World Gone Sour
If Cool Spot never happened this would be the best commercial + game ever. Unfortunately that's not a very prestigious category.
Xenoblade Chronicles
It’s unfair to judge the state of Japanese role playing games as stagnant or irrelevant. Over the last four years games like Persona 4, Radiant Historia, Lost Odyssey, and, yes, Final Fantasy XIII have demonstrated a willingness to blend new ideas into a genre defined by its rigidity. And yet, none of these titles seemed to push the needle far enough to completely satisfy either critics or f...[Read More]
Warp
"Scientist revenge" is quickly becoming a sub-genre for sharp puzzle/action games. 'Splosion Man, its sequel Ms Splosion Man, and both Portals have specialized in enabling the protagonist to enact comic vengeance upon his or her immoral captors. Warp, the first game from the folks at Trapdoor, cooks a similar dish but mistakenly spices it with superfluous carnage and clumsy gameplay.
Street Fighter X Tekken
My experience with Street Fighter was defined at an instance when Capcom’s Seth Killian annihilated me and only used one hand in the process. I had asked Killian to display his infamous party trick and he graciously obliged, but that performance also spoke to my relative skill by way of interest, or lack thereof, in Capcom’s stable of 2D fighters. Multiple iterations of Tekken, on the ...[Read More]
MotorStorm RC
“Well, this isn’t MotorStorm” was my immediate reaction to MotorStorm RC. Yes, it was created by Evolution Studios and each of the game’s sixteen tracks allegedly drew influence from MotorStorm’s previous four entries. But gone was the first person point of view, the ridiculous sense of speed, the exotic locals, and that oddly perfect Burning Man atmosphere. In its pl...[Read More]
Mass Effect 3: From Ashes
Mass Effect 2’s downloadable content ran the gamut from mediocre to exceptional. Zaeed and The Arrival were on the low end, Kasumi and Overlord were a bit better, and Lair of the Shadow Broker is one of the most impressive pieces of post-release content to date. From Ashes, Mass Effect 3’s first extraneous episode is free with the N7 Collector’s Edition but remains $10 for everyo...[Read More]
Mass Effect 3
Investing one's time and mind in fiction is a double edged sword. If it all eventually comes together then indulging in results can be moving experience. When it doesn't work we get the Lost finale or Star Wars prequels. Disappointment only arrives because of how much we appreciate the establishment created by what came before, and are subsequently disheartened by where it's taken us. Applied to B...[Read More]
Mass Effect 3 Impressions
As of this writing (Monday morning) I’ve played Mass Effect 3 for twenty hours. That’s obviously not enough to complete or even properly enjoy the game, so I thought I’d have some early impressions ready when all the other sites reviews go live on Tuesday. I’ve set aside a big chunk of time with week to finish it, so expect a full review by (hopefully) Thursday. Neither the...[Read More]
Journey
When Journey began and I was plopped down in the sand, briefly shown how to manipulate the camera, and then set free in the desert. Traditional tropes we associate with teaching us rules (complicated button layouts, explicit tutorials, wacky sidekicks demonstrating perplexing mechanics) seemed deliberately absent from Journey’s visage. It was as if the development team at thatgamecompany reg...[Read More]
Syndicate
Dated interpretations of the future are so cool. I'm completely serious, I think watching movies like Strange Days or reading books like Snow Crash two decades after each were created is fascinating in a way that can never be replicated. Syndicate does this concept one better by its obedience to pre-millennial fiction first realized nearly twenty years earlier in Bullfrog's tactical isometric shoo...[Read More]
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
The Signal left Alan Wake in a strange place. On one hand our writer seemed eager to indulge in his next piece, Return, and further unravel the narrative threads left dangling throughout Alan Wake proper. In the real world, and for clarification’s sake I mean the physical world you and I exist in, the developers at Remedy seemed vaguely non committal in regard to any sort of sequel. Enter Al...[Read More]
Tekken 3D Prime Edition
Tekken 3D Prime Edition was one of the more impressive titles we saw at E3 2011. Though it was strictly in prototype form, the folks Namco and Arika had achieved a solid sixty frames-per-second with 3D fully engaged, a feat even Capcom couldn't accomplish with their 3DS edition of Super Street Fighter IV. Tekken in 3D certainly looked nice, but what sort of game its tech would crawl into remained ...[Read More]