice and witty game that I feel may be the most English of games I’ve seen in quite some time.

ThomasWasAlone is released on Saturday (30th June, 2012) on PC and Mac. Check out the official Thomas Was Alone website around that time for all details about the various places you may pick up this little gem.