227 public written reviews
The views here are this user’s only and are not representative of Giant Bomb's thoughts and opinions on the discussed video game. GB's official reviews reside at giantbomb.com/reviews.
I am of the opinion that Persona 4 is a very peculiar piece of wonder, even if that magical awe is incidental. For all I know, it was an accident that Atlus’ schoolkids-and-tarot cards RPG/dating sim brushes with psychological issues, gender politics, family dynamics and does so with surprisingly affable characters. I mean, Persona 3 wasn’t this intelligent. Likewise, I have a fond place in my heart for Arc System…
The best word to describe the Marvel vs. Capcom Origins is “subdued.” Not subdued in the way the waves on a beach off the coast of Orlando hitting against the serene landscape is subdued. More like the way your underground subway is subdued against the bullet trains of Japan. One way or another, standing in front of one is going to fucking end your life. But one’s demise will be less of a blur of pain and confusion.…
I think at this point, there are three regions of thought in regards to Sonic nostalgia. There’ s the camp of people that just don’t think about Sonic the Hedgehog in their day-to-day lives; they are the great scientists, artists, leaders and free thinkers of the world. There are the people who actively curse Sega for ruining their childhood memories with images of interspecies relationships, bad camera angles and…
So these last few months have been a decidedly weird malaise for me. I feel like the medium of video games as a whole is failing to provide me with any kind of satisfaction. The big blockbuster disc releases are too mindless and unintelligent for my cerebral cortex, but the smaller arthouse games are too intelligent and complex for my mushy skull. I need some kind of middle ground. Intelligent murder games, maybe?…
I found the target audience for Skullgirls in a basement facility near a video game shoppe in downtown Toronto. This gentlemen’s club was sort of a modern day arcade, where tournament-caliber fighting game fans can ply their craft at the expense of people who wanted to be tournament-caliber fighting game fans. One guy asked me to do repeated Sub Zero low kicks so he could decide which Kitana attacks were best suited…
I lied. I said a few months back that I wouldn’t be purchasing Street Fighter X Tekken on account of learning a valuable lesson on how Capcom does business. I was the fool that purchased the Limited Edition of Ordinary Marvel vs. Capcom 3, guffawed at the homogenous collector’s comic that was loosely attached to the tin case, then sold said case immediately because Ultimate Less-Ordinary Marvel vs. Capcom 3…
After you bypass all of the data installations, trophy installations and even the prompt to check if there’s new downloadable content for you to give Capcom more of your money, the first sight one witnesses after booting Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is saliva. The introduction is a scrolling through the pages of the comic book that came with the special edition of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. You know, one of the once…
Not to get my melodrama on, but there’s a problem with seriousness. So many games try their damnedest to play the straightest of laces with material that isn’t especially well worth the investment in dignity. It’s hard to get particularly invested in a major war game where the solution to Russia’s invasion of the American heartland is to detonate a nuclear bomb in space. Or about the secret cult of Italian assassins…
Yup. Thrust upon us once again is another Zelda game, released at naturally the worst time of the year for people whom wish to do things like accomplish work, see loved ones or even play other video games. How long has it been since a non-Bioware, non-Bethesda game was released that was over 30 hours long? I mean a game where all 30 of those hours was dedicated to the main story. I feel like Nintendo dedicated…
It sure is great that all 6 billion human beings on this planet have individual tastes and opinions and aren’t just some manufactured collective Borg consciousness. Sure, the differences in beliefs can lead to war or death or genocide, but I’ll take that over sitting in a weird electrical-recharge-station thing inside a giant flying space cube any day. How awesome is it that we can choose our favorite songs, movies,…
Oh, PETA. I ironically love you guys so much. Not because I agree wholeheartedly with your beliefs. I can only do so much to defend animal rights with a Slim Jim in one hand and a fly-swatter in the other. But your oft-irrathttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifional attacks against unknowing targets serve more to assist your victims than harm. The “ Tofu Boy ” debacle from last year wound up giving the independently…
So I had recently been approached with the opportunity to write video game reviews for a website targeting teenage girls. Two thoughts popped into my head; one is that I can continue to procrastinate on editing that Spiderman Edge of Crap review I typed up weeks ago. Secondly, this would be a good chance to go reflect on my experience with this summer’s romance conspiracy puzzler, Catherine. After all, if there’s…
