More recently, the internet unearthed the original concept for Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure (a game that we’ve covered heavily on the website). This video is basically me playing the concept demo used to show off the game in the original pitch to Activision.

An intensive, in-depth review of Max Payne’s DVD box.

Welcome back to the second episode! What game will we be playing this weekend? Stay tuned!

Fancy a forgotten game from Rockstar’s recent history? You’re in luck, as they’re giving away Midnight Club 2 on Steam for free to anyone who joins their group before 15th of May.

Welcome to the first episode of Crashpro3′s Retro Portal. In Retro Portal, we’ll be taking brief looks at classic video games from the early days of gaming, up to any game released (at least) six years ago (2006 being the most recent year possible in this case). The games will be shown in no particular order, and can range from me knowing a lot about the game, to games I haven’t played in years, or even to completely new games.

Each episode will be roughly 45-60 minutes long, and two games will be shown off during that time. Names of the games played will not be provided in the title of the episode until the next episode is uploaded to keep an element of surprise.

Please be sure to post your feedback on this, and feel free to suggest any games you’d like to see on the show.

Some of you may remember that a few months ago Valve announced some new Portal 2 DLC to be released in early 2012. Not that early(ish) 2012 is here, Valve have given us more details on this DLC along with a release date and trailer. As we previously knew, the DLC will be a very basic level editor.

For your interest, here is a nice animated trailer:

Once you’ve created your lovely puzzles, you can upload it to the Steam Workshop (which currently has support for custom content in Team Fortress 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) where you will be able to browse, rate and download levels. The DLC will be released on the 8th of May 2012 for the PC and Mac, but whether there will be future support for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game has yet to be announced.

Skylanders: Darklight Crypt Adventure Pack | Toys for Bob | 360/PC/PS3/Wii | £20 | Released: 14/10/2011

A few months ago, I got (and completed) Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure for my PS3. Now that I’ve got all the trophies and completed it 100%, there’s not really much for me to do. Any normal publisher would just release some DLC to expand the game and I would pay a few quid to unlock something new in game. But Skylanders isn’t any normal game and instead of DLC unlocking new levels, we get the Adventure Packs. All 4 of the Adventure packs are currently released but I decided to get the Darklight Crypt Adventure Pack – because it looked the most interesting!

The pack includes 4 in game items. A new character (Ghost Roaster), the Crypt itself to unlock the level and two magic items, the healing elixir and the time twister, along with the stickers, web-codes and trading cards that come with every Skylanders pack. In this review, I will be looking over the level itself along with the character and magic items that come with it.

The level itself is set in a Ghost Village, where a baker has noticed that the undead inhabitants of the village have stopped buying his pies and asks you to go and see what the problem is. Yeah, ok, don’t buy the Adventure Packs thinking that it’ll expand upon the story of the original game – you buy it so you have something new to do and that’s exactly what it offers. The level has an interesting mechanic where you have to manually switch between the real world and the ghost world by activating switches throughout the level. This is mostly used in puzzle solving, but it can also be useful as there are different enemies depending on whether you’re in the real world or the ghost world. It’s not an original concept, in fact it’s something that’s been used in a previous Spyro game, but it’s certainly an interesting game play mechanic and adds some more difficulty to the puzzles.

Another new puzzle aspect is a change in the lockmaster imp puzzles. Where as the lockmaster imp puzzles from the main game included just one imp that had to active switches by rotating a box, the lockmaster imp puzzles in the Darklight Crypt include a burning imp that, if it touches the normal imp, causes you to have to restart the puzzle. It doesn’t make the puzzles more difficult, but it means that you have to be more aware of the second imp and whether the two imps will cross paths depending on your movements.

However, overall, the level is very easy. The enemies aren’t difficult to defeat and the new puzzle aspects only seem to slow you down more than actually add any difficulty to the level.

The character that you get with the pack, Ghost Roaster, isn’t exactly the best character in the game. He has some relatively strong attacks (in fact, I managed to get through the level with his starting attacks fine) but his Skull Charge attack is very difficult to control so I don’t ever use it as a way to move around quicker like Spyro’s charge or Zap’s slime, but it’s still a strong attack and is an instant kill for most enemies.

The adventure pack includes 2 magic items as well. These 2 magic items are a healing elixir and a time twister. The healing elixir restores your health by 30HP every 10 seconds and can be used for a minute over an entire level (either all at once, or in bursts). It can be useful when you are in dire need of health, but I’ve never found real need of it considering that if I die during the game, it’s usually because the enemies killed me too quickly to even think about putting the healing elixir on the portal.

The other magic item, the time twister, slows down time for your enemies and (again) lasts for a minute over an entire level and can be used all at once or in bursts. I can see where this can be very useful, mostly whilst your battling enemies such as Arkeyan Ultrons, but because most enemies don’t take much to kill and don’t get to the point where they’ll swarm around you so much that you need to ever use it.

In conclusion, the Darklight Crypt adds quite a lot of interesting features and the magic items that come with it aren’t too bad and I can see where they’d be useful throughout the main game. However, whether it’s worth £20 for an extra level could be questionable but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the other 3 Adventure Packs, which I will be looking forwards to giving a go – especially Dragon’s Peak.