The Games of Chance

Darksiders II drops June 26th.

2012-02-14T13:59:00.000-08:00

Binary Domain consequence trailer.

2012-02-14T04:20:00.000-08:00

Faaaantastic. A system where you AI teammates will intentionally not help you and get in the way - and won't shut up about what a dick you are while doing it. That could get old very, very fast.

That said, I love the way the rest of this game looks. Crap.

Obligation Day is almost here (NSFW)!

2012-02-13T13:45:00.000-08:00

For the last few years I've attempted to offer some gaming-related Valentines around nowish. This year I'm simply going to show you a comic.

I've been reading it since about... two weeks after it started. I have no idea when that was, but it's one of my favorite webcomics of all time - and that's all I'm going to tell you about it, because it is totally and in no way, shape or form fit for all audiences.

Going on averages, every single one of you who read this blog are over eighteen - likely pushing thirty, in fact - but I'm not prepared to take that chance that a kid could wander in here, click a link, and get swept away into the untold fathoms of sexual perversity the internet holds.

...not that they'd really need my help, obviously - but it's the principle of the thing! No linking to porn, hilarious or otherwise! Fortunately, the most recent comic is mostly penis-and-vagina-free, though still totally NSFW

Enjoy.

That said - for the record - I am totally doin' it up for Valentine's Day.

Uncharted: Golden Abyss launch trailer.

2012-02-13T11:43:00.000-08:00

Well, this certainly makes me feel better about Golden Abyss - particularly after reading Kotaku's damning review. I just have to keep in mind it got an 8/10 from Eurogamer, along with some of the best games in history.

Oh, and speaking of Eurogamer, if you have a Kinect, small children or a habit of throwing drunken parties, you should read this.

Personal note.

2012-02-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

Nothing much is going on today, unless you want to watch a twelve-minute video of Sony folks talking up the Vita.

That said, I did want to add a footnote to the below review: I was really surprised by how good Shank 2 is. It's still kind of amazing to me.

Tonight Blue came by to see the game, and I ran through a couple of levels to show him the presentation and mechanics. Sometimes I question myself - what I lay out in a review, I mean - but it feels very gratifying to show the game to someone else, see the game through their eyes, and find we see the same value in it.

There was one sequence - one of a hundred - where I had a half-dozen enemies around me. The game just flows so beautifully - dodge, grab, cancel into a dodge, grab, throw, dodge, counter, grab, throw, pounce, throw, pounce, grind, shotgun blast to the face. After wiping a room with maximum style, I would look over to Blue and hold out my hand in a motion which asked, "...okay, so - incredible, right?"

He just looked at me with wide eyes and nodded.

It felt good. I am right about Shank 2. It's wonderful.

REVIEW - Shank 2.

2012-02-11T23:27:00.000-08:00

Three or four times a year, I'll discover I have almost nothing bad to say about a game. If said game has any problems, I find myself explaining why those facets are the way they are and go on to gush about how phenomenal the rest of the experience is.

Yep. Shank 2.

Shank 2 is a significant leap in quality over its predecessor. Not in terms of presentation, structure, or pacing, but in terms of the heart of the game. While almost all of your combat abilities from the original are retained, the feel of playing Shank 2 is entirely different. It is fast, savage and feels absolutely perfect in the hand.

I love this game.

Many of the title's new mechanics seem like window-dressing, at first. The ability to pick up dropped weapons from foes, the ability to throw items, the ability to counter an enemy by ripping the baseball bat from his hands a tenth of a second before he brains you with it, shoving it in his mouth and kicking it so hard his head explodes in ludicrous gibs. These initially come across as extras - extraneous little boxes to be checked, in keeping with classic tropes of the brawler genre.

Shank's dodge maneuver, now mapped to the right analog stick, feels particularly strange at first. It's not until a few hours into the game, when you find yourself in a particularly sticky situation, that you discover a profound appreciation for these additions and tweaks - and, crucially, how they are implemented.

Once Shank 2's combat system winds its way into your head, once your fingers begin responding instantly to unconscious intention, the game and its mechanics snap into focus and you experience what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity: it all works beautifully.

It had better. Shank 2 can be just as brutally challenging as its predecessor - the difference is, when you die in Shank 2, it never feels unfair or cheap. It's only ever because you brought the wrong tactics to the table, or your reflexes failed you.

Take the above tableau, for example. Shank has put himself in precisely the correct position to deal with his situation.

He has grabbed one of the enemies and thrown them into the others, knocking all to the ground. This grants a moment's respite to single out one target - in this case, the brute. If Shank had, instead, pounced on one of the smaller grunts and attempted to execute a chainsaw grind (hold down triangle for a longer grind!), the brute's rising attack would knock him off his target before he had completed his attack. By grinding the larger fellow, he'll be able to complete his assault just in time to evade the attacks of the smaller grunts - who don't have rising attacks, and must gather themselves to their feet before taking a swing - and re-position himself for the next series of moves.

You have to be constantly thinking about stuff like this. You have to be aware that you can grab and attack this enemy while holding them by the throat, but that enemy won't allow you to execute any grab attacks and you're only able to fling them aside. You have to know when you have time for three shank strikes before a brutal finisher from your machetes, when to switch out your shotgun for pistols, and when shoving a mine up an enemy's ass is wiser than jamming a grenade in their mouth.

It's all very tactical, and surprisingly fast-paced.

Like all the best ultra-fast-paced games, once you begin thinking as fast as the game is moving, you start to see how - in reality - the game is a series of staccato beats. Each beat is the opportunity for you to execute a move - whipping out your shotgun to blast an airborne foe, for example - where the wrong choice, fueled by an inaccurate understanding of your situation, will smack an eighth of your life bar off.

If it sounds challenging, it is - but it's challenging in the good way. The way where you're constantly learning about your abilities and the timing of its systems, constantly discovering new tactics and strategies. It took until my second playthrough, for example, to discover that I could grab a standing enemy, shank him twice, transition into a ground hold, transition from that into a throw, go into a pounce and land on him in a ground hold, haul him to his feet and shank him into the air for a juggle combo.

It's the type of game where you can enter a situation and get your ass kicked six ways from Sunday over and over - but once you come to a clear understanding of its systems and your abilities, when you find yourself in that wonderful gamer Zen state of total immersion, you will enter the exact same fight and dance your way through it in a blinding, zig-zagging blur of throws, shanks, stabs, gunshots, dodges and counters - and walk away from it without a scratch.

In Shank 2, you feel sublimely lethal thanks to enemies and mechanics that twirl and pirouette along a razor's edge of beautiful, frame-specific risk and reward.

You gotta' know when to hold 'em, know when to throw them.

Any negative remarks I could level at Shank 2 could be argued aside as easily as countering a pistol thug's shot.

The cutscenes are compressed, but if I were Klei, I'd compress them too. They're a small studio with a small budget - a budget that would get hammered by the fees Sony and Microsoft levee on a publisher any time their content is downloaded from PSN or XBL, respectively. It makes perfect sense to have Shank 2 take up as little hard drive space as possible.

The narrative is anorexic, but we're not sitting down for a period piece or a political thriller, here. If Shank's gameplay genre is brawler, its narrative genre is an action movie circa 1995. All we need, in that context, is a flashy rogue's gallery and a series of ever-increasing challenges which establish that our hero is the most badass badass in all of badassery. In terms of telling that story, Shank 2 is a sterling success.

It understands exactly what it is, and doesn't attempt to overreach or embellish itself with needless exposition, mechanics or features. It's small, meticulously carpentered to provide the experience its creators had in mind, and - by being the product of such a focused vision, so prepared to address criticisms of the original - it achieves its goal with grace and precision.

I know what you're thinking - and you're right.
That shark is about to get fucked up.

Shank 2 is - as of February 11th, 2012 - the most fun I've ever had with a PSN or XBLA title. It looks utterly gorgeous, thanks to Jeff Agala's striking, silhouette-conscious style. Its animation remains slick and expressive without sacrificing the responsiveness its gameplay requires. Its music is excellent, its pacing never lets up, its construction is deeply considered.

This game is precisely what it means and wants to be - even if that goal falls somewhat short of the triple-A standard. It's also precisely what a sequel should be - a crazed, gleeful, foaming-at-the-mouth realization of the original's potential, and a definitive entry in its genre.

I've never said that about a PSN or XBLA title before - only ever suggesting that such games are merely acceptable representatives of their form - so rest assured, this is a very measured statement:

Shank 2 is the funnest, best-designed brawler I've played since Bayonetta.

THE GOOD

fantastic character design, incredible animation

fun

the music is genre-perfect

fun

striking overall presentation - it's endlessly fun to just watch

a silly, minimal story that hits the right notes and never gets in the way

excellent in-game presentation

the boss fights - rather disappointing last time - are a ton of fun. You actually fight these guys instead of just luring them into stunning themselves.

a ton of variety in locales, enemies and miniboss encounters

the game gives you good reason to switch weapons, on occasion

the platforming feels very smooth and intuitive

the combat system is absolutely excellent, and the enemy AI and levels have been constructed to maximize your use of every tactic and talent

lots of fun

lots of blood

hidden trinkets and unloackables to discover

co-op (basically horde mode) is a ton of fun, and demands real teamwork

co-op is local and online

hard mode is seriously hard, totally rewarding and never feels cheap

all killer, no filler

THE BAD

the cutscenes are compressed

THE VERDICT

Shank 2 is an impeccable example of its genre, and gorgeous to boot. Buy it.

FEATURE - Totally and severely off-topic.

2012-02-10T16:07:00.000-08:00

This post has absolutely nothing to do with video games

and may, in fact, make you very,

very uncomfortable.

So. Burqas, "sluts", and sexual violence.

I live in Canada, where there is an ongoing public discussion about whether or not Burqas and Niqabs should be allowed in workplaces/banks/anywhere that security is a concern. When I'm reading a MacLeans or a newspaper piece about Muslim culture in Canada (we get a few "honor killings" up here - eugh), for some reason my mind always goes to the stories I would read about the experiences of women in their birth countries - Afghanistan, mostly, because that's where a lot of Canadian troops were, and still are, stationed after 9/11.

Did you know Canadians are supposedly the best snipers in the world? Anyway...

What pisses me off most are the tales of how women are treated. Being killed for wanting to attend school, for example - but the most disgusting stories involve sexual violence - and those are, horrifyingly, the most common. A woman in a small village is raped by a half-dozen men. The men suffer no punishment for - or even acknowledgement of - their crime, and the woman is outcast as a wanton whore.

"If only she'd been fully swathed in her Burqa! She wouldn't have been raped if she hadn't been showing so much juicy female skin! She was asking for it!"

Guh!

Now, we can sit here on our North American High Horses and cluck our tongues about how backwards these Muslum savages are, or we can join them and hang our heads in shame because we have pulled some similarly insane shit in our day - and by "our day" I mean all the fucking time. Here's one from my home province, for example.

"Rhodes and a friend met the 26-year-old woman and her girlfriend earlier that night outside a bar under what the judge called "inviting circumstances." [Judge] Dewar specifically noted the women were wearing tube tops with no bra, high heels and plenty of makeup."

They made their intentions publicly known that they wanted to party," said Dewar. He said the women spoke of going swimming in a nearby lake that night "notwithstanding the fact neither of them had a bathing suit."
-source-

So prominent, educated people in our society can be this idiotic. But don't think you Americans - or the common, uneducated masses - are any better! Here's one from Texas last year.

"Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?"
-source-

That 11-year-old girl began receiving threats from her community, because - among the twenty eight men and teens who gang-raped her over the course of Thanksgiving 2010 - there were some "star athlete"s and children of prominent community members.

“It’s just destroyed our community ... These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives."
-source-

Oh, those poor boys. That girl was eleven. She did not invite it upon herself. They had a choice.

There is a profound and hideous irony, here. We tacitly accept such terrible and disgusting treatment of women because there is, as the core of this, a terrible and disgusting assumption being made about the mental and emotional capacity of men. The belief that we cannot be at once thoughtful, caring human beings and sexual beings. The concept that a man has no choice than to attack any female who may be viewed as an efficient sexual conquest. The concept that a man is, therefor, not responsible for said attack - because, what, we're too fucking stupid or horny to view a woman as anything but a sheath for a sword?

Bull. Shit.

I had a conversation with my younger brother on this topic - he's a rather well-read fellow - and he pointed out that, to a degree, in-the-heat-of-the-moment, idiotic decisions have been actively bred into humanity. Success and stupid decisions often go hand in hand. Rape was likely very common in the hundreds of thousands/millions of years it took our species to develop - and the past thirty-thousand years haven't done much to remove the programming of a man as the sexually dominant aggressor, any more than it has removed our intolerance of dairy.

There is an argument, then, that men are governed entirely by our schlongs, and you ladies had best stow the tank tops and invest in some turtlenecks, lest our mighty members wrench control away from our brains and force their way into you.

There's an argument - to be sure - but not one I agree with. I have been in countless circumstances of sexual invitation and consciously - mindfully - chosen to avoid it, until it takes place within an environment and relationship that I would deem healthy. I have that power, and I submit to you that all men, in fact, do - if they choose it.

I'm going to leave you with the quote that gave me the impetus to write this - a few paragraphs from a fellow named Hugo Schwyzer, who perfectly crystallizes my position on the subject when discussing Toronto's first-ever SlutWalk - a yearly march in protest of violence against women - better than I ever could.

"There are so many things that trouble me about the obsession with regulating women’s bodies. But as a man, I am particularly exasperated at the assumption that lies beneath the insistence on modesty: the myth that men cannot control themselves. As feminists often point out, the real “man-haters” are those who promote modest dress for women out of the belief that men lack self-control. There is nothing more contemptuous than the suggestion that those of us with penises and Y chromosomes are prisoners of our biology, liable to rape or commit infidelity at the first sign of cleavage. The myth of male weakness sells us woefully, heartbreakingly short.

I honor SlutWalk for many reasons. But I appreciate one assumption that the organizers made in particular. Though what constitutes “slutty” clothing is obviously open to debate, SlutWalkers believe in men’s capacity to do two things at once: be aroused by what we see while honoring the humanity of the woman whose body attracts our eye. The most pernicious of all lies about men is that because of our make-up, lust and empathy can’t coexist within us. If you want kind and compassionate men who will respect women’s boundaries, the myth suggests, those women will have to conceal the parts of themselves that will turn men bestial and irresponsible.

