Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City
I stopped playing Grand Theft Auto IV a few hours shy of the triple digit count. Two pigeons kept me from 100% perfection, but I gleefully devoured every other morsel of the offline experience. I picked the retail disc up for my Playstation 3, which meant I was out of luck if I ever wanted to play the Xbox350-exclusive downloadable content. For those of us in the same boat, or if you want it all o...[Read More]
Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
While I appreciated the different aim for The Lost and Damned, the grimy overlay failed to appeal to me. I didn’t care for the biker theme, the music that blared over the safe house, or the personalities behind the characters. The world was masterfully reinterpreted for the new take on Liberty City, but it just didn’t connect with my tastes. The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the other hand, g...[Read More]
Tekken 6
Tekken has either been intrinsic to, or flat out destroyed, specific eras of my existence. Tekken 2’s CG intro, Nina’s hair in particular, introduced my jaw to floor. Tekken 3’s arcade-perfect Playstation port insured I would never love cast of fighters like I loved Yoshimitsu, Paul, and Jin. Tekken Tag was the first game I got for my Playstation 2, and a botched attempt to mod t...[Read More]
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
Tools of Destruction, Ratchet & Clank’s first Playstation 3 entry back in 2007, was about as safe a game as one could make. The visual leap took full advantage of the PS3’s technical muscle, but the gameplay elements, save a few fleeting instances, differed little from the three (and a half if you count Deadlocked) PS2 games. I loved playing Tools of Destruction, and I completed e...[Read More]
Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble
A bit of a word about Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble; stuff like this doesn’t usually make it out of Japan. In fact, it hasn’t; Badass Rumble is actually Kenkabancho 3: Zenkoku Seiha, the third game in the series and the first to get localized for a North American audience. And it’s all kinds of crazy. While it’s technically not one of a kind and it may not be as stellar as we...[Read More]
Half-Minute Hero
Do you remember that brief period of time (let’s say, 2007) when you heard about Twitter, and, almost instantly, judged the very idea of micro-blogging to be unimaginably stupid? Hey, me too. Having maintained a few long-form writing blogs over the last ten years, the concept of limiting any substantial thought to 140 characters scared the living hell out of me. I didn’t want to cater ...[Read More]
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
I never really got into the PSP’s previous Grand Theft Auto entries. They were technically impressive, streamlined for mobility, and, for all intents and purposes, accurate in their rendition of both Liberty and Vice City, but they lacked any semblance of an identity. Both were, from a pure gameplay perspective, inferior to the latest and greatest console entry, San Andreas, and both felt re...[Read More]
Axel & Pixel
The recent flood of adventure games has been one of the more appreciated retro-revivals. While the heyday was undoubtedly conceived through LucasArts stellar mid 90’s offerings, recent titles, like Telltale’s Sam and Max series, have introduced a new generation to a seemingly archaic style of gameplay. While the state of interactive media has evolved considerably since then, the charm ...[Read More]
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
I fondly recall my initial reaction to Kingdom Hearts 2; “who the hell is this Roxas guy and what happened to Sora?”. If you missed out on its GBA ,card flavored prequel, Chain of Memories, opening the newest Kingdom Hearts only to take control of Roxas came as quite a surprise. What the original Kingdom Hearts’ secret “Deep Dive” ending, Chain of Memories, and this R...[Read More]
Dead Space: Extraction
Enough to make me want to join the Church of Unitology!
Obscure: The Aftermath
Obscure, a survival/horror game ala Silent Hill, was one of those games that I vaguely remembered existing, but any thought or proactive decision to play it was quickly extinguished by the deluge of other games in 2005. I suppose the same could be said of Obscure: The Aftermath, 2008’s full featured and budget priced sequel. Critical perception for the Obscure games was neither stellar nor h...[Read More]
Zombie Apocalypse
With the success of Left 4 Dead, the Resident Evil series, and the sweet zombies mode in the latest Call of Duty, it’s easy to see why the zombie craze has taken off. Zombies are a universally hated foe across all races and cultures, and the ferocity of their bloodlust is only matched by the cheesiness of their inherent humor. Couple that with modern game’s reliance on making sure ther...[Read More]