33 public written reviews
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The whine, click, and swoosh of the aging Rad Spencer's bionic arm still satisfies. He may have taken on a few wrinkles (and a mustache) since Bionic Commando Rearmed, but Rearmed 2's Spencer still knows how to make the dangerous act of swinging fun as well as effective. Should you find yourself using Spencer's arm to swing back and forth endlessly or jumping between two pivot points as smoothly as the game allows,…
Ghost Trick uses the actual scenery in its cutscenes, to great effect. Ghost Trick's deviation from Shu Takumi's previous work, the Ace Attorney series, is immediate; rather than clicking around in still environments looking for the detail that you missed, you're actively engaged in solving the puzzle, directly moving your character.. As Sissel, a ghost who recently lost its body, you can move your flame avatar…
Lost in Shadow does a lot of interesting things with its aesthetic as well. To get a feel for what Lost in Shadow is like, imagine the first dungeon in a Legend of Zelda game. You're alone, you see a lot of darkness, you're picking up new weapons, and learning the intricacies of how the rest of the game will play out. Most of the puzzles are simple, but a few of them can be tough to get through. Before the rest of…
If you weren't such a troublemaker, Mickey, you could've saved us all a lot of trouble. I'm sorry, animatronic version of Donald, but I couldn't put you back together. I know it's unfair to you that I put animatronic Goofy back together instead, but if it's any consolation, I didn't put Daisy back together either. And not just because I couldn't figure out where her pieces were – I just didn't like her. So, my…
It's crazier, and definitely faster, than it looks. The first time I plowed through over ninety ghosts after eating a series of power pellets – a fever dream made possible by Namco Generations’ revision of Pac-Man in Championship Edition DX – I wondered if there was some sort of historical context for why the huge grin was spread across my face. Perhaps years of being restrained by the limited amount of ghosts and…
Vanquish definitely looks great, and is likely the craziest shooter you'll play in a while. Vanquish's unnecessary score screen perfectly sums up what kind of game it's trying to be: one that doesn't just want the player to advance through its levels, enemies, and bosses, but to excel at it. Death carries a harsh, 1000-point penalty, and the sluggish player gets no time bonus. Like in most games that score you, the…
Typical exploration screen. In more than just its old-school RPG gameplay, Costume Quest aims to harken back to the good old days. Trick-or-treating is a childhood tradition closely adhered to by its participants, however archaic it may be, because of the delicious reward of earning something, much like the RPG's of old. As someone who's both put the practice behind them and sometimes takes care of two nephews,…
Feel Good really went all-out on the fabric motif. The dreamy music that's likely to illicit warm feelings, the tender and nostalgic voice of the storybook narrator, the endearing patchwork style that works its way into nearly every part of the game – Kirby's Epic Yarn has detonated an atom bomb of adorable, and the only victims are our throats sore from making baby voices and cooing “Aww!” sounds. The…
Screen gets redder as you near death? Check. As the “To Be Continued” screen fades out at the end of Hydrophobia – yes, it's that kind of ending – I have very mixed feelings about the abruptness of the ending. Clearly, the game's cliffhanger ending doesn't bother to even try to give the player a sense of closure, and that's subject to much scrutiny. But I'm also a little relieved, because around almost every corner…
The art also sticks close to BioShock's art-deca style. Single-player downloadable content seems like exactly the kind of thing that those who bemoaned BioShock 2's existence were afraid of. The original BioShock's story was self-contained, they might argue, and thus, trying to expand the fiction of the game with stories that would reference the central material when the original game didn't allude to those…
DeathSpank's art style closely resembles that of developer Hothead's previous series, Penny Arcade Adventures. When going into something that telegraphs its intentions as clearly as DeathSpank , I’m usually turned off by it. There’s almost always a nagging thought that regularly reminds me, “Isn’t this funny? You should be laughing, because this is supposed to be funny.” I have the same kind of reaction to things…
What's going on in the picture? Doesn't matter just shoot it. For fans of the original Sin and Punishment, I can without much hesitation say this: Yes, Star Successor is the sequel you wanted. It blends the the fast-paced action of an on-rails shooter with the twitch-reflex timing of the bullet hell shooter as well as its predecessor. The Wii remote makes a much better pointer than the Nintendo 64's analog stick,…
Swimming/drowning is not a trick in Joe Danger. Avoid it whenever possible. Something about Joe Danger seems to attract crowds. Passerby -- though rare, considering I'm playing in my basement -- can't help but stop and stare, at least for a little while. They'll leave after I botch my 110th (the game counts your attempts) try at landing on a target and successfully ducking under the hurdle right next it, but the…
This is totally not in the DSi version of the game. Guess Why. Though God of War knockoffs litter the retail and digital shelves, the portable market has not yet reached critical mass on the number of games that encourage the most gratuitous kills possible. Hero of Sparta attempts to rectify this, and did so on the and PSP and specifically on the iPhone , where the God of War franchise had not yet clenched its…
I don't know what a "Sparkster" is, nor do I really care about the back story of a kingdom attacked by wolves and pigs consecutively. I don't know why my jet pack can let me fly in the air for several minutes one time, but only give me a burst of speed the next. I thought "Axel Gear" was a Gun 'n' Roses/Kojima Productions joint the first time I heard it. I definitely don't care for the last boss in the remake of…
More than most multiplayer games I've played, I can say with a good amount of confidence that I'm a great Fat Princess player. I place at the top of the leaderboard consistently, and when I don't, it's usually because I entered a match in progress. I know my way around most of the maps, how to exploit certain areas of the map to gain the upper hand, and know when to use what class. In short, in the week that I've…
For the kind of person who plays video games to experience scenarios which would be impossible to replicate otherwise, Metro 2033 seems like the ideal game. The dark, mutant-infested tunnels and dimly-lit communities of impoverished Russians offer a look at life in Moscow after something -- the game doesn't make it especially clear, but one can assume a nuclear holocaust -- causes humans to retreat from the…