We present women with a brutal binary: hide your sexuality and be respected; show your sexuality and be slut-shamed, harassed, or worse. But if ever there were a false dichotomy, rooted in ignorance about male identity, male biology, and male potential, this is it. While none of us want to live in a culture where women are compelled to display those parts of themselves they’d like to keep private, none of us should settle for living in a society where women are compelled to conceal those parts of themselves they’d occasionally like to display.

Men rape and harass not because of biological imperative but because of cultural permission. To paraphrase George W. Bush, we treat men with the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Of course, the real price for those low expectations is paid by women, who become responsible for managing and redirecting what we refuse to expect men to manage for themselves."
-source-

TL:DR - we are responsible for our own actions.

Confirmed: LittleBigPlanet Karting is in development.

2012-02-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

It's a seriously official tweet - which is just... what, did Modnation Racers - which you have on like, three platforms - not take off like you wanted? 'Cause that is almost literally LittleBigPlanet Karting. You totally pushed it as the next member of your "Play, Create, Share" thing.

And nobody much cared about it then, so you're going to devalue the LBP brand by spreading it to this new genre nobody except Mario Kart fans care about? Well that's... that's...

Mass Effect 3 FemShep trailer and screenshots!

2012-02-10T13:37:00.000-08:00

Finally. You have no idea how hard it is to track down just screenshots of a standard-designed lady Shepard, so I'm most pleased with the higher profile BioWare is giving Hale's Shepard, this time around.

Personal note.

2012-02-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

This week at work has been particularly grueling, so I'm just going to post this link to the record-shattering kickstarter for Tim Schafer's next game (which you should totally give money to, if you have any) and say that I'm going to retire for the night, play some Shank 2 on hard mode, and I'll hopefully do up a review tomorrow.

Goodnight, Wonderland.

Lollipop Chainsaw Valentine's Day trailer.

2012-02-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

Finally, we learn what the deal is with the severed head Juliet keeps on her belt. Turns out they're in lurrrve.

...annnd beat Shank 2.

2012-02-09T02:14:00.000-08:00

Well. I feel (almost) uniformly positive about this one. I'm going to have to give it a whirl on hard mode, but yeah... this is the best downloadable game I've played since...

Review soon.

This is Shank 2's launch trailer.

2012-02-08T23:55:00.001-08:00

...because I'm quite sure you don't spend enough time thinking about Shank 2.

True Crime: Hong Kong is now Sleeping Dogs.

2012-02-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

Apparently True Crime: Hong Kong was killed by Activision a while back. It's since been picked up by Square Enix. They've tossed the title, thank goodness - True Crime was essentially a badge of anti-quality - and offered up the above trailer, which gives us absolutely no indication how the game is actually looking. Fortunately, they were thoughtful enough to include four screenshots to peruse.

If you're curious what the game looked like in action the last time we saw it, check out this cinematic/gameplay trailer from like, three years ago.

The new title alone is a huge improvement.

Movie trailers!

2012-02-08T23:44:00.001-08:00

Awww, no more Matt Damon. But Jeremy Renner! That ain't bad!

Wait, what's this...

...cool!

The Aggression Scale? What the heck's that?

Hm. Well that looks kind of awesome. Food for thought!

Game Diary - Shank 2.

2012-02-08T00:10:00.000-08:00

Shank 2 is the best game of 2012. So far. I mean, in terms of new games I've played it's only in competition with Scarygirl and Amy - so that's not saying much - but that doesn't make it less true. At the moment.

This game is precisely what you want a sequel to be. It's everything you loved about the original, with the good stuff expanded upon and the bad stuff ironed out.

I loved Shank for its great-playing combat, accessible systems with a modicum of depth, gorgeous presentation and award-winning animation. I sighed and accepted its epic load times, cruel difficulty spikes and moments of arbitrary cheapness because the rest was so lovely. Shank 2 is all of the good with (almost) all of the bad removed - thus far.

There was one difficulty spike, so far - in the third level. But after the cutscene that ended the second level, I didn't give a crap. I'm not prepared to spoil it, so I'll just say it's one of the awesomest cutscenes I've ever seen. I'm including Darksiders, Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy games in that assessment, by the way.

[update]I'll bet someone's ripped a walkthrough to YouTube already... yep, here it is. If you want to see the offendingly pleasing cutscene, skip to 11:10.

Just ignore the commentary. [/update]

Load times are much better, bosses are much more fun... it's wonderful.

It's wonderful when you sit down to a game you had massive anticipation for, and find yourself proven right in your belief that it would be awesome.

Shank 2 is awesome. So far.

Minecraft's Notch offers to fund Psychonauts 2.

2012-02-07T23:57:00.000-08:00

The internet lit afire today with a few tweets from Markus Persson and Steven Dengler, but the story actually begins last Friday, when Double Fine Awesome Leaderdude and legendary developer Tim Schafer (Brutal Legend, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle) gave a brief interview to gaming site Digital Spy, and spoke about the possibility of a Psychonauts sequel.

"I mean I get a lot of, on Twitter or whatever, daily questions about Psychonauts 2. And I would love to do Psychonauts 2. I've actually pitched that to publishers several times and no-one has taken the bait so far.

I'd love to do that game, but I'd have to convince someone to just give me a few million dollars, that's all."

Tim also sagely points out that many of his cherished, hugely original games would never have been created if any of his earlier brilliant but commercially tepid titles had required sequels. "If I did a sequel to Full Throttle there wouldn't have been Grim Fandango, and so and so on down the line."

Which is, well, sage. At the same time, pretty much anyone who played Psychonauts wants a sequel. It was a funny, well-written, visually striking 3D platformer with a brilliant emotional core. Like much of Double Fine's products, it was a pretty-decent game and a sublime experience.

It seems that Markus Persson took an interest in the story - and this is where things get interesting. Markus Persson is otherwise known as Notch - the man who made Minecraft. Which sold millions upon millions of copies. He's probably got a money bin like Scrooge McDuck that he likes to swim around in - and this nouveau-riche fellow enjoys throwing his cash around. Today, he offered to throw it at Tim, and the concept of Psychonauts 2.

Tim, it should be noted, hasn't said anything about it - save for the fact that he didn't know about the tweet when Kotaku woke him up calling about it. The tweet immediately became news, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun followed up with a tweet to Notch attempting to clarify if he was really saying what we think he's saying.

Turns out, yes he is.

By early this evening, Schafer had woken up, had a cup of coffee and was prepared to comment on the idea. He told Kotaku

"Could happen! I have found funding on Twitter before!"

Keen-eyed folks, at this point, noticed that Steven Dengler of Dracogen - who helped find funding for Costume Quest's PC version and Psychonauts' Mac version - began firing off tweets to Notch and Schafer.

It seems things got serious - because the discussion is no longer taking place within view of the public.

...and that's the story. Interesting. It'll be way-cool if it happens - and I sure hope it's not another bloody 360 exclusive.

I Am Alive Survival Trailer.

2012-02-07T12:08:00.000-08:00

These get a lot less interesting as time goes on. I guess there's only so much you can show us of a game that has climbing, finding equipment and combat before we're all like "meh."

I mean, I'm still stoked for I Am Alive, but remember last year? When we'd never seen gameplay?

Ah. Those were the halcyon days.

Kinect Star Wars bundle drops April 3rd.

2012-02-07T12:05:00.001-08:00

Oh, c'mon - you know you want it.

A crapload of Spec Ops: The Line screenshots and concept art.

2012-02-06T22:37:00.000-08:00

Slideshow! You didn't forget about Spec Ops: The Line, did you?

February : The Plannening.

2012-02-05T22:31:00.000-08:00

February is just packed with games that I am going to need to chow down on. It is, to be clear, very weird to have to be so choosy about what to play and what not to play so early in the year - but there simply won't be enough time to spend with all the games I'm interested in this month.

I write this post because - in addition to there not being much newsy musings to speak of - this is what's on my mind, lately. How am I gonna' swing this?

Well, let's figure it out. The first important date of the month is February 7th - just two sleeps away.

Shank 2 and The Simpsons Arcade both drop on the 7th - and one can rest assured, I won't be passing up either. Shank 2 demands a review, but I wonder if The Simpsons will actually require one?

I mean, honestly, what's the point? Here's all it would say:

"The Simpsons Arcade Game certainly hasn't aged well, in terms of presentation. The sound is tinny and the (expressive) sprites are ancient and profoundly jaggy, when compared against anything produced since the Super Nintendo. If, like me, you have a soft spot in your heart for this game, it's certainly worth the ten dollar price tag. If you lack the required nostalgia, you'll only discover a game that lacks all the advancements of the brawler genre from the past fifteen years.

If you want a great 2-D sprite-based brawler, check out Muramasa: The Demon Blade or Odin Sphere. If you want something current-gen, get Shank (or Shank 2), Castle Crashers or Scott Pilgrim."

At the same time, I think it would probably be best to review it - just because there will be no way I'll be able to complete and review Kingdoms of Alamur: Reckoning or even The Darkness II before the 15th.

The Vita officially launches in North America on February 22nd - but if you order the "first edition bundle," you get it a week early.

I can't wait. I expect it will be a rather different experience, owning a piece of gaming hardware at the precise dawn of its release - something I have never experienced before. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it will be an entirely pleasant exercise.

New consoles and handhelds are known, frankly, to be a bit shit right out of the gate. Consider the original run of the 360 with its horrific red ring of death. Consider the Foreman Grill-sized PS3 that first launched, complete with its jet-engine fan. The bulky PSP-1000, the cracked hinges of the Nintendo DS - the list goes on.

First iterations of hardware are always failure-prone. Judging from reports surrounding its release in Japan, there is a 10% chance my Vita will have a faulty touchscreen, or turn out prone to projectile-vomiting pea soup - who knows? Expect the unexpected, and expect the unexpected to be unpleasant.

The question is, then, why am I bothering if it's probably a bad idea? Simple: so I can blog about it.

'Course, I'd better blog about it fast, because come the 21st, shit gets real.

Grand Knights History - if Amazon and GameTrailers are to be trusted - drops on February 21st. I've got an order in for Amazon.com's UMD version, but I also intend to get the PSN version - I really want to play this thing on the Vita's humongoid screen. It will, I'm afraid, become my top priority for the remainder of February - and given that strategy RPGs are notoriously involving affairs, I worry that I'll be able to get a review on it out within a month of its arrival.

I'd better be able to, though - 'cause February is far from over.

As much as I'd love to give Asura's Wrath a playthrough - or snap up a copy of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - February 22nd is the day that the Vita's official launch (and so, its official launch lineup) becomes available.

There's lot of other Sony stalwarts in the mix, of course. There's a Hot Shots Golf game and a WipEout and a Lumines, but all I'm interesting in getting my hands on is a portable version of Uncharted.

Here's hoping its campaign is similarly downsized, 'cause I'll have just seven days until

bam - SSX. Of the five games I will definitely purchase and play in February, SSX is the one that is not up for debate in any way, shape or form.

I won't care where I'm at with Golden Abyss, I won't care if Grand Knights History has utterly absorbed me - I will drop it all and start playing SSX. I will select Kaori, master every run in this game, and review the hell out of it.

Now, I hope you're seeing a theme here - 'cause I'll have precisely seven days with SSX before another little title drops, lest it fly under everyone's radar...

It never ends.

The Death and Return of Superman in 17 minutes.

2012-02-04T22:15:00.000-08:00

Starring:

Elden Henson

Elijah Wood

Mandy Moore

Morgan Krantz

and many more...

Yep. Worth watching. I was always curious about the four-Superman thing. This does a pretty good job explaining it!

Game Diary - demos.

2012-02-03T19:15:00.000-08:00

A good dose of demos have dropped lately, providing additional insight into some of this Winter's upcoming releases. The verdict, as a general rule, is that many games are best avoided until they come down in price - which, as a general rule, is a strategy I do not adhere to. Still, it's nice to be proven right about certain properties - or at least reminded how I feel about them, and why I feel that way.

Take, for example, Twisted Metal. It has a sweet little multiplayer demo up - Jaffe is clearly confident in the long-term appeal of his car combat gameplay - and I fiddled around with it the other day.

Strangely, I find, I like the controls - even though they have nothing in common with your standard driving game controls. Having gas and break not mapped to the triggers feels very, very weird - but before long I found myself pulling hairpin turns perfectly and drifting 90 degree corners with crazy, thirteen-year-old-on-a-caffeine-binge precision. This game plays very fast - and as such its controls, at first, don't feel lose enough.

I take that as a good thing. Tight controls - controls that feel too tight at first - are never unwelcome at my parties.

That said, I feel much the same about Twisted Metal now as I did when I was fifteen; meh. I can see how others would like it, and perhaps I too would like it if I felt the need to invest any time in it - but I don't.

Similarly, I found The Darkness II demo to be a merely acceptable diversion.

Technology: Meh.
Art direction: Not bad.
Gameplay: Decent.
Presentation: Not bad.
Gore: Significant.

...and that ain't enough, for me. It's not enough for a game to be just good-enough. It's got to have something that... I dunno, sparks the imagination. That makes you want to explore and invest emotionally - not just of you time, not just of your money, and-

...why, hello, there - who are you?

You're a pretty one, aren't you? What's your name? Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning?

That's quite a mouthful. I'll just call you Kingdoms.

What have we here? A large, interconnected world? Bright, poppy art direction? Timing-based, impactful combat? An unusual take on the whole mortal humans and their relationships to immortal races thing?

Well well... aren't you interesting?

Kingdoms feels very good, very quickly. All I'd heard about this demo was that it "got a lot of people talking," though I'd assumed they were talking about how incredibly buggy it was - 'cause that's 90% of the discussion I'd heard on it. I did, I'll admit, see one glitch in my time with the demo - a body of water would turn into an infinitely reflective, four-dimensional surface that remembered everything it had ever reflected. Very weird.

Beyond that? In terms of mechanics, gameplay, structure - everything worked just fine.

You run around beating the crap out of bad guys with attacks that become flashier and more impressive the further you go. By the time I'd run out the demo's forty-five minute clock, I was level three and an absolute badass Rogue assassin.

The Darkness II? Asura's Wrath? Twisted Metal? Forget those demos. I highly suggest you try the demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. If any demo thus far this year has made me seriously consider a purchase, it's this one.

Honestly. Imagine Diablo with a standard action-game behind-the-shoulder camera, and an open world instead of randomly-generated dungeons.