I don’t consider it a homecoming when I leave my apartment home to go downstairs and pick up the mail. I get no cause for celebration from returning to my humble abode after a grueling affair at the corner store. (Despite risking my life saying no to the kids asking me to buy them smokes.) Even traversing as far away as the distant land of downtown Toronto doesn’t quite warrant the fanfare Kirby seems to be getting…
I wonder if the rest of the Justice League gathers around the Fortress of Solitude and gossips amongst themselves their envy towards Batman. Superman doesn’t get to appear in any award-winning video games. Wonder Woman wished that the rest of the world spoke in hush tones about anything she’s done the way the world does the Christopher Nolan Batman films. Green Lantern fantasizes about having an animated series that…
Hey, check it, transhumanism! I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution is trying to be an ominous prophecy of the dangerous melding of flesh and machine. The thing is that I don’t know if that’s so much a future thing than a present thing. We’re already being augmented with laser eye surgery, replacement limbs, Taylor Lautner’s hair and other things that cannot be considered natural in any way, shape or form. Are…
One looks back at the lineage of X-Men games over the years, and sees that it’s a flimsy one. There have been great games, there have been less than great games. One can make the argument that the future for all mutantkind progressed as a species once LJN got their mitts off the franchise. But the one consistent fact about all of those titles is that they only have a skin-deep understanding of X-Men’s themes. You…
I remember the day when Majesco press-released to the world their plans to create a pan-media empire out of a new vampire franchise called Bloodrayne. There would be games. There would be comic books. There would be movies. There would be a Playboy spread. The logo looked like a cross getting titty-fucked. I would like to believe those comics turned out okay, because the movies were gutter trash, the games were…
It’s been a fucktastically long time since I’ve mustered the strength to hunker down and write a video game review. My reasons range from straight-up apathy to personal distractions like “moving” and “pools” and “gyms” and other semi-active activities. But the big reason is Persona 4, a crooked-ass, super-silly, super-serious oddity of a Playstation 2 game that made me embrace video game addiction for the first time…
The revelation that I’ve had over the past two weeks is that not only is wrestling goofy and ridiculous, but that it should be goofy and ridiculous. You take a look at today’s current WWE product and you have guys like Randy Orton speaking in solemn tones about his family and John Morrison staring awkwardly and uncomfortably at the camera attempting to “act”. This is not entertainment to me, John Cena as an…
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 strikes me as an emotionally polarizing game in the sense that its fans seemingly loved it and its makers seemingly despised working on it. You’d have to loathe the action-packed, explosion-fueled anime violence-fest fighting game you were developing to have included such grating lounge jazz music and the carnival motif stage. That game rather haphazardly threw just about every other set of…
Read the full review Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds
So I can envision in my head a meeting between Shinji Mikami of PlatinumGames and the president of Sega, whom I presume answers to the name “Supreme Asshole Man.” I envision Mr Asshole Man giving Shinji and his friends permission to have their crazy niche action game about the librarian stripper with the guns on her heels and old arcade games in her heart published by Sega. But in return, SAM demands that Shinji…
So I’ve never read Journey to the West, the ye ‘olde Chinese storyline that Enslaved is claiming to be inspired by. Though I can extrapolate my experiences from the Dante’s Inferno game and pick out the parts of Enslaved that were altered for the American video game-playing public. I don’t think Journey to the West has, for example, a post-apocalyptic setting, or a hero so chiseled that he can regenerate health by…
So every year, I like to give out a very unprestigious award for the Worst Named Game of 2010. This non-honour goes out to the game whose title is either too pretentious, annoying or mis-marketed for its own good. Something so repulsive, I feel ashamed to tell my friends about it by name. Kingdom Hearts came very close to winning twice in a row for the very self-serving subtitle of “Birth By Sleep”, but I think this…
So all of the assorted end of the year video game year recaps was more than enough to nudge me back in the direction of Mass Effect 2. It was certainly enough to motivate me to finally get to my second playthrough, this time as a renegade jerk! Shoot first, ask questions maybe! Convince my teammates that the best way to overcome their personal demons is to murder somebody. Womanize the lady at the desk! And yet in…