Your Tetris tactics will mislead you; your Lumines strategy will slow you down. Chime , though visually reminiscent of the giants in the puzzle genre, is a game that will take some getting used to. It would be one thing if it were completely different -- all you'd have to do is learn the new ideas and apply them to the game. To excel at Chime , however, you must first unlearn judgments picked up during your 100th…
Mechanically, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth clearly stands as the highest point in the Ace Attorney series. Though somewhat controversial, many of Miles Edgeworth's changes help to streamline the process of working your way through the text-adventure game's courtroom drama. Rather than splitting the investigation and trial sequences, you'll do a small amount of crime scene work and then listen to…
Read the full review Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth
Initially, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx acts as a "man-check" of both your equipment and skills in Borderlands ; if you don't have high-quality weapons and know when to use what kind of elemental weapons, the Crimson Lance patrols and drones that populate the early areas of the game are going to keep you busy for quite some time. Like all of the DLC released thus far, General Knoxx caters enemies to a player's…
The first No More Heroes' free-roam city was the cause of many of the game's problems: every time you failed a side mission you had to drive all the way back to where you were handed the assignment, then drive back to the objective, the collectibles were all but useless, and getting to and from anywhere was more of a hassle than it was worth. That, along with the repetitive nature of having to amass enough money to…
Conceptually, Dark Void Zero is a pretty unique concept; taking the concept of the game Dark Void and fitting in onto the DSi with a fake-retro sprite art style is interesting even on a superficial level. The joke is that Zero is supposed to be the "original" game that the Xbox 360/PlayStation game was based on, when it's actually the other way around. Gags aside, Dark Void's gameplay transfers remarkably well to a…
Though its intro sequence is the biblical apocalypse, Darksiders doesn't make a good first impression; the beginning areas of the game don't differ much from the standard God of War levels, the combat feels much too simple, there's all of one combo to dispatch enemies, and the story sounds like something a fourteen-year-old has been kicking around in his head until he had the chance to apply it to some form of…
Aside from an in-game bank to house all of the guns you've likely been accumulating while playing Borderlands, Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot is essentially an attempt at capitalizing on the market popularized by Gears of War 2's Horde and Halo 3: ODST's Firefight modes -- sending wave after wave of increasingly vicious fodder towards players -- and adapting it to Borderlands' architecture. However, asking consumers to…
If you're asking yourself whether or not The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks will entice a player who's fallen out of love with the series -- either because of its reluctance to change or because of franchise fatigue -- the answer is that it might. If your frustration with the series is with its trademark structure, then you won't find much to love here; dungeons are still the game's main attraction, with the same…
Even two years after the release of the first Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft Montreal remains undisputed in their mastery of traversing through and scaling buildings. More than any other game I can think of, Assassin's Creed II makes climbing ledge-riddled towers, shimmying across rooftops, and skipping from one wooden platform to the other truly feel like second nature. You're not mashing the A button to jump up to the…
"Role-Playing Shooter" may be a fitting descriptor for Borderlands , but it's slightly misleading. It does combine Role-Playing and Shooter elements, but it doesn't do so in equal portions. It has all of the loot, character progression, and quest structure of RPG's (specifically MMO's), but the gameplay is nearly all shooter. Stats do factor into hits, determining both the damage you'll do and the chances of landing…
With as ripe as the medium is for mockery, it's surprising that actual parody is as rare as it is in the realm of video games. Even then, the few games that attempt to play thin storylines and derivative mechanics for laughs often fall into the same traps that they make fun of. They themselves employ these mechanics and stories, which misses the point of a work whose purpose is to "call out" other works for their…
For a game that once again treads the 2D platfomrer path (albeit with meticuluosly detailed 3D environments), Trine is able to feel surprisingly original by mixing a mastery of the established with the novelty of a couple of interesting new concepts. The titular astrological aspect unites the souls of three characters into one being, which at first seems like a somewhat forced excuse to be able to swap between them…
People who've seen Brütal Legend in ads or are interested by the heavy metal aesthetic of the game may find themselves confused and perhaps alienated by what it actually is. The thing about Brütal Legend that's most likely to alienate players is the bait-and-switch that occurs as you're playing the game. The game starts out as an action-adventure game that admittedly feels rough around the edges, but what happens is…
From a "value" perspective, Wet doesn't have all that much to offer. It's a pretty straightforward, 5-hour shooter with some challenge modes, collectibles, and extras to keep you busy. Of course, not every game has to have to the Wal-mart seal of approval. Even if it's short, if a game can provide the player with a quality experience, then there's not much of a need for the game to validate itself as a "value".…
Forgetting our small grievances with games is something we as players do often; it's easily done when we find the rest of the game so enjoyable. Flower, Sun, and Rain, however, is a game whose many flaws are not only numerous and glaring, but might also be intentional. This should be no surprise to anyone who's ever played a game developed by the ever-eccentric Suda 51. His games often straddle a line between…
Games often try to be an encompassing medium. So many titles attempt to have as much for the player to do as possible, with vehicle sequences, dialogue trees and time-wasting fetch quests. Variety can be wonderful thing, but when the whole is only connected parts, it dilutes whatever product was there to begin with. In this sense, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is the most "pure" game I have played in a long while. To…