Consider that. Try this demo.

The sexiest thing I have seen all week.

2012-02-03T14:30:00.001-08:00

First screenshots of The Last of Us.

2012-02-02T21:22:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of GameInformer.com, what you see above are the first publicly-released in-game screenshots of Naughty Dog's upcoming post-apocalyptic action opus. It's a (short) slideshow - so just click on one, enjoy its full-sized glory and scroll through.

Oh Naughty Dog - I know it's what's inside that counts, but you look so good.

Lollipop Chainsaw pre-order skins trailer.

2012-02-02T11:58:00.000-08:00

"Why bother with this? None of these will be as sexy as a cheerleader outfit...

...damn... why do I like the Ash from Evil Dead outfit the best? ...is that weird?"

Groovy.

The Games of February 2012.

2012-02-02T01:15:00.000-08:00

February is looking absolutely gorgeous - particularly when compared to the gaming wasteland of January. We've got FPSs, we've got RPGs (action and strategy), we've got platformers, we've got stealth, we've got three gorgeous, 2-D sprite-based games! And one 2-D sprite-based game from like, twenty years ago!

Eeee! February is a blessed month indeed.

February 7th
The Simpsons Arcade Game
PS3, 360
Hype-O-Meter : Day one.

Fourteen quarters - that's how much it cost me to beat The Simpsons Arcade Game back in 1991. I was immensely proud of this, and attempted to tell the tale while over at my friend's house for dinner. His mother, whom I loathed, promptly cut me off, explained that no one else cared about video games, and went back to talking about whatever it is adults talked about shortly after the eighties.

I didn't care - I loved that game. I went so far as to investigate how much, precisely, it would cost to obtain the arcade cabinet for it (too much, it turns out). News that I will be able to play this most cherished of childhood titles on my slick-ass grown-up plasma TV? That tastes far better than your vegetarian cream-sauce rice-instead-of-noodles "lasagna", Reed's Mom!

February 7th
The Darkness II
PS3, 360, PC
Hype-O-Meter : Wait for reviews.

The Darkness was a slow-burn cult hit at the dawn of the current gen, significantly assisted by Starbreeze Studios' surprisingly powerful storytelling and a very creative riff on The Hell Level. The Darkness II, from Digital Extremes (Homefront, Dark Sector) is - as far as I'm concerned - starting from square one, in terms of goodwill. The demo was merely okay, the presentation is not-bad, the gameplay was acceptable.

If I end up hearing (from someone I trust) that it's amazing, I'll take a second look at The Darkness II - but not before.

February 7th
Shank 2
PS3, 360
Hype-O-Meter : Day one.

Shank was best-described, I feel, as a "Brock Sampson simulator set in a Robert Rodrigues movie." If you understand both of those references, you have an inkling of just how special the first game was. It wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was still my favorite downloadable game of 2010 - and a Shank with rejiggered combat mechanics and deeper systems smells like ambrosia to me.

February 7th
Kingdoms of Amalur : Reckoning
PS3, 360, PC
Hype-O-Meter : Wait, what is this game?

This game flew completely under my radar until the (apparently very buggy) demo dropped, and people started freaking out about it. I can tell you nothing about the title, save for that fact - and that it has quite a few interesting names attached. The Executive Director was the Lead Designer on Elder Scrolls III and IV, the story is written by Forgotten Realms scribe R.A. Salvatore and the character design was seemingly helped along by Todd McFarlane (Spawn).

It seems to be an open-world-ish third-person RPG-brawler with an emphasis on lovely combat animations and brutal finishers.

This, my friends, could be this years' Darksiders. Keep an eye on it.

February 14th
Twisted Metal
PS3
Hype-O-Meter : Oh Jaffe, we love you.

I do love Dave Jaffe, the man, the personality, the guy who came up with the first God of War - but I never got into the Twisted Metal car combat games. They're games I always wanted to like, but I remember not thinking much of the five minutes I spent with one of the games back on the PS1.

There is a demo up on PSN... perhaps that bears looking into.

February 21st
Grand Knights History
PSP
Hype-O-Meter : Day one, if it actually releases.

I say "if it actually releases," because - while a few gaming sites are citing February 21st as its release date - localizing publisher Xseed hasn't said shit. We learned last September that Xseed would be localizing Vanillaware's latest gorgeous, hand-drawn effort - a fantastic-looking turn-based RPG - and that was the last we heard of it.

If you search for Grand Knights History at Best Buy, HMV, EB Games or even GameStop, none of them will have it listed. The only place the game is listed is Amazon.com, which reminds me - I should order it.

....annnd ordered. The fact that nowhere else has it listed and we haven't heard a peep from Xseed since last September regarding the title gives me pause. There are rumors that the title is exclusive to Amazon, and exclusive to the U.S. Amazon, at that - so perhaps this all makes perfect sense, and Xseed haven't done any interviews or pushed it on any media sites because they suck at publicity.

Here's hopin'!

February 21st
Asura's Wrath
PS3, 360
Hype-O-Meter : Must... wait... 'till it comes... down in price!

I'll be honest, I want Asura's Wrath. I enjoy CyberConnect2's Ultimate Ninja Storm games - but only because they're so damned good-looking when the fur starts to fly, and when it comes down to quicktime events.

Asura's Wrath seems to follow their formula, with an emphasis on what they do best - gorgeous art direction, animation, and incredibly well-framed, cinematic ultra-action. In terms of depth? In terms of gameplay? Eh. I expect Asura's Wrath will follow the Naruto trend and be a game that is neither great nor bad, but definitely worth seeing.

February 21st
Syndicate
PS3, 360, PC
Hype-O-Meter : This one has potential...

Nobody took it well when it was revealed that Escape From Butcher Bay and The Darkness's well-respected developer Starbreeze Studios was turning strategy classic Syndicate into a first-person shooter. It seemed an obvious cash-in, and a gorgeous but somewhat dystopian future seemed a tired world to explore after 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

A lot of that changed, lately, when folks were about to go hands-on with the (punishingly hard) demo, which showcased that Syndicate is still very much a strategy game at its core, which requires more than the ability to put a cursor on your target's head.

Syndicate, suddenly, seems promising.

February 22nd

PlayStation Vita

Sony's successor to the very-successful-in-Japan-and-nowhere-else PlayStation Portable is a piece of gaming kit that seems rather designed for yours truly. A portable way to play console-quality games is exactly what I want - and while it's really no competition for the iPod or your cell phone in terms of low-entry-bar gaming, it's not really trying to be.

With a start-up price that exceeds all current dedicated gaming platforms, the Vita has a steep road ahead. Without a price cut before Christmas, it may cement Sony's spot as a second banana in the handheld market - but in the meantime, there are some very, very good-looking games on the horizon - and I plan to be in on the ground floor, with this one.

Honestly. This will be the first time I have ever purchased a gaming platform at launch. Wish me luck.

Along with the Vita comes a suite of lovely-looking titles...

February 22nd
Uncharted : Golden Abyss
PSV
Hype-O-Meter : Day one.

Developed by Sony Bend - the folks behind the Syphon Filter games - Golden Abyss is Sony's attempt to launch their handheld with a must-own title for the core crowd. It's no Mario, that's for sure - and reviews have generally suggested that yeah, it's pretty good.

Personally, I have little faith in Golden Abyss - but I want to believe - so I'll day-one it.

February 22nd
Rayman Origins
PSV
Hype-O-Meter : Sweet!

One of the best 2D platformers of the current gen, in the palm of your hand?

Oh, yes please. I don't even care that it's a 3DS-style re-release. If they're all like this? Bring it on. Next, do the first inFamous!

February 22nd
Shinobido 2 : Revenge of Zen
PSV
Hype-O-Meter : If reviews tell me it's 7/10...

...I'll almost definitely buy it. A feudal-era ninja simulator from the folks behind Tenchu. Heck, I'm sold.

Honestly, Shinobido 2 had me in its pocket as soon as I mistook it for a Tenchu title in the Vita's E3 2011 sizzle reel.

And others...

Little Deviants, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, Army Corps of Hell, WipEout 2048, Dynasty Warriors Next, Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus

But wait! February's not done yet!

February 28th
SSX
PS3, 360
Hype-O-Meter : Day one.

SSX has long been a favorite franchise, ever since my older brother and I bonded over absolutely mastering SSX Tricky on the PS2.

Honestly - ever since the PS3 launched, he and I have been talking about how much we want an HD SSX. Well, here it is! Just twenty seven more sleeps until I can jazz my way down a mountain to kickin' beats while doing stunts that physics could not possibly allow!

This is one of my most anticipated games of the year.

February 28th
Binary Domain
PS3, 360
Hype-O-Meter : You'll have no faith from me, Sega!

Going on trailers, Binary Domain actually looks pretty cool! Part of me feels we should be more open to this game - just as I feel we should be more open to new IPs in general - but Sega has very, very little credit with me.

I'd love the game that trailer is attempting to present - I'm not just sure Binary Domain is actually that game. I don't believe it will be that cool - but I want to. I'll definitely be reading reviews of this one.

* * *

And that's February! What a month. It's going to kill me.

Dragon's Dogma story trailer.

2012-02-01T23:36:00.000-08:00

Turns out it has a story! Who knew?

Word lately is that Capcom has a lot riding on Dragon's Dogma - mostly because folks are reading into the fact that the title grants one early access to the Resident Evil 6 demo. They've been pointing out how Konami did it with Zone of the Enders and Metal Gear Solid 2, how Sony did it with inFamous and Uncharted 2, how Epic did it with Bulletstorm and Gears of War 3, et cetera - and implying that it means Capcom isn't very confident in their new IP, and stands to lose a lot of cash, should things go south.

The thing is, all those examples turned out - from the perspective of a gamer, at least - to be more than anything an indication of the earlier game's quality. Zone of The Enders, Bulletstorm, inFamous - those are all games you would have been glad you'd tried, if you dropped some cash on them at release.

For me, at least, Uncharted 2's beta drove me to purchase inFamous day one, and we all know how that turned out. I don't much care about a demo for Resident Evil 6, at this point, but the fact that Capcom feels so strongly about the quality of Dragon's Dogma certainly makes me want to give the game a closer look.

If nothing else, it's in very good company.

Mana mana.

2012-02-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

I think I'm just gonna' re-post this. Every three months.

Forever.

Here, have a video of a Pokemon 2D fighter.

2012-01-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

The Games of February post is turning out to be more involved than I'd anticipated. I suspect tomorrow I'm going to come back to it and cut 90% of what I've written, and just do something sleeker - but we'll see.

So yeah, that'll be up tomorrow. For now, please enjoy these videos of a fan-made 2D Pokemon fighting game that will never be released!

SSX - Kaori Nishidake trailer.

2012-01-30T22:19:00.001-08:00

My Kaori! Similar to Koopa in Mario Kart, Kaori is the SSX character with the best agility/turning - and has long been my main in the series.

One request, though - can we give these guys better victory dances?

Watch this Wind Waker sequel fan trailer...

2012-01-30T22:18:00.001-08:00

...and despair, for it is not to be.

The Ballad of Sevrin.

2012-01-30T21:57:00.000-08:00

This video was made after Sevrin - who had climbed the highest peaks of World of Warcraft - quit the game to rediscover the real world, and put this together as a project for a 3rd year film production class.

I have a very succinct take on WoW: It is the greatest massively multiplayer online game ever, and you should never ever try it. Here's why.

I don't often talk about my own three-year stint in WoW, but I will tell you I never invested heavily in the raiding culture like many others. In fact, it drove my friends and guildies nuts.

When Chances - my Rogue, named after Chance, my Samurai in Final Fantasy XI Online - reached about level 32, I stopped leveling her. I consciously stopped doing anything that would gain me any experience points, and dedicated all of my time to farming the required reagents for Thistle Teas (which allowed me to perform more special attacks, and created devastating combos) and explosives (my personal favorite was the Goblin Sapper Charge).

I would then head to The Crossroads, in The Barrens, which was a small Horde settlement and hub for early-level questing. I wrecked that place. More than that, I turned wrecking that place into a science.

By my mid-thirties I could wipe the entire town - every single non-player character, and thus, quest givers - and by my early forties I had mastered killing the Flight Master.

The Flight Master was a level 55 elite NPC. When you attacked him, two level 55 elite wyverns would spawn to protect him... but they could be driven away with a particular explosive. All you had to do was kill the flight master before the effect wore off, and they returned.

Shortly after I demonstrated that I could do this all the time, they patched the game to remove the bomb's effect on the Flight Master's wyverns. Hah!

This was all I did in WoW. Sometimes I would fiddle about with my alts, but for the most part I was either in the Barrens harrying The Crossroads, or I was getting more gear to head back to continue mucking with that town.

I developed quite a reputation (hit ctrl-F, type in Chances... and for the record, Rentesh and Alphamage are both real good dudes.)

Once I was down there, doing my thing with a Hunter friend named Sarabi who had decided to accompany me. Given her non-stealthiness, she stayed outside town picking off PvP-flagged Hordlings while I wrecked shit inside the town.

A level 60 Mage had shown up, but couldn't find me (stealthy!), so they went out of town and killed the hell out of my friend. On the way bank into town, the Mage performed their Blink spell to save time - which was, at the time, the only ability that could break a Rogue's stuns - and crack.

Cheap Shot -> Backstab -> Thistle Tea -> Backstab -> Cold Blood -> Eviscerate -> Goblin Sapper Charge. Takes about four seconds - the duration of the Cheap Shot stun effect.

I killed my first level 60 (which was the cap, at the time) when I was 42. It was at that point, I'm told, that the "highlevels" - as I called them - in the Horde began talking. Given that I wasn't highlevel and not party to the raiding discussions occurring therein, I only heard it second-hand - but word was "they're praying you never hit 60."

So I have a lot of positive memories about my time in WoW - I ended up with a lot of good friends in the Horde, just by being such a fun enemy to them - and made a few more on my own faction when the Outland expansion hit, and I rolled a Shaman.

As I was leveling her up, I met a few nice Warriors - I still keep in touch with those two (congrats on fatherhood, Xero!).

Also, I will never, ever go back. WoW is the greatest MMO ever made, and it will consume your life.

Game Diary - Mass Effect 2.

2012-01-29T23:36:00.000-08:00

I feel I've been a very good boy, lately. I suffered through Amy's entirety and completed the middling Scarygirl - and now, naturally, I feel the need for a game that attempts the whole triple-A thing.