Fuck you Activision. Fuck you for pumping out so many soulless Guitar Hero games and Band Hero games that you ruined the rest of the music genre. Because of your inability to pace the release of your wares, we now find ourselves with a disenfranchised public that lost their passion for matching coloured notes on a preset highway. It’s a shame, because it’s not like other developers have stopped thinking about cool…
My advice for the day is to resist peer pressure in all forms. When your buddy Pete in school is telling you to take a puff of that cig, just say no. You already know the dark path that follows: a dark path of taking smoke breaks in -20 degree weather and spending money on packs that could’ve easily gone into other vices like booze or Big Macs. Well, multiple coworkers erked and nudged me for weeks on end to play…
The Kinect is a very special kind of hardware, both identical and polar opposite to the motion options of the Wiimote and Playstation Move. All three of them involve some kind of motion of the body beyond your thumbs, but otherwise…Not to rip into the Wiimote or PS3 Move (though I will gladly rip into the Wiimote anytime, actually, fucking Wii Sports) but the required motion in those games is limited to arm flicks…
So lets start this review for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood by talking about the end of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. And I won’t spoil the ending, except to say the ending sucks. Then again, the ending for every Assassin’s Creed game sucks. All of the games end with a horrible cliffhanger, asking players to pipe over $60 to find out what happens in the next game (and presumably to be left with another horrible…
I’ve learned over the past year or so that making a retro-driven video game throwback is not quite as easy as it seems. Merely applying new textures for HD television screens is not enough, as it sucked the timelessness out of Turtles in Time. You can’t go so far as to completely rearrange everything about the original game’s themes (Blaster Master Overdrive’s “kid who lost his frog finds a magical tank replaced…
Yup. It’s a zombie game. I need another beer. Some corporate executive at Take-Two made a trip to Toronto one day and attended our annual zombie march. (And yes, Toronto has a zombie march. We cannot be the only city doing this!) He saw the hundreds of people painted and dressed in full creeper/geek attire and decided that people will buy anything zombie-related, regardless of how bored and exhausted the rest of the…
I thought about trying to review the Kinect sensor itself, but I think you already know whether or not you want to buy this peculiar device. A divisive machine to be certain, anyone that has heard about the Kinect for a great length of time has long since formed an opinion, so you don’t need mine. If your idea of fun involves having friends and family over and playing lighthearted entertainment for laughs while…
While I do tend to talk a fair share about video games to the people in my life, I try to skew the conversation towards the interests of said person. My macho-would-be-tough-guy friends will hear about the time I diced up three straight dudes in a Gears 2 while chugging a Dew down like a man. The women can learn of my sensitive side as I discuss the charming merits of stitching a plush bear’s cut together in Kirby’s…
I feel like every time I’ve talked to someone I know about my experience playing Fable 3, the net result is the receiver of my discussion being turned off on Fable 3. This might be because it’s hard to translate “Stephen Fry is hilarious in his vocal performance as a crooked industrialist” to someone who doesn’t know who Stephen Fry is, or how to spell industrialist. It could also be because, well, explaining how…
Kirby’s Epic Yarn is the game I want to throw back at the guys that used to make fun of my Nintendo 64 back in school. The big, machismo-fueled tough guys (that were guidoing it up well before Jersey Shore was a thing) that dismissed the Banjo Kazooies and Donkey Kong 64s of the world as too childish for people with a double-digit age. The people that would rather be playing the M-rated games the ESRB deemed them 7…
As I was doling out candy to the assorted door-to-door treasure hunters last Halloween, I began to wonder about today’s generation of costumed kids. Do they go through the same dilemmas we did? Do they argue amongst themselves on whether or not to “do both sides of the street”? Or get upset when they draw the courage to visit the really creepy looking house (with gravestones, scary music and a guy in the toy casket…
As the 26th Sonic game released, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 aims to numerically confuse the world. It also aims to address just about any and every complaint levied at the series since the existence of polygons. There is no beastiality love story. There is no ridonkulous plot. Sonic doesn’t transform into a wolf form and have crappy combat sequences. (Though I’ll confess to being weirdly curious about Sonic Unleashed at…
