Square Heroes

One of the great things about sourcing content for these independent gaming pages is that I can follow game development, and the people doing it, over time. I first saw Square Heroes at PAX Australia in 2013 and I recall it as being so immersive, I could momentarily ignore the madness of the indie pavilion, just to get lost in something really fun. Recently, at full release, I got so busy playing the campaign that I forgot to put my kids to bed. This game speaks right to my inner escapist.

Bad Dream: Series

Do you sleepwalk? I don’t. At least, not very often. One night, however, I woke up in my Grandma’s old fl at, trying to unlock the front door with what was, possibly, my dad’s right slipper. I blame falling asleep with the heater on in a small space. It was actually pretty scary, so if you do sleepwalk, you have my sympathies. Bad Dream Series is this exact experience in short, loosely sequential, adventure games, providing confusion and horror through simple line drawings on yellowing paper.

Apple to adopt ad-blocking in iOS 9?

Is this the death of ads on the world wide web?

At Apple’s recent WWDC conference in San Francisco, the company introduced something massive. Instead of announcing it on stage, however, the revelation was hidden away in the developer notes of the iOS version of Safari 9.0. The controversial new feature is an inbuilt ‘Content Blocker’ pathway, which will allow third-party ad-blocking-apps to bind to Safari and potentially prevent any ad script from running anywhere on the entire web.

Killer Instinct: Season 2

Xbox One’s premier fighting game continues to grow

At last! The final character has been released and the second ‘season’ of Xbox One’s headline fighting game has been brought to a close. It’s been a pretty good year for Killer Instinct, despite a rocky start with Season 1 developer Double Helix Games leaving the series to make something for Amazon and being replaced by Iron Galaxy, which was best known for porting other games. Turns out, it’s actually pretty damn good at making its own, too. Season 2’s new characters make for one of the most interesting lineups of all the current fighting games and, thanks to a big injection of prize money from Iron Galaxy, Killer Instinct is one of the featured games at EVO 2015 – the world’s biggest fighting-game tournament. Not a bad year at all.

Tom Clancy’s The Division

Hands-on impressions from New York City’s most godforsaken zone (no, not the discount rack at Macy’s...)

Deep in the heart of The Division’s plague-ravaged imagining of Manhattan, just north of Times Square, lies an area dubbed ‘The Dark Zone’. If the Big Apple’s gone rotten, then this fenced-off area is its rancid core – the area where the pandemic first took hold, and where concentrations of the virus are at  its highest. According to the game’s fiction, before society crumbled, the Dark Zone was quarantined off in a futile attempt to contain the virus’ spread.

Where Now For Windows 7? (And Why Windows XP Is Still Hanging On Too)

David Crookes looks at Microsoft's plans for Windows 7 now that its latest operating is available

Microsoft's release of Windows 10 is just days away. It is the successor to the ill-fated Windows 8 and 8.1 operating systems and it has, in the upgrade process, skipped an entire number, as many of you will know. The company has kept quiet over the reason why it has done this, leading to speculation that it's because the number 9 is unlucky in Japan or that it's to do with an issue surrounding software checking for Windows 95 or 98. But the effect has been to put some distance between the new and old. The only problem is the old could so easily linger and bite Microsoft on the bum.

Edit Photos Anywhere

Roland Waddllove reveals 15 of the best photo editing tools for the web, smartphones and tablets, and the PC

How do you edit your photos? Using a specific piece of software, online tools in a web browser, or with your mobile phone? All three platforms have advantages and disadvantages and here we take a look at each one, picking the best that each has to offer.

Smart DIY Wearables

David Briddock reveals how building smart wearable tech can be cheap and fun

Smartwatches, fitness bands and other wearable products are all the rage at the moment. Yet there's a lot of fun to be had fabricating your own smart wearable, so it's not surprising to discover there's already a large community of makers, hackers, crafters, artists, designers and engineers doing just that -what sort of hardware platform is suitable for a wearable project?