For years, now, I have been well away from the Mass Effect bandwagon. When the original came out, it was rather like BioShock - an incredible game I was unable to actually play, and had to weather everyone else in the world going on about how it was the single best example of its genre ever.

Last year, I picked up a 360 - sampled a dozen or so hours of Mass Effect - and dove in to Mass Effect 2's PS3 version, quite certain that I would not be left behind by this franchise again.

Then the rest of 2011 happened, I forgot about ME2, and the Great PS3 Crash of '11 robbed me of my saved games. I had gotten really far in ME2. I had probably put fifty or sixty hours into it, and now - when I actually need that save again, it really burns to have it gone.

I need the save, of course, because Mass Effect 3 is due to drop - across every HD platform - on March 6th. Even with Final Fantasy XIII-2 releasing next week, it's Mass Effect 3 that's considered the first really important title of 2012.

This time, I do not intend to be left out of the discussion. I switched my class from Infiltrator to Soldier - I rather appreciate Adrenaline Rush - and went off to Omega to rescue Garrus again.

Oh, Garrus. This time, I am gonna' be all up in that scarred Turian grill.

REVIEW - Scarygirl.

2012-01-28T21:18:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, a little girl is abandoned on a clifftop road. She has one eye, a bone where her left arm should be and a tentacle for the right. A gigantic sentient octopus named Blister adopts the child. Utilizing his spectacular eight-armed carpentry skills, he constructs her a dream house. Swimming to the inky depths of the sea, he obtains stylish garments for her - names her Scarygirl - and together they spend their days discussing the nature of the universe...

Immediately, Scarygirl draws one into its corner. Perhaps some of us simply have affections for beautiful and morbid tales of courageous young women, but this thing has a very endearing setup. Still, as a work of art, one would be better-served to consume its source material - as a game, Scarygirl is merely decent.

It's not bad. It's okay.

It's a game I wish I could have played when I was six or seven. Kids, I expect, will get a great deal of joy out of Scarygirl - but for a palette that's tasted more than a handful of platformers, it's a merely acceptable diversion - and not worth one's time, when compared to more ambitious and refined pursuits.

At the same time, though, being an acceptable platformer - in an age when beautiful, fun 2-D platformers are the exception rather than the rule - is perhaps a rather valuable asset, and worth consideration.

Scarygirl employs a pleasant, pastel-hued art style directly drawn from the original comic, but never quite achieves the same striking, joyful whimsy of its inspiration. It's thoroughly troubling that a ten-dollar PlayStation Store game, done up with polygonal models and backdrops, isn't as visually enjoyable as the free flash game you can find on Scarygirl scribe Nathan Jurevicius's website. Honestly - the flash game even has an opening cutscene of higher quality than anything you'll find here.

Still, graphically, the game is good - far better than your average little PSN platformer, to be sure - it only suffers in comparison to Jurevicius's original art. A real, significant disappointment - and a lost opportunity - is that Scarygirl's animation is perfunctory, lacking any real character or charm.

The game's music - some lifted wholesale from the flash game - is also a standout, but that raises the question of why on earth one would want to play this game instead of that one.

I suppose it's because Scarygirl is indeed "an acceptable platformer," and that alone is cause enough for some.

Keeping in mind that 'acceptable' doesn't imply 'remarkable,' Scarygirl does indeed scratch the ancient gamer itch to play a running-and-jumping game - it's good, simple fun - and at the very least, I love spinning her tentacle like a helicopter blade to hover. Its mechanics, at first, are somewhat at odds with modern conventions - you don't press the button harder or longer to jump higher, for example - but the environments are designed to only ever take perfect advantage of its slightly unorthodox gameplay.

Scarygirl doesn't evolve its platforming much over the course of the game - merely asking you to address more complex and lethal hazards as you edge closer to the final level. Instead, it leans more heavily on its combat as it progresses- regularly offering new skills that turn Scary's whippy, hook-tipped tentacle arm into a weapon of mass devastation.

Like the platforming, it's a bit disappointing that the combat - which is unusually well-fleshed-out, for a game like this - does not evolve or become more complex over the course of the game. It would be nice to have new combat skills that make significant changes to the mechanics, offering greater options, but for the most part you merely get flashier and harder-hitting attacks.

You want those attacks, of course - 'need' may be a better word - because Scarygirl's enemies can and will wipe the floor with you, before you learn how to dominate them. In that, at least, it's rather satisfying.

The game's boss fights are similarly simplistic, and - like 2010's Shank - will kick the hell out of you multiple times before you simply memorize their patterns and utterly dominate them.

If you find yourself desperate for some easy-going platforming and a touch of whimsy, Scarygirl is an acceptable diversion. Its characters, its world, its art style are all valuable and interesting - and I'd love to explore them more - but taken on its own, this game isn't really worth ten dollars.

Its greatest feat is that is has piqued my interest in the Scarygirl brand. I want to read the original comic, now. I want to spend more time with that lovely flash game - I just don't want to put any more time into TikGames' riff on the property.

It's not terrible. It's okay. It's meh.

THE GOOD

lovely art direction

a great set-up, and a pretty good ending

great music

there's a surprising amount of combat mechanics

a reasonable length for the money

Scarygirl plays skip rope with her own tentacle as a wait animation

regularly rather fun

an easy-going, simple platformer that scratches the itch

THE BAD

there are far better platformers out there

the source material is way better looking

the flash game based on the source material is also way better looking

rote animation, completely dodging an opportunity to offer some vitality to the characters

boss fights come down to simple memorization

the platforming doesn't really evolve over the course of the game

neither does the combat

throwing an enemy or object into a target is near-impossible. Honestly, would it have been so awful to let us target things?

THE VERDICT

Scarygirl is neither great not bad, but not nearly as endearing as its source material.

Gravity Rush's weirdly effective Japanese launch trailer.

2012-01-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

Sorry, that's the highest-def version I could find.

The apple thing is a bit ridiculous. The old lady looks up - my apples! - and then the camera pans up to reveal hundreds of apples! How many pies did Granny Apple intend to bake? There are apples across the city's entire skyline! Oh, they all came from this one dude's apple cart. ...no, I'm still not buying it.

So yeah, kinda' silly, but when I tried to imagine the commercial without the apples - with just gameplay footage - it wouldn't achieve the same sense that the game is trying to convey. Of being in control of this universal constant, and wielding it at a whim, rushing through the skies.

I can dig it.

SSX's Mount Fuji exclusive to PS3 in NA.

2012-01-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Screenshots!

There's a rather large post over at the PlayStation Blog detailing the content, but for the most part it's just a breakdown of what SSX is, for the uninitiated.

The short version? You bust down awesome mountain ranges on snowboards. The more tricks you do, the faster you can go, the bigger tricks you can do, until you're flying through the air doing The Worm dance off a snowboard and an avalanche crashes down the mountain behind you.

Y'know - good stuff.

Thy will be done!

2012-01-26T23:12:00.000-08:00

And on the seventh day Chance spake

Unto them, saying "Lo, I cannot but alter

My course, for the gerbils and the lions

And the orangutans and the kookaburra

Have whispered unto me, and they have

Cried out, in their wisdom,

"Maketh thy blog wider, that we may

Sup our gaze upon trailers and screenshots

That be not shriveled and microscopic,

And be joyful in their glory."

And so I say unto thee,

dig this shit."

It is done. And now - once I get these fonts reasonable - I'm going to spend the evening getting to know Scarygirl.

Now, the question is, do I intend to go back and update the images for all my old features and reviews? Also, what will I do, in lieu of a tag cloud?

(1) I'm leaning towards no.
(2) I have no idea.

Ted Price: No more Resistance from Insomniac.

2012-01-26T11:51:00.001-08:00

Or so he said in a recent interview with VG247. Specifically,

"We won’t be making any more Resistances."

And really, can you blame them? Insomniac did their best to make an arcadey FPS for Sony - to give them a blockbuster - but the games just never caught on like Gears or Halo or even Uncharted.

For Insomniac, it's just the right choice. The problem is, Insomniac's biggest hits have always been the core Ratchet & Clank titles. While the Restistance games are great, they never really showed Insomniac at its best the way Ratchet does - and I worry that Overkill may not, either.

[update] After the furor from the interview, Ted took to YouTube to try to offer a very mellow explanation.

[/update]

The Witcher 2's 360 version drops April 17.

2012-01-26T11:35:00.000-08:00

First of all, watch this trailer. This entire trailer - from its source on GameTrailers would be best. Game protagonist Geralt is nowhere to be seen, but it does an excellent job of setting the M-for-Mature tone of the game.

Next, slideshow!

Oooh, pretty!

Finally, you bet your butt it'll have a big 'ol Collector's Edition - and here it is.

The Witcher 2: probably the only disc-based 360 game I'll buy all year.

Not many games offer a boss fight against the temptation to grab breasts.

2012-01-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

But now, at least, one does.

Yep. It's definitely Video Day.

Skip to 5:22.

2012-01-25T11:42:00.000-08:00

Heck, I may just do this all day. Last week Tycho mentioned in his blog post that the PATV show Extra Credits (which started as a YouTube thing and then became an Escapist thing and then The Escapist stopped paying them and now they're with PATV) which concerned itself with SOPA and PIPA was seriously worth your time.

If you're unfamiliar with Extra Credits, I suggest you remedy that. It's essentially a once-a-week, intensely thoughtful examination on game design, the industry or issues that affect it. Last week, they took on SOPA/PIPA, and - in their usual humble but precise and perfectly-argued way - explain why it is the devil, and you Americans need to get off your duffs and start annoying your politicians.

They go a bit into the specifically abhorrent provisions set forward in the bills, but if you want to hear the best argument against this thing passing, click this link and skip to 5:22.

Skip to 0:47.

2012-01-25T10:18:00.000-08:00

Those few precious frames are all the gameplay you'll see of Namco Bandai's new RPG Tokitawa. Apparently the title will be be a bit like a third-person shooter, with a fixed camera. The title says it's the first "animation RPG" on the PS3 - and judging by the screens and action that starts at 0:47, I'm not sure they're lying.

It's due out this year, in Japan.

The Darkness II launch trailer does its job.

2012-01-24T22:25:00.001-08:00

It certainly makes me want to go try the demo. Oh! Speaking of PSN Store updates, Scarygirl is also up, with a demo!

Guess what I'll be reviewing next?

'Bout time somebody pointed out that Tim's a douche.

2012-01-24T12:09:00.000-08:00

New Darksiders II trailer, screens and gameplay!

2012-01-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

The above trailer shows no gameplay, and is meant to get us hyped for the idea of playing as Deathhhhhhh.

Slideshow!

This video comes courtesy of Kotaku - I highly suggest you watch it there, in HD - and shows off a little combat and a lot of Darksiders II's platforming, which looks much better than you'd expect. A lot of it seems very akin to Prince of Persia '08.

Ooh! And here's an interview with Vigil Games co-founded and artistic center, Joe Mad talking about the game. Wow. He is mellow.

REVIEW - Amy.

2012-01-23T23:41:00.000-08:00

Survival horror titles have been entirely absent from the current gen since Siren: Blood Curse dropped almost four years ago, and the idea of a new entry in this most cherished of genres that offers a few interesting twists is a delightful proposition. Amy offers two such twists - and those two Good Ideas are good - they just happen to exist in a game that is, in all other ways, mediocre or just plain bad.

If one were to take a step back and compare Amy to the heyday of its genre - the PS2 - it's not entirely awful. What's awful is that it keeps a very great deal of what made much of those games awful, and finds new ways to disappoint along the way.

I want to like Amy. I like some of Amy's ideas very much. The fact that player-character Lana is suffering from the same zombification infection that plagues the game's setting is lovely. Without a constant feed of syringes to keep the infection at bay, her skin will grow pale, her cheekbones hollow, her eyes sunken and dead. Ugly black veins spiderweb across her face and out from her mouth. She hears mad whispers - the world turns red, and her vision begins going a bit liquid.

When she's that far gone, Lana can even walk unmolested among the game's undead enemies, passing through them as a fellow nightmare creature - until she reaches out and holds the hand of the game's titular tot.

Amy, a mute girl who takes instruction well and seems to have psychic powers, will cure Lana of the infection whenever they are close. A white shimmer flows over you when you take her tiny hand, and she cleanses you with a touch.

Many have lamented the concept that Amy is essentially one long escort mission - but that's hardly true. The girl herself does not seem very threatened by the monsters that stalk this game, and given that your survival relies entirely upon her close proximity, if anything, she's the one escorting you.

I like that. I like that Amy's protector is also a monster - that the only thing stopping her from becoming a monster is the girl she's promised to help. I like that your ostensibly helpless ward is - much like Elika from Prince of Persia '08 - a supernatural powerhouse.

She never hinders, only helps.

God help me, I also kind of like that Amy is - more than anything - a throwback to the survival horror games of yore, when we accepted and even championed terrible combat as a necessity of the genre. Unfortunately, Amy isn't just a throw back - it's a long bomb.

Its puzzles - if one would be generous enough to call them that - are tedious. We're talking about weird "hack the computer" puzzles that see you rearranging symbols until the game lets you advance. We're talking about pointless elevator puzzles that have you standing on one while Amy flips a switch across the room, and then having her stand on one while you flip a switch placed in the stupidest location possible.

The ones that really annoy are when you guide Amy into a little crawlspace, so she can hit a switch or open a door from the other side. This wouldn't be offensive if Lana were a bit meatier than she is, but the woman is as skinny as a runway model (complete with impressively high cheek bones and short pumps) - she could fire through those spaces just as easily as her tiny ward.

There's a great deal in Amy's construction that, similarly, just makes no sense whatsoever. The game asks you to ignore its rote combat and the way it will introduce a mechanic by making it the only means to move forward and then not telling you it exists - but if a game is going to ask that of us, it had better step up, elsewhere.

We could ask, for example, that it have a compelling narrative - worth suffering the game's slings and arrows, elsewhere. Amy does not have that. It has a bare-bones, uninteresting story with voice acting and dialogue that feels totally at odds with the game's setting. It even switches voice actors for Lana here and there. One line of dialogue will be from one actor, and the next from another - it's somewhat stunning, really.

We could ask for a survival horror game with somewhat enjoyable combat - but bare-bones, wiffy-feeling melee is one of the tropes of the genre Vector Cell have decided to champion.