Gah! I can’t decide whether or not I idolized or merely tolerated Comic Jumper. If you judge a title on the sole merits of its gameplay, then this is the dog’s bollocks. It’s a not-particularly-great shooter that is rife with annoying filler. But yet the overall experience is just so damned strange and amusing that it almost has to be played by anyone that can appreciate a good South Park episode. In trying to write…
I don’t know whether or not I should be proud that I’ve reached 200 reviews, or ashamed that I’ve made not a single dollar for it. Someone offered me free PC strategy games based on Napolean or something one time for reviewing purposes, but that would’ve been a very quick means to aggravate that site’s sponsors. So review number 200, it’s going to be a game near and dear to my heart. One that swooned me long enough…
Part of me felt confused when I caught wind that Civilization 5 would present a more streamlined experience than in the past. I never thought that the original Civilization games were particularly complex (okay, maybe Civ 3). I mean, what’s so hard to understand? Cavemen need to build the Wheel to pump out chariots in order to conquer Moscow. Seems simple enough. I figure that if you can understand what it takes for…
Meet the Other M in my recent life. ModNation Racers. I feel like I’ve been putting off giving this peculiar racing game the time it deserves on account of the recently released and comically-named Metroid title. Maybe I underrated Other M and how replayable the game is when you skip those awful cutscenes. This is a shame because 1. ModNation Racers has pretty amusing cutscenes (considering how they’re skewered…
So many comic book characters have been around for so long that they have undergone numerous reboots and reinventions in the name of relevance. (Or in the name of creating an excuse to retell the Green Goblin murdering Peter Parker’s love interest storyline again and again.) Shattered Dimensions purports to combine the characters from various reboots in an unlikely crossover, and why not? I know I would love to see…
I’d like to take a second to prove something. Remember how great Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox was? Remember the plot to Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox? No? Point proven. I feel like Team Ninja has had this problem for years, where they spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars developing elaborately spectacular cutscenes of strong visual quality, but with poor writing, voice-acting, logic, respect for women and other…
So I was in the Best Buy parking lot talking with my brother about things that brothers are want to talk about. Important issues included women, cell phones, the revelation of a secret mission in Starcraft 2 whose existence completely invalidates my Starcraft 2 review for some reason. And why I haven’t played Starcraft 2 online in several weeks. Avoiding the real reason (because I suck at using supply depots to…
First, some cleaning notes. I had twice planned to see the Scott Pilgrim Versus the World movie over this weekend but my friend twice vanished on me. Maybe things work a little differently in her native Mississauga, but where I come from, you try not to agree to see a movie the same day as your brother’s big birthday party. I don’t know. Fortunately I was in Toronto at the time and there’s never not something…
There exists an impenetrable wall, 52 1/3 feet tall, that keeps me from figuring out sports games. I can’t quite comprehend the wall’s existence, or who built the wall (probably John Madden himself), but I know that this wall doesn’t let me function well at simulation sports games. I’ll admit that I am not much of an expert on sports that don’t involve shirtless men holding each other’s bodies, and that I can…
The Summer of Arcade has certainly simmered down, as there exists a real lack of excitement over the impending releases in my mind. Maybe we peaked early with the semi-avant-garde Limbo, and are now reduced to retreading of old material. Take the redux of an 11 year old arcade boat racing game, or the bizarre repackaging of assets from the last 13 years of Castlevania games, or the return of 14 year old Lara Croft,…
I’ve spent the last few days indulging in Harmony of Despair and I’m still not exactly certain what exactly Harmony of Despair is trying to be. Is it supposed to be a Diablonian gear-driven fire sale? A co-op adventure where players are made to work together to reach a common, anti-vampire goal? A developer trying to showcase as much low-resolution art on a single screen as humanly possble? An attempt to fill my…
Maybe my brain functions a little differently from the rest of the world, but I always find the hardest part of writing reviews to be the introductory paragraph. I know what I don’t want to do with my beginning and go into the usual spiel of “it’s been a long time coming, the sequel to the all time great strategy game is here” because quite frankly, everyone starts their Starcraft 2 review like that. (And I wish…