We could ask for gorgeous presentation - or at least interesting art direction - but Amy doesn't offer it.

We could ask for decent checkpoints, or a manual saving system that would allow us to make reasonable progress before breaking for the day - but we have, maddeningly, been denied that.

Perhaps - most within reason - we could ask for a game with mechanics, design and rules that are consistent throughout the experience. We could ask for a title that doesn't change its own rules several times over the course of a single level - rules that we, the player, consider rather important when they are the difference between losing a half-hour's worth of work in the game or not.

I do not use the term "work" loosely. Amy is simply not a fun game.

In its attempt to put an interesting spin on the survival horror genre by way of its mechanics and protagonists, it trips over its own inane, amateurish design. There is tension in Amy, but it's entirely the wrong kind.

It's not as a result of the game's atmosphere. Amy barely has any.

It's not a building fear of the next terrible monster hiding around the next corner - combat is simple, rote and not too difficult to master.

No, while playing Amy - along with a general sense of boredom - you will constantly be aware of a creeping terror that here, there, anywhere, the game will suddenly assume you know something it never told you, and kill you for not knowing it. Then, through no fault of your own, it will send you back to the beginning of the level (and there are only five).

In that way, it's not fear, really. It's an long, slow-burn appreciation of the fact that that this game is just going to make you more and more angry until you decide it's not worth it and walk away.

As you attempt each level, again and again, Amy reveals itself to be a tedious, insipid little title that shames the bad old survival horror games.

Honestly, this is worse than Galerians.

THE GOOD

I like that Lana is infected just like everyone else, that Amy is her lifeline, and that the infection can even be used to your advantage

it's rather pleasing that Amy herself is rather like your super power

a throwback to classic survival horror

holding hands feels weirdly wholesome

THE BAD

classic survival horror was much better than this

amateurish writing and a story that goes nowhere

boring combat

Amy's autistic. Is it just me, or is anyone else a little tired of autism being the flavor-of-the-month go-to mental illness?

totally forgettable presentation

awful stealth implementation

the electrical mines are just stupid. they seem to only exist to make you walk slower - as if this game really needed another thing to slow it down

it bothers me that Lana is a rail-thin blond sporting high heels and a miniskirt. It's like, c'mon - can we try something else?

whoever designed Amy's checkpoint system should be tried in the Hague

the game, its enemies and its mechanics will change, here and there, just because the devs want you to do something different...

...and they expect you to do that different thing without suggesting what it is in any way, shape or form - and until you figure it out, it's killing you over and over - which makes Amy...

a tedious, frustrating, forgettable experience

THE VERDICT
This is a bad game.

Aaron Sims' Archetype.

2012-01-23T21:20:00.000-08:00

Go HD and watch it full-screen. Thanks, Matt!

...and y'know how sometimes you just sorta' bop from one YouTube vid to another? Well, d'awww!

Xbox Live Arcade House Party detailed.

2012-01-23T11:55:00.001-08:00

The lineup and release dates for this year's House Party were announced today.

First up will be Warp on February 15th ($10).

Warp is a rather awesome-sounding top-down stealth puzzle game which sees you in the role of an alien attempting to escape from a human lab, who can 'warp' through - or into - solid objects. Tempted as I may be, I doubt I'll be more interested in Warp than a new platform from Sony.

One week later, Alan Wake's American Nightmare drops on February 22nd ($15)...

...which I would very much like to play and review, given that Alan Wake was pretty awesome - but that's one day after Uncharted: Golden Abyss drops - so we'll see.

Following Wake is Nexiuz on the 29th ($10).

Built on a (very) heavily-modified Quake engine, Nexiuz started as a mod and turned into a full-on game - rather like Defense of the Ancients. It's basically your old-school arena shooter.

Finally, I Am Alive - after so long - is actually coming out on March 7th, 2012 ($15).

The title's development is shrouded in mystery. Announced with a big-budget CGI trailer at E3 2008, word was that Assassin's Creed celebrity-developer Jade Raymond was helming the project - which turned out to be bunk. It started development at a lesser-known studio called Darkworks, which eventually bowed out.

The game went on to Ubisoft Shanghai, who are generally responsible for Ubisoft's bread-and-butter pop games - Raving Rabbids This, Tom Clancy's Splinter That. I Am Alive is the first original IP they've ever worked on.

Basically, we can look forward to Ubisoft-style 3D platforming, with some survival elements mixed in - if it didn't have such a depressing development, I would be nothing but stoked for this game.

* * *

...I wonder when I Am Alive is coming to PSN? I'd much prefer to play it with a Dualshock. Also - if this is what's dropping for the House Party, I wonder what they've got up their sleeves for Summer of XBLA?

The Monthly Hate - Preordering a Vita from Best Buy.

2012-01-22T20:26:00.001-08:00

The Monthly Hate is a (rare and non-monthly) feature

where I try to complain about things.

I'm not a huge complainer, but I'll do my best.

I'll start with swearing more.

A few weeks ago, while perusing Best Buy's flyer, I noticed this little gem:

Welly welly. That sounds rather perfect, for me. I definitely want a PSVita, I absolutely want to get my hands on it a week early - the better to blog about - and fifty bucks for a 4G memory card, Little Deviants and a case is a reasonable saving.

Now, granted, Little Deviants is not very high on my to-own list. More precisely it's not on the list - and a 4G memory card will hardly serve me for long - but I definitely want to get my mitts on this thing as soon as possible, and the fact of the matter is Little Deviants (while a full game in its own rights) is basically the world's best tech demo for the Vita's various features.

It takes great advantage of the front and rear touchscreens, and the system's giro controls - it'll be a good way to familiarize one's self with the system's intricacies.

So, I follow the instructions on the flyer and type bestbuy.ca/psvita into Google Chrome and... that website does not exist. Hmph. I head down to Best Buy.

This is the Best Buy I frequent. I've had good and bad experiences, here. When I bought my first, second and third HDTVs, this is the store I went to. I got great service, and when I decided I didn't like TV #1, they let me swap it right out for a different model.

On the other hand, when I went shopping for a PSP, the doucher dudebro who's generally milling around the games section assured me - along with the dude who took my money for said PSP - that a PSP-3000 comes with 8GB of onboard internal storage, and doesn't need a memory card.

Idiots.

Anyway, given that the website for their advertised deal was unavailable, I entered the store in the hopes that discussion with a living, breathing person may help.

What a fool I was.

The fellow in the gaming department had no idea what I was talking about. I asked if he had a copy of his store's flyer (he did), and pointed out the promotion to him.

He was amazed by it, and directed me towards the customer service desk.

The woman who came to my aid at the customer service desk had, similarly, never heard of the promotion, and advised me to visit the website that didn't exist. I explained that situation, and she went and fetched someone else to help me.

Best Buy Customer Service Associate Mark III suggests I visit bestbuy.com/psv.

After explaining it a third time, he plays around on his computer for a while and tells me all I have to do is walk up to the cashier at the front of the store, tell her to type in a certain code on the flyer, pay her fifty dollars, and I'll have my preorder.

The cashier has absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, when I attempt to explain what Mark III's instructions were. She assures me that - in a case with a preorder like this - all I need is a card they should have on display back with the other gaming stuff. I assure her no such card exists, but she goes to look for it anyway.

She comes back, and tells me to visit the website on the flyer.

I explain it to her again - Mark III comes over and explains it again - and they come to the shared conclusion that the only place I can get the Week Early deal is at bestbuy.ca.

Well, fuck.

So, today - several weeks later - Kayla and I swing through that same Best Buy in the hopes of securing a pretty-good romantic comedy my parents have asked me to locate. As is usual, I swing through the gaming section... and there are the cards!

The cards are there! I can preorder the Vita and get the deal and get Uncharted: Golden Abyss a week early as well!

Kaloo kalaay!

I grab both cards (and a copy of Willow) and head to the checkout.

"You have a Rewards Zone card?" she asks me. I give her my phone number. "And the Gamer's Club card?"

"No," I tell her.

"Oh, well you need that to preorder this."

"...what."

"Yeah."

"...how much is that going to cost me?"

"Nothing! We can sign you up right now and it's free."

"Fine, sign me up."

"Now you just need to wait for the SKU number to get emailed to you."

"Emailed to me? What email address will you send it to?"

"The one on your Rewards Zone membership."

...which is, of course, my father's fucking email address, 'cause he's the one who first used that phone number to sign up for the account. And they have no idea when the email will be sent.

"Shortly after the promotion ends, I expect. So... the short version is... this time, you have these cards - and you still won't let me preorder this thing."

I was so pissed off.

They're advertising this thing - indicating, in a way I did not perceive as obfuscating - that they would like you to purchase it. And then, at all ends, they make it as hard as fucking possible for you to just buy the goddamned thing.

I don't get it. I don't understand it. Fuck it.

I went home and poked around on the internet. I checked out EB Games' website.

I went down there, put fifty dollars on the counter and walked away with a preorder for the First Edition Bundle.

It was so easy. Of course, now that I've put down an order at EB, I have absolutely no assurances that they will actually have the product on the 15th - such is the nature of that beast - but at the very least, the process was utterly painless.

Best Buy, I swear on all that is good and holy - I will never attempt to preorder anything from you ever again.

Personal note.

2012-01-22T20:18:00.000-08:00

There are some mildly interesting goings-on, today. Some people are thrilled about there being six-player co-op in Resident Evil 6, but I can't expect it to be anything other than Horde Mode: Capcom Style.

No, I've spent the lion's share of my day working on Amy. I'm on the last chapter now, and I was expecting myself to be prepared to offer up a last gasp of tremendous effort to finish the game tonight, and get a review writ.

What do you know? Turns out I'm not prepared to do that. It's 10:30pm, and I am sick of this game. I'm so sick of it I'm toying with the idea of not even finishing its last chapter and writing a very cruel Impressions post - but I'm going to do my best not to do that.

I'm going to do my best to finish it up tomorrow night, and do up a review, proper.

No promises.

MOVIE - Underworld: Awakening.

2012-01-21T21:40:00.000-08:00

As a chapter in an over-arching epic of vampire and werewolf mythology - a narrative in which the characters and audience emerge enriched, and changed for the experience - Underworld: Awakening is a piece of shit. Don't go see it for that.

As a movie in which Kate Beckinsale, while sporting skin-tight pleather, is totally badass, Underworld: Awakening is the best Underworld movie there's ever been.

Most of her badassery takes place during the first twenty minutes of the film, as she kicks the crap out of human spec ops guys in far more brutal fashion than one would be accustomed to, after the last three Underworld flicks. She breaks necks and kicks skulls in and slashes throats - she is more of an ass-kicking ultrababe than ever before. This, finally, feels like the Selene we've been hearing about throughout the first two movies.

This is Selene as we felt she should be - quiet, mysterious and the most lethal thing in any given room.

In the middle and latter half of the movie, we get back into the vampire-versus-werewolf thing, and while she remains suitably badass, things take a disappointing turn when we're introduced to the Ultralycan. It's basically a very big werewolf, with more polygons and detail - but as an End Boss, it leaves much to be desired.

On the way home, in the car, I explained my problem with it to Kayla.

"It's like... if that were the end boss in a game, right? It's only got one move. It hits you so hard you go flying into a wall. You get up, and try again. I kept waiting for it to try and bite her head off."

Much less interesting than William in Underworld: Evolution - now there was a cool design.

You'd be well-served to wait for Awakening on bluray - and speaking of resolution, I find myself wondering if I would have had a better impression of the film if I'd seen it in a theater that could focus a goddamned picture.

Game Diary - Amy.

2012-01-21T18:40:00.000-08:00

Playing Amy is very much like work. I'll get more into that in the review - should I actually prove to possess the discipline required to keep playing it - but you've most likely read the same general reaction, if you've looked into any critiques of the game available across the greater interwebs.

For now, let me just say that there is one part of Amy I rather like - and it's pictured above.

There's something... emotionally wholesome about holding Amy's hand and guiding her through the dangerous world of the game. Much the same as in Ico - this is exactly what Peter Molyneux was talking about when he was touting leading an NPC by the hands in Fable III. It shouldn't feel as spiritually grounding as it does - but it does.

Just taking her by her tiny hand and leading her around - just that alone - makes one feel so protective of Amy. I don't even know if I have to protect her - she's certainly never been killed, in my time playing the game - but I'm quite certain that, as I negotiate the asshole soldiers and mutant killers of Amy, my primary task is not to survive them. My primary task is to keep Amy safe.

The fact that Amy's close proximity is directly tied to my own survival - I shortly turn into a zombie and the screen fades to black if I'm away from her for too long - only reinforces this.

So, yeah - that's my Nice Thing To Say About Amy. Something about it feels very emotionally true. I wonder if it's how a mother feels, gripping her child's hand - aware that, should you release it, they may disappear - never to be found again.

Jason!

Sounds like Naughty Dog is goin' next-gen.

2012-01-21T17:19:00.000-08:00

A career listing popped up at Naughty Dog today for a Character Artist...

Responsibilities

This digital sculptor will be responsible for making million poly models game ready, and support highest-res characters for renderings
This individual will create clean, deformable and efficient models, extract normal maps from high-res version and sculpt morph targets for use within a Maya/ZBrush pipeline

Requirements & Skills

Prior professional experience with normal map extraction of human models for next-gen games
An advanced knowledge of human anatomy is required
This position is best suited for modelers who prefer to sculpt and paint texture for their models as well
Candidates should be able to work with minimal input and be comfortable working in a team environment
Candidates could expect to take an offsite test

The part that should stand out to you is "responsible for making million poly models game ready." Now, whether that means taking a million-polygon character model and downgrading it to something that fits in a standard game or creating a million-poly model within a game's engine is not clearly defined, to non-industry folks like us, but...

Most are taking this as a sign that one half of Naughty Dog - the half that isn't making The Last of Us, the half that made Uncharted 3 - are working on a PlayStation 4 title for their next game.

If they really are talking about million-polygon in-game character models? That's an absolutely ridiculous leap from the current gen. Kratos in God of War 3 clocked in at about 20,000 polygons, while Uncharted 3 characters were "over 30,000."

Would you prefer a wider blog?

2012-01-20T11:46:00.000-08:00

'We fear change.'

I'm considering a total overhaul of the blog - or, its layout at least. The content will remain the same. There are a few reasons for and against this - but the reason I've stayed with this layout for so long is the Tag Cloud.

I love that thing - and, as far as I'm concerned, it's far better than the standard list of tags you get on blogs. Want the latest feature, review, music post or bit of art? Around and around the tag cloud goes! It's delightful.

The thing is, the tag cloud script was designed several years ago. Five years ago, to be precise, it was an attempt to recreate the same awesome widget on WordPress - and it does not work with the more recent Blogger templates that would allow me to widen my columns.

It's either wide columns or the tag cloud - we can't have both.

One strike against it is that - on older machines, or when attempting to view this blog on your PS3 - you may notice it giving your system a bit of a hard time. I suspect half the reason my PS3's hard drive got corrupted was all the times I had to force it to restart after it froze while viewing this blog. I don't get that problem when I'm reading Mogs or Chamberlain - they both use more modern templates.

Simplicity is good.

Additionally, it's always bothered me when I pull a big, beautiful YouTube video or screenshot for the blog and have to shrink it down to 400px wide to get it to fit. When I first started this thing, just figuring that part out was hard - I'd end up with giant videos stretching into the sidebar, or half-pictures, their right sides disappearing off the side of the column.

I'd prefer to offer big, beautiful screenshots and full-sized videos. I feel that's a very positive endeavor, but it's worth noting that (a) all past posts would look rather funny with the new layout - tiny pictures, occasionally on the left side of a column, occasionally in the middle - whichever formatting I had to use at the time to make it work with this old-school interface. (b) it may be off-putting to you, dear reader.

And that I can't abide.

So, as you can see, I'm torn on the subject - and I turn to you for help. It's worked out rather well in the past, so let's do it again!

On the upper-right corner of this blog, you will find a small poll. Your choices are simple;

(a) Leave the blog as it is.

(b) Change it up.

I'll leave it up for a week and take action, as you see fit.

Three uncut SSX races.

2012-01-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of GameSpot. Rare is the title that can put a smile on my face just by showing me a gameplay video.

Resident Evil 6 officially announced - looks reasonably awesome.

2012-01-19T15:14:00.000-08:00

Y'see the move where Leon does a slide and turns around to shoot the dude?

Slick.

This looks more interesting that I'd thought it would. Also - fastest rumor-to-confirmed turnaround ever?

Resident Evil 6 leaked - Nov 20, 2012 release date.

2012-01-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

If IGN's rumor mill is to be believed, the new game sounds similar to Resident Evil 2 in that there are separate playable characters and campaigns - but it also sounds like it will all be co-op, a'la Resident Evil 5. Word is, Chris Redfield and Leon Kennedy will both be playable, with Ada Wong being unlocked after certain playthrough conditions are met.

I would buy the crap out of Resident Evil 6... if it dropped in the first four or five months of a year - but I anticipate I'll have my hands so full this Fall, RE6 may get pushed to the 'when I have time' pile.

Yet more X-COM: Enemy Unknown screens.

2012-01-19T15:06:00.001-08:00

This game has a lot of screenshots. I wonder if it will ever have any trailers?

Slideshow - just click.

Shank 2 is so close I can taste it. It's kinda' gamey.

2012-01-19T14:43:00.000-08:00

Ooh, theme song.

Klei announced today that Shank 2 - follow-up to the best downloadable game I played in 2010 - will arrive on the North American PSN on February 7th! To celebrate, let's watch a new gameplay clip!

Mmm. That's hot.

Darksiders II dev diary - Death.

2012-01-19T04:50:00.000-08:00

Thank goodness - it's been far too long since we saw some new footage of Darksiders II. Granted, most of the footage here is of developers talking about their new protagonist, but I'm just glad to see that "Summer 2012" card at the end.

Stop your government from fucking with our internet!

2012-01-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

Americans, I'm looking at you. You have power, here. Power to let folks who want to keep their overpaid government jobs know that you won't vote for them again if they support this shit.

PIPA - Wikipedia Page .

SOPA - Wikipedia Page.

The Short Version.

The Shorter Version.

Who supports, who opposes, and who's getting paid to do one or the other.

Write to your senators! Here are their addresses.

Write to your representatives! Here's a directory of them.

Call them! Piss them off!

Like it or not, America is a world leader - and nobody wants to be led down the road of internet censorship, so we can all be like Iran and North Korea! Now, I know you think that's an extreme interpretation of this - but they're essentially attempting to allow the same method of blocking websites as those countries. C'mon, Americans - keep it free! That's supposed to be your bag, isn't it?

New Max Payne 3 dev diary - Technology and Weapons.

2012-01-18T17:10:00.001-08:00

Very hyped. Also, it ends with an actual, factual release date - May 15th!

Eeeee!

One thing I was kinda' nonplussed with is the muzzle flare on Max's uzis when he goes into bullet time. Its constant warbling - not suggesting the single report of each bullet - feels a little cheap looking.

I Am Alive is still 'coming soon.'

2012-01-18T16:58:00.000-08:00

Here's another little trailer to tide us over until its unannounced release date, showing off the game's intimidation and combat mechanics.

Best of 2011 - wrap-up.

2012-01-18T16:25:00.000-08:00

Awww yeah - it's the breakdown! Here's a quick look at where the cookies crumbled for gaming in 2011 here at The Games of Chance.

The Best of 2011 homepage can be found here, along with what games were up for consideration and why.

Games I'm sorry I didn't play...

Mass Effect 2
Child of Eden
Okamiden
Rayman Origins
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Resistance 3

The most singularly striking moments in gaming were...

Acknowledgments

Bastion
Dark Souls
Portal 2

Honorable Mentions

Batman: Arkham City
Portal 2 (for a different moment)
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
inFamous 2

Runner up - Alice: Madness Returns

Greatest Moment of 2011 - Dead Space 2

The most visually creative and impressive games were...

Acknowledgments

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Batman: Arkham City
inFamous 2

Honorable Mentions

Alice: Madness Returns
Dead Space 2

Runner up - The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim

Best Art Direction of 2011 - Dark Souls

The games that took me unawares were...

Acknowledgments

Bulletstorm
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Honorable Mentions

Duke Nukem Forever
Alice: Madness Returns
L.A. Noire

Runner up - inFamous 2

Most Surprising Game of 2011 - Dead Island

'Cause there's no topic like off-topic...

Biggest surprise - Tangled

Best action - Kung-fu Panda 2

Best story - Thirst

Best animated movie - Rango

Best live-action movie - The Muppets

Best Movie of 2011 - Rango

The most stylin' games were...

Acknowledgment

L.A. Noire

Honorable Mentions

Batman: Arkham City
inFamous 2
Alice: Madness Returns

Runner up - Dead Space 2

Best Presentation of 2011 - Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

The funnest games were...

Acknowledgments

Catherine
Rage
Bulletstorm
Portal 2
Batman: Arkham City

Honorable mentions

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Dark Souls

Runner up - Dead Island

Best Gameplay of 2011 - inFamous 2

The most immersive or affecting games were...

Acknowledgments

Alice: Madness Returns
Portal 2

Honorable mentions

The Elder Scrolls V: Syrim
Dead Island

Runner up - Dead Space 2

Best Atmosphere of 2011 - Dark Souls

The best voice work of was...

Acknowledgments

Logan Cunningham as Rucks (in Bastion)
Nolan North & Richard McGonagle as Drake & Sully (in Uncharted 3)
Gunner Wright as Isaac (in Dead Space 2)

Honorable mention

Ellen McLain and Stephen Merchant (in Portal 2)

Runner up - Eric Ladin & Caleb Moody as Cole & Zeke (in inFamous 2)

Best Performance of 2011 - Mark Hamill as The Joker (in Batman: Arkham City)

The very best, most awesomest games of 2011 were...

Acknowledgments

Alice: Madness Returns
Dead Island

Honorable mentions

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Batman: Arkham City
Portal 2
Dead Space 2

"Best" game of 2011 - Dark Souls

Game of the Year...

I hope everyone got a kick (or at least a few more games to care about) out of this year's proceedings. Personally, I feel I produced some of my better pieces. I feel explaining Dark Souls in the Best Art Direction post and examining the symbolism of one awful door in Madness Returns for the Greatest Moment post were two of the best thing I've ever written.

Max Payne 3 pushed to May.

2012-01-17T14:25:00.000-08:00

Originally slated for a late-March release, Rockstar Vancouver's Max Payne 3 won't see store shelves until an unidentified date in May. That's only two more months - but still, doesn't pushing this game back indicate it's a broken, disastrous mess, and won't be fit to see the light of day when it comes, blinking and bawling, into the Sun?

Of course not. Remember the last time Rockstar pushed a major game back a teensy bit, a few months prior to its release? Of course you do.

Uncharted: Drake's Devotion.

2012-01-17T13:51:00.000-08:00

Seriously, beautifully done.

Best of 2011 - Game of the Year.

2012-01-16T16:22:00.001-08:00

The time has come. Here, we focus on the eight most wonderful and delicious games of 2011. That's right - eight. I refuse to narrow it down any further. I refuse to drop any of the following games from this list, because they are The Games.

If one were consider only measurable criteria, I suppose, one or two titles would get the boot in favor of, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Bulletstorm, Dragon Age II, Catherine or Killzone 3- which are all great games. To be one of the best games of the year, though, you have to have something more.

There has to be something different. Call it inspiration, call it magic, call it awesomesauce - it is, simply, a divine spark that elevates an experience from merely good or even great and turns it into a game that can only be described as special. A title that carves out its own little place in your heart, and takes up residence for all time.

These are the games that defined 2011. These are the Games of the Year.

game of the year 2011

acknowledgments

Horror-themed action platformer.

Developer : Spicy Horse

Publisher : Electronic Arts

Acknowledgment : best atmosphere.

Honorable Mention : best art direction, biggest surprise and best presentation.

Runner-Up : greatest moment.

"Alice is fun. It's a nice game to slip into for the purpose of running, jumping and going snicker-snack with a two-foot butcher's knife of myth - but thanks to its incredible art direction, unique protagonist and exceptional emotional intelligence, it's not just a nice game.

It's a rare one."
-from the review-

2011 boasted plenty of triple-A games - and we'll get to the best of those, in a moment - but there were two B-quality titles that still managed to be gems. Alice is the first, thanks to its profound psychological insight and stunning presentation.

While the game's pacing is best defined as nonexistent - there is simply far too much padding, here - the final impression it leaves and ultimate effect on the player is one of a consistently magical, gorgeous fever-dream where one shudders from awe at its incredible art direction to a deep emotional terror that cannot be adequately understood until its final, triumphant moments.

Alice herself is a sharply drawn and thoughtfully crafted protagonist, and playing as her is a comfortable, easy-going pleasure as you burst into swarms of butterflies to dodge and zip towards a foe for a quick Vorpal Blade combo before finishing it off with a mighty whomp from your Hobby Horse. She twirls and flies through soaring, insane worlds of floating steamworks and bloody rivers, drifting - along with the player - between an infuriatingly passive existence in reality and the horrifying emotional truth of her dreams.

This is a game that one may tear through and find themselves disregarding, due to its thoughtlessly languid pacing, simplified mechanics and lazy, backstroking take on structure - only to discover there is, at its core, a burning ember of uncomfortable emotional honesty that is not so easily forgotten.

Many games in 2011 attempted to tell great stories. Many succeeded - but none carried the same psychological weight and courageous accuracy of Alice. With that remarkable - and practically singular - feat, its brave, unique themes, it consistently thrilling presentation and its smooth gameplay, Madness Returns is one of the best titles of the year.

First-person open-world RPG-lite zombie brawler.

Developer : Techland

Publisher : Deep Silver

Honorable Mention : best atmosphere.

Runner-up : best gameplay.

Winner : biggest surprise.

Picking your way across a deserted beach. Slinking through slums. Edging a bit deeper into the jungle, keeping one ear cocked for the groans of the recently deceased - that's a tense, immersive, fascinating journey.

Beating the shit out of zombies with a fire axe via the most perfectly-realized first-person melee combat to ever grace gaming? That's an unmitigated joy.

"In my opinion, Dead Island is not one of the "best" games of the year. It behooves me to warn you about its bugs, its mediocre graphics, its crap narrative and infuriating system of auto-saves - but I would be remiss in my duties if I did not advise you that Dead Island is easily one of the most tactile, thrilling, immersive and when all is said and done fun gaming experiences of the year.

It is, therefor, one of the best titles to drop in 2011. I love this game."
-from the review-

Dead Island accomplishes a rather stunning feat with a few choice and simple tools - with good music, great atmospheric sound and the best first-person melee combat I've ever experienced, it shatters the bonds of mediocrity which would otherwise relegate it to the bargain bin.

Similar to Alice, it is a far-from-perfect game which happens to boast a singular, blindingly beautiful strength that no other title offers - and so, is elevated to an instant classic. Similar to Dark Souls, your immersion is directly tied to the simple act of playing the game. Dead Island's moment-to-moment combat is so visceral, so brutal and tactical but mechanically comfortable, one cannot play it without being entirely absorbed - and being absorbed in a first-person open-world zombie apocalypse, which so many gamers and geeks have imagined with gleeful, savage grins for decades, is nothing less than a gift.

"First-person zombie bludgeoning. Who knew?"
-from Best Gameplay-

game of the year 2011

honorable mentions

First-person open-world fantasy RPG.

Developer : Bethesda Game Studios

Publisher : Bethesda Softworks

Honorable Mention : best atmosphere.

Runner-up : best art direction.

I know, it's counter-intuitive - Skyrim only got mentioned in two previous Best of 2011 posts, and here it is, ranked higher than Dead Island and Alice. Why? Ambition. And not just ambition - successful ambition!

"Skyrim demanded a healthy dose of optimism to create, and requires a pinch of the same hopeful, romantic spirit to enjoy. What were the good folks at Bethesdathinking, when their fertile minds spawned this prodigious property? They were being arrogant, is what they were doing - but so beautifully.

Bethesda are the most attractive of optimists. They believed it could be done. They, in their proud, self-righteous way figured they could produce a massive fantasy kingdom for gamers to play in that could be squeezed on to the current gen yet managed to bypass our cynicism. A game that would make us forget about bugs, forget about the graphical limitations of our gaming tech, and become entirely absorbed in a fantasy.

They wanted to make the fantasy game we imagine a fantasy game could be. In assembling Skyrim, they reached for the sky - and descended from those snowy peaks with a definitive experience. Skyrim is a supernatural success."
-from the review-

No other western RPG developer really tries to pull off what Bethesda does with The Elder Scrolls. Let's not count Fallout 3 and New Vegas, here - those are basically in the same boat. For the past seventeen years, reviews for each and every game in the series have shared the same bullet points:

Wonderfully well-realized world.
The degree of freedom is fantastic.
Combat is decent.
Way too buggy.

Skyrim does not break the mold - but that's not a bad thing. Bethesda has been re-working and refining their flagship franchise since 1994, and with each iteration we get a game that is markedly better than the last - in this case, it's wonderful to admit Skyrim is par for The Elder Scrolls course. It's a much better game than Oblivion.

Its combat is still dissatisfying, its systems are still a bit questionable - but who cares? No one cares when a dragon slams into ground ten yards away, bellowing a challenge. No one gives a crap about unfortunate loading times when you're picking your way through the swamps south of Solitude, or crossing your fingers that this time you'll be able to pickpocket that 1,900-gold necklace from the Jarl of Whatevertown.

Skyrim shares much of its predecessors problems, but it takes the series' strength and extrapolates on it to a degree that borders on lunacy. The kingdom of Skyrim is obscenely large - its landscapes so rich, so varied, so detailed, so thickly populated that it becomes impossible not to become entirely absorbed in your adventures there.

Characters and stories and adventures just leap off the screen, here, to take up residence in your imagination as you head off to work for the day. You can't get it out of your mind - you're stamping forms or serving customers with rote professionalism, but inside you're weighing potential tactics for dragon takedowns. You're second-guessing whether or not you should have assassinated that politician.

You're living in Skyrim.

Action-adventure / Zeldalike.

Developer : Rocksteady Studios

Publisher : Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Acknowledgment : best art direction and best gameplay.

Honorable Mention : greatest moment and best presentation.

Winner : best performance.

After the frankly shocking revelation that 2009's Arkham Asylum was an excellent Batman game, we paid much closer attention to Arkham City's development - but Rocksteady didn't get a free hype pass. Lightning is not often known to strike twice - but look! It has.

In so many ways, Arkham City is the Batman game we've been waiting for. After all, when we read the books and watched the cartoons and movies as children, we didn't just throw a dark towel around our shoulders and imagine ourselves fighting goons in a series of corridors - we saw dramatic visions of ourselves soaring over a darkened city, perched on rooftops, narrowed eyes focused on a clutch of thugs in an alley below, planning our awesome attack. Our fertile little minds furnished us with all the wonderful toys - we tossed paper Batarangs and fired imaginary grappling hooks - at one time or another, we all fantasized about being the Bat.

Arkham City is that fantasy, realized.

"More than merely a great game with classic structure that harkens back to Metroidand Zelda, Arkham City strikes out on its own in terms of substance, with mechanics pioneered by Batman alone. Its résumé reads like a wish list of gaming: a fantastic central character, an involving story, a stunning beginning and a moving ending. Artistically striking, structurally comfortable and mechanically unique. Wonderfully fun in all its facets - oh, and an open-world game that really rewards exploration.

Love for its source material bleeds from every scrap of dialogue, every perfectly-cast villain, every elegant explosion of violence from its hero, which can do no less than inspire the player to invest further in its wonderful world. Arkham City is a title of uniformly high quality, with no weak link about which to complain.

This is one of the best games of the year. Plus, it's Batman."
-from the review-

First-person sci-fi comedy puzzler.

Developer : Valve

Pubisher : Valve Corporation (PC), Electronic Arts (PS3, 360)

Acknowledgment : greatest moment, best gameplay and best atmosphere.

Honorable Mention : best performance.

If I had done a Best Writing or Best Narrative post, Portal 2 would have won, hands down. This game's script - and its writers' grasp of the fundamental values of acts and narrative arcs - is easily the best of the year. Portal 2's story is a funhouse ride of wonderful, funny characters and clever ironic reversals - where your best friend becomes your worst enemy, your worst enemy becomes your best friend, and you are an unstoppable force - but we didn't come here just for a story.

As a contained, directed and linear experience, Portal 2 is among the the most well-constructed game on this list. Long loading screens aside, it's immaculate - and immaculately designed.

"What we have here is a perfectly-playing puzzle game. This thing has been playtested to the ends of the earth.

Valve are supernaturally practiced at introducing new mechanics in steady, comforable beats that never leave the player overwhelmed - and crucially never leave them bored with things they've seen before. They have mastered the art of making puzzles just challenging enough to reach the cusp of frustration before the solution becomes clear, and sweet satisfaction and pride washes over you.

...

Portal 2 is a pleasure at every turn. A wonderful script. A fascinating world. Original mechanics. Rich, chewy gameplay that's smooth as silk, and still wholesome fun on multiple repeat playthroughs. The game's final act of is, without question, some of the best gaming I have ever experienced."
-from the review-

No game in 2011 offered as many moments of near-frustration which unfold into gleeful, proud understanding as Portal 2. Valve have cornered the market on "the a-ha! moment," but that's just the tip of the iceberg, with this game.

It is one of most creative, interesting science fiction worlds we've been invited to explore in years. With cool whites, grubby forest greens and neon accents, it's one of the most artistically striking titles in recent memory. With a supernaturally well-designed campaign, constantly engaging and comfortable gameplay, the unexpected gift of an excellent co-op experience, revelatory writing and wonderful performances from its leads, Portal 2 was one of the few games of 2011 that qualified as "required reading," no matter what genre you favor.

Sci-fi/horror themed third-person shooter.

Developer : Visceral Games

Publisher : Electronic Arts

Acknowledgment : best performance .

Honorable Mention : best art direction.

Runner-up : best presentation and best atmosphere.

Winner : greatest moment.

"Dead Space 2 is the rarest of games - a modern horror classic - the likes of which we haven't been graced with since the original, three years ago. At first blush it may suffer from familiarity, but every part of the game has been improved, every facet buffed to a shine.

The story is more involving and more intimate, with a script that wisely knows when it's best to say as little as possible. No environment outstays its welcome - the variety allows for some major payoffs - and no addition to the formula is a missed step (save, arguably, for the stomp-reward mechanic).

It looks fantastic and plays beautifully, with fast, growling combat that benefits from an added dose of strategy thanks to reworked weapons and the viable option of turning enemies' own severed limbs against them. Games of such uniformly high quality don't appear too often - and almost never as a multiplatform release from a third-party developer.

It's excellent."
-from the review-

Dead Space 2 stole the show early in the year, but many seem to have forgotten it. Similar toPortal 2, this is a linear, heavily-directed experience that is perhaps best described as immaculate.

I can't point to any significant weakness in its design, presentation or mechanics. Voice work is strong, art design is fantastic and sound design is better. The gameplay itself is silky-smooth, and the Saturn-orbiting Sprawl is just as well-realized as the haunting U.S.G. Ishimura was in 2008 - which, alone, is one hell of an accomplishment.

What elevates Dead Space 2 above 2011's other gorgeous, triple-A third-person shooter is the sense of legitimate wonder and lack of cynicism that permeates its construction, and interpretation. Dead Space 2 takes nothing - particularly the player's attention - for granted, and makes a promise to never, even for a moment, disappoint with some lax pacing or substandard storytelling.

Nothing, here, feels clichéd, or arbitrary. While it's very directed, and every facet is quite intentionally - thoughtfully - included, one never feels like this plot point or that set piece was shoehorned into a narrative that lacked the ability to elegantly support it.

Dead Space 2 is one of those games I simply can't encourage you to investigate enough. One note made in February's review of the title is that this game seems to be custom-made for those little blurbs you read on the back of a box that make a game sound far better than it could possibly be. In Dead Space 2's case, those blurbs are all true.

* * *

And now, things come to a head. Some of you may be surprised with how it ends, here. I thought long and hard about this one - and what I arrived at is that a great, but imperfect title may be better than a perfect one. There is a difference between the "best" game and the best game.

I went this rout for the following titles because, in the end, I felt it would be... dishonest of me to reverse their positions on this list. So, while I acknowledge and celebrate this next title as an absolute treasure and a tour de force, it's not the best game of the year. It's the "best" game.

* * *

"best" game of 2011

Action fantasy RPG.

Developer : From Software

Publisher : Namco Bandai Games

Acknowledgment : greatest moment.

Honorable mention : best gameplay.

Winner : best art direction and best atmosphere.

This can be very simply put;

"Dark Souls is a masterpiece."
-from the review-

In the most literal and most passionate senses of the word, Dark Souls is a modern masterpiece. There is nothing here - no mechanic, no creation, no snippet of music - that one could remove without damaging the experience. There is nothing one could add that would not have a significant and negative impact on the title. It's just... perfect - or at least as close to perfect as games have ever come.

Dark Souls - from the first uneasy moments to the final apocalyptic confrontation - is one of the single greatest video games of our time.

While many titles this year have strengths that comfortably appear on bullet-point lists, Dark Souls' otherworldly style and substance assembles to form a beast of an experience that is unlike anything else in gaming - leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor, Demon's Souls.

"[From Software] were free to let their imaginations roam to a dark world that echoes the fantasy landscapes we only ever saw in our dreams as children, while our parents read us stories of brave knights, evil monsters, ancient ruins and insane cities. As whippersnappers, we lived in those worlds, curled up on couches or safe in bed, regularly drifting from rapt attention to that ethereal, barely-conscious place that loomed before the sandman took us away - so we could continue exploring in our dreams.

The fantasy worlds we wandered in our larval forms were never crystal-clear - they were swirling miasmas of details we were sure of, and an eerie fog obscuring the minutiae beyond - breeding a feeling of joyous discovery and uneasy trepidation of what unimaginable things lay in wait, just past the doors of our understanding.

That is what Dark Souls feels like..."
-from Best Art Direction-

Dark Souls achieves this miraculous, romantic, dreamlike immersion with both its wonderful presentation and, crucially, its gameplay. Like Dead Island, your complete and total absorption in the experience is a prerequisite to your survival - it's built in to the very mechanical fabric of the game - and Dark Souls boasts a similarly unique and rewarding combat system.

Where many games with a focus on melee combat can end up feeling inconsequential or "airy," Dark Souls' weapons all seem to have a bit of heft to them. Your decisions within combat - split-second choices of whether or not to block, attempt a forward stab or an arcing slash - have infinitely more consequence here than any other title in memory, and are that much more rewarding. If you make the wrong choice - say, you attempt a heavy swing to dispatch an enemy in one mighty blow, but make the mistake of thinking your sword can pass through solid rock - your blade will clang off the stonework, leaving you vulnerable for one awful second.

In Dark Souls, that one awful second is all your enemies need to tear you limb from limb. Back to the bonfire. Try it again - and don't embarrass yourself, this time.

It sounds brutal - and it is - but that's what makes success all the more thrilling.

"Because, while everything in this world kills, once you've learned its secrets, nothing in it kills better than you."
-from the review-

This game is nothing less than sumptuous. It offers so much that we've forgotten to ask for, in modern gaming. Here, there truly is a rich, vast fantasy world to explore. There are enemies which really will scare the crap out of you - and that alone is something we seem to have lost, somewhere around 2002.

Beyond that, the game is defined by what it quite consciously doesn't offer. Upon arriving in Lordran - if you decide to talk to the only living soul you see - he'll mention something about ringing two bells. That's all you get.

There are no waypoints. There is no glowing line on the ground telling you where to go. There are no moral choices - or, at least, none that are framed as such - and the consequences of your actions are left for you to discover. Nothing is explained, nothing is spelled out.

What it offers - and just as importantly, what it doesn't - makes Dark Souls an absolutely singular title. It resonates on a long-forgotten, deeply shrouded level, possessing you entirely - wielding the simple tools of thick atmosphere, rewarding combat, uncompromising challenge and an air of genuine mystery.

It doesn't merely offer these gifts. It does so with such skill, such considered, thoughtful design, such creative joy and such a wisely restrained hand - adding no half-baked mechanics, no characters, no bullet-point features that would detract attention and focus from its unique and profound vision - that if one must apply a label to Dark Souls, it can only be "masterpiece."

It's not just an atmospheric action-RPG - it's as close as I've ever seen to a perfect one.

best

game

2011

Open-world platformer / third-person shooter.

Developer : Sucker Punch

Publisher : Sony Computer Entertainment

Acknowledgment : best art direction.

Honorable Mention : greatest moment, biggest surprise and best presentation.

Runner-up : best performance.

Winner : best gameplay.

There are two distinct schools of modern-day platformers. There are those that allow very linear play - games that build on "combos" of canned platforming abilities like Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed - where you can, for example, run up a wall (at a direct vertical or particular horizontal angle), jump off the wall to swing from a pole (in a canned swing animation), and from there you can leap off. It's freedom to do a lot of things - but those things are very prescribed and very constrained.

Other modern three dimensional platformers have a few simple moves - Super Mario Galaxy,Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank for example - but these allow you to ping-pong your character off the game's geometry with much more moment-to-moment freedom. You can, essentially, do more - but you have fewer tools to do it with, and less tactile interaction with your environment.

inFamous 2 isn't like either of those schools. It is the any-angle, any-surface freedom of the more traditional Mario-esque platformers, combined with the slick animation and deeply interactive environments of the modern Prince of Persia-style. It's neither - it's both - it's thebest.

When it comes to platforming, Sucker Punch are simply the masters of the form - and given that it's a genre that's fast approaching thirty years old, with dozens of storied properties under its banner, that's really saying something.

At its core, inFamous 2 is just a platformer. It's a game about jumping from one object to another object - but it is, without question, the best platformer I've played in twenty-five years of gaming. There's something so... wholesome, so comforting about the act of playing it.

A good platformer is chicken soup for the gamer's soul, and inFamous 2 is as good as it gets. It is nothing but gleeful, indulgent, fantastic fun at every given moment.

Sucker Punch designed New Marais, from the ground up, as a more interesting jungle gym for Cole to run, jump, climb and zip his way through - and the simple act of navigating this world is more pleasurable than any game I've ever played. There's just something delicious about hopping on to a power line on the side of a building that rockets you skyward, leaping backwards off it at the last moment to kick along and off the building opposite, snagging a ledge, kicking offthat, throwing out your hands to repulse gravity and shooting yourself up another five feet to land on a rooftop.

The simple act of playing inFamous 2 the most pleasure I've had with a Dualshock in... well, ever.

Of course, there's more to it than that.

Player-character Cole is an electrically-powered superhero. As such he fires lightning from his hand, lobs electrical grenades, launches energy rockets and throws out street-sweeping ultrapowers like the (always satisfying, absolutely gorgeous) ionic vortex.

inFamous 2 - thanks to its thoughtfully-designed enemies - is a beautiful, tactical but arcadey third-person shooter. That would be fine - it would be decent all on its own - but because this game was designed with the idea of allowing the player to use nearly all their combat abilitieswhile platforming, it becomes something else entirely.

You're not just navigating an environment. You're not just shooting enemies with energy rockets. You're launching yourself fifty feet in the air to float above your target for a moment, raining down a barrage of thumping electrical rockets before transitioning into a 'thunder drop' and crashing into the ground in a blinding shockwave of kinetic power.

There's a unique, silky feel to it. It chains together so beautifully, and so freely - the control of a modern platformer, the freedom of a classic one, completely married with its comfortable shooting. For example, you could be 'grinding' across a power line that joins up with a nearby roof. As you near the top of the power line's gently rising arc, you leap off, repulse gravity with your hands to give you a little extra air and soar over the building, lining up your reticle on four thugs to throw them all, simultaneously, from the roof with a perfectly-placed energy blast before smacking into the rooftop and rolling to a halt.

This game is a wonderful, easy-like-Sunday-morning mix of shooting and the exemplary platforming. Its fantastic controls and elegant mechanics, when turned against its weird and fantastic enemies, make inFamous 2 the single most spectacular, enjoyable action title I've ever played.

Still, there's more to it than just the best gameplay of 2011.

Sucker Punch have long had a flair for visuals. Between their cartoon-inspired mastery of animation and their skill with art direction, they've always been slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to painting a backdrop or framing a move, special effect or set piece so it elicits a gentle gasp, and widened eyes. In inFamous 2, they rupture any previous expectations of what they could achieve.

The team revamped the engine they used in inFamous with input from their artists and programmers, and the results are staggering. In terms of graphics technology, this is the most impressive open-world game I've ever seen. In terms of artistry, it sits right up there with 2010's Red Dead Redemption, and regularly exceeds it.

Rare is the game that demands one stop and stare because the sky is so gorgeous.

Elsewhere, the team recognized that the presentation of their narrative - which they ably handled back on the PS2 with the Sly trilogy - was far from current-gen standards in the firstinFamous. To address that gap in their repertoire, they recast hero Cole McGrath with an actor who could physically stage scenes, and put him to use in cutscenes constructed in the Unchartedstyle - with actors sharing the same physical space, interacting and playing off each other to achieve the most comfortable, believable performances possible.

If inFamous 2's artistic strength matches the gorgeous style of Red Dead Redemption, their use of technology in storytelling plants one foot firmly ahead of Rockstar's gold standard, and flatly trounces L.A. Noire's unnerving rubber-faced marionettes. Never have cutscenes in an open-world game looked or felt this good - and the title climaxes in one of the most affecting, touching moments of the year.

The storytelling is excellent, but still - you no doubt understand, by this point - that there's more to it than that.

The above screenshots (no, that's not concept art) illustrates two different interpretations of the same in-game vista. This clock tower, which you ascend during an early tutorial mission, feels either looming and gothic or strong and pure - as dictated by your in-game choices.

The game's entire color palette will change, depending on your actions. If you are a dastardly, self-absorbed supervillain who doesn't let collateral damage like starving orphans stop you from carpet-bombing your target, the world will change to reflect that. The game's music becomes darker - inFamous 2 has two soundtracks - and even Cole's posture shifts, bit by bit, until he becomes a dramatically different version of his heroic counterpart.

Sucker Punch didn't give us just one game, here. Tonally - aesthetically - they made two, and both are gorgeous.

Woooo!

inFamous 2 is an intensely beautiful game. Intelligent. Touching. Masterfully constructed. It's imperfect - but its few foibles are not what I'll remember about it, one or two or ten years from now.

I'll remember inFamous 2 was, without question, the most fun I had with a Dualshock in 2011. inFamous 2 is the game of the year.

MUSIC - The Last of Us theme by Gustavo Santaolalla.

2012-01-16T13:17:00.000-08:00

Smexy. Gustavo Santaolalla is the Oscar-winning composer of the scores for Brokeback Mountain and Babel.

And while we're on the subject of The Last of Us, you may want to check out this video interview Eurogamer's got with the second team over at Naughty Dog, working on the title. It offers little and less in terms of new info - but it's a nice glimpse at the attitudes of folks who clearly feel very strongly about their work.

Given that these guys did such a phenomenal job on Uncharted 2, I have very high hopes indeed.

[update] Ooh, look at that. You can download the song over at Eurogamer.[/update]

A dangerous method.

2012-01-15T20:48:00.000-08:00

Dangerous indeed - for my work on the Game of the Year post this year seems... utterly exhaustive. It took me hours just to find the header images, and I've been plucking away at the post itself for the past three or four days.

Now, I find myself within striking distance of finishing it. Maybe six paragraphs to go - but I'm afraid I have company, and she is in dire need of snuggles. I'll work on it tomorrow.

In the mean time...

Kayla and I saw A Dangerous Method, tonight. I was rather interested in seeing a movie about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, played by Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen, respectively. If you want to see a movie about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud starring Fassbender Mortensen, this is without question the best there is - but there's a monkey in the wrench.

I spent like, every scene she was in wishing someone else had played Keria Knightley's character. For a supremely good-looking person, she's absolutely tedious to watch, when compared to Mortensen and Fassbender.

There's one scene, for example, when Knightley's mentally damaged ingenue is framed, front-and-center. She takes up 30% of the screen, and is in sharp focus. Behind her, to her right and slightly out-of-focus, sits Fassbender - and I spent the whole scene watching his blurry ass try to react with a semblance of realism to her silly, jaw-jutting ridiculousness.

I know some critics are saying this role is Knightley amazing us all with what a remarkably good actress she is, but man, I don't see it.

Knightly's presence aside, A Dangerous Method is an interesting look at the strained relationship between Jung and Freud during the birth of the very idea of psychology. It's a little dry, and doesn't delve too deeply into either character - I would have enjoyed more exploration of Jung's unusual childhood exploits, for example - but still, it was an infinitely better night at the movies than Mission Impossible 4.

Dana's back in Prototype 2?

2012-01-15T09:54:00.000-08:00

One of my bigger gripes with the original Prototype was its general narrative. The actual, core A -> B -> C story of (player character) Alex Mercer was an interesting sci-fi diversion, but elsewhere it was a ragged mess of loose ends and fraying edges.

The most egregious example of this was the fate of Alex's sister, Dana Mercer. And alt-lifestyle hacker/techie, she helps Alex with his investigation early in the story, climaxing in a fantastic chase through the streets of New York when she's abducted by a big clawful mutant baddie. Racing through Central Park after her as she screams your name at the top of her lungs was easily the most emotionally resonant sequence in the game.

Eventually, you rescue Dana. She's terribly ill, so you take her to a doctor you trust, tell him to take care of her, and... that's it. We never find out if Dana recovered, Alex never goes back to check on her. There's the Dana story - done.

...but apparently not so done that she won't be appearing in Prototype 2 - if the above concept images have anything to say about it. Interesting (to me).

Personal note: Workin' on the Game of the Year post.

2012-01-14T20:51:00.001-08:00

...and it's not ready yet. It's taking me a while. An oddly long time, to be honest.

Anyway, one of the things that struck me as I was trying to sum up this game and that game is how I kinda' screwed myself when I wrote the Best Art Direction post, when it comes to Dark Souls. When I explained Dark Souls in that post, I think I explained it - on a fundamental, emotional level - better than I ever could again.

I think this is one of the best things I ever wrote;

"The game is regularly beautiful, not due to technical wizardry (Uncharted 3) or occasional near photo-realism (Skyrim), but thanks to developers who were able to bend their reasonable but unremarkable mastery of current-gen consoles to a focused, precise vision of gothic fantasy that gets right under your skin.

Here, the artists were free to let their imaginations roam to a dark world that echoes the fantasy landscapes we only ever saw in our dreams as children, while our parents read us stories of brave knights, evil monsters, ancient ruins and insane cities. As whippersnappers, we lived in those worlds, curled up on couches or safe in bed, regularly drifting from rapt attention to that ethereal, barely-conscious place that loomed before the sandman took us away - so we could continue exploring in our dreams.

The fantasy worlds we wandered in our larval forms were never crystal-clear - they were swirling miasmas of details we were sure of, and an eerie fog obscuring the minutiae beyond - breeding a feeling of joyous discovery and uneasy trepidation of what unimaginable things lay in wait, just past the doors of our understanding.

That is what Dark Souls feels like, thanks in large part to its spectacular, inventive and strangely familiar visual design.

There is a curious romance permeating Dark Souls. Where it's not overgrown by ancient flora, the world is almost entirely dead or dying - making occasional encounters with living human beings all the more startling. Instead of being dense with detail, Lordran is painted in broad strokes. Gaps in narrative and visual explanation abound, and nothing can fill them save the player's imagination.

The ancient kingdom of Lordran is populated almost entirely with nightmare creatures - from standard, easily-digestible skeletal warriors to mind-flaying creations that seem to have clawed their way through from R'lyeh. Its architecture is both classic European gothic and a confident, inspired exploration of what could be - what, in fact, existed beyond that obscuring haze we viewed these worlds through as children."

I don't think I often toot my own horn, around here - but c'mon. I nailed that one.

Sumioni might work...

2012-01-13T18:01:00.000-08:00

...but honestly, I'll wait for a demo.

Well, that's no ordinary rabbit. That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on.

2012-01-13T14:11:00.001-08:00

I made Kayla watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the first time ever last week - so, naturally, when I stumbled across this in my internet wand'rings, I had to post it.

Hitman: Blood Money coming to PS3?

2012-01-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

This ESRB rating suggests so.

Blood Money was the best of the PS2 Hitman games, pulling ahead of Hitman 2 and Hitman: Contracts with gameplay that realized a lot of the series' potential, and some very valuable new mechanics in the hands of your assassin. Simply being able to grab a guy from behind and crack him over the head with your pistol was a huge step up - meaning you didn't have to rely on a limited supply of drugs or injections to non-lethally incapacitate guards.

It was also fun, of course, to grab a dude and use him as a human shield while you line up your reticle over the forehead of a freaked-out personal security goon.

I'd love to play Blood Money in HD - of course, it could just be another "PS2 classic," and not an HD up-port.

This is SSX trailer.

2012-01-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

There - now you get it.

Lollipop Chainsaw - Swan trailer.

2012-01-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

Y'ever had a game that you want, but you don't want to want it?

Yeah.

Three New XCOM: Enemy Unknown screens.

2012-01-12T04:45:00.000-08:00

Slideshow!

Of particular interest may be the top image, which shows a criminally low chance to hit - similar to (what little) I've seen of the original strategy game.

Go hands-on with The Darkness II this month.

2012-01-12T04:43:00.001-08:00

Word dropped today that the demo for The Darkness II will be out on PSN and XBL on January 24th. If you're an Xbox Live Gold member you can snag it a week early, on January 17th.

Hitman: Absolution - new screens and details.

2012-01-11T16:29:00.000-08:00

Just click me! I open in a slide show that's totally awesome!

A bunch of preview articles dropped today for Hitman: Absolution - otherwise known around here as "Eeeeeeeee!" - along with a batch of sweet new screenshots.

The previews explore how Absolution is endeavoring to be accessible without sacrificing challenge. Instead of being somewhat inscrutable to newcomers, Io are trying to make it easier for the player to understand, at all times, the options that are open to them via on-screen prompts, et cetera.

Elsewhere, the hardcore should be pleased with what they're calling "purist mode", which removes all the onscreen prompts and information, right down to an ammo counter for your gun.

What has two thumbs and can't wait?

D'awww!

*I don't know who that baby is - I just found him on Google Images. I am not that guy pictured above, but I do have two thumbs and am totally hyped for Absolution.

[update] Oh sweet that slideshow thing totally works. I am gonna' use the crap out of that. [/update]

I don't want to care about an action game from Sega.

2012-01-11T13:40:00.000-08:00

...but now I do.

...shit. It's like Metal Gear Solid plus Ghost in the Shell.

Shit. February 24th? Shit.

First reviews are out for Amy...

2012-01-11T02:57:00.000-08:00

...and it sounds terribad.

79/100 @ GamingXP.

"Amy rises above the zombie splatter masses with protagonist Lana really coming across as a depsperate young woman rather than yet another survivor who's practically a Navy SEAL and can mow down anything."

4.7 / 10 @ CVG.

"...this slowly decaying escort-'em-takes the chaotic horror of the zompocalypse and neuters it with completely unimaginative puzzles."

4 / 10 @ Gamekult.

"L'horreur est bien là, mais rarement pour les bonnes raisons et il est difficile d'y survivre."

4 / 10 @ PlayStation Official Magazine UK.

"...this is technically shoddy, poorly designed and unbearably frustrating. There’s the odd moment when you care, but a dose of pure anger is never far behind."

* * *

So that's disheartening. Am I still gonna' buy, play and review Amy? You bet your ass.

[update] Ooh, it's out on XBL! Don't buy it! It's pretty shitty so far! [/update]

Go hands-on with Asura's Wrath, right now.

2012-01-10T16:30:00.001-08:00

Can you guess why I've embedded the Asura's Wrath Demo Trailer?

Awww yeah. The demo is out now on PSN! Go go go!

The demo offers little, in terms of the standard brawling gameplay we espied in early trailers for the game, instead allowing you to face off against two of the title's bosses. Much of the game's more spectacular action is not brought about by capable combat mechanics, but the most gorgeous quick-time events this side of God of War III.

I don't want to ruin things for you... but there's this one, for example, where some badass ultradude attempts to cut you with his ultrasword - which he only ever used previously in a duel against the king of the gods! - and descends upon you with a vertical, overhead slice.

You jam the analog sticks towards each other, and catch the blade in your six hands. Then you push both analog sticks to the right to deflect the blade off its course. It cuts into the ground instead, and a contintent-sized piece of the Moon cracks apart and up, where once there was a flat expanse.

It's brawler-lite and the most creative, spectacular quicktime events I've seen since Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2.

Check it out.

...oh, and Liam O'Brien as Asura is awesome.