Any kid who had access to an arcade in the 90′s surely spent a good chunk of their allowance pumping quarters into The Simpsons arcade cabinet, but is the game still worth your time and money on the PS3 and Xbox 360? That’s debatable.
Downloadable titles, I personally feel, are the future of how console gamers will digest their games. With consoles every year offering hard drives with more available space, the ability to save a full game locally and play off the hard drive is inevitable.
Let’s face it: Sonic is kind of a joke nowadays. Despite some solid recent releases like Sonic Colors and the Sonic Rush series, most of the games he’s appeared in over the last decade are mediocre at best and unplayable shovelware at worst; garbage like Sonic Unleashed and the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog has transformed Sega’s premiere mascot from gaming icon into the biggest joke in the gaming industry. Every time I mention to someone that I like Sonic games, I quickly have to qualify my statement with “I mean, the good ones. Y’know, the old ones,” unless I want to be laughed at and mocked (and rightfully so). Sega’s been making gradual steps towards improving Sonic’s tarnished imaged, but they’ve still got a long way to go. Thankfully, be re-releasing Sonic CD on PSN and XBL, they’re giving gamers a much needed reminder as to why Sonic was such an icon in the first place.
Batman: Arkham Asylum was to superhero video games what Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was to Batman movies; just as Nolan’s film proved that it was possible to create a gritty, intelligent crime drama starring The Caped Crusader (who’s film appearances up until that point had been limited to campy garbage,) Arkham Asylum likewise proved that, after years of appearing in shovelware and quick movie cash-ins, it was indeed possible to create a good game starring Batman. So does that make Arkham Asylum’s sequel, Arkham City, the gaming equivalent of The Dark Knight? Well, not quite, but it’s still an amazing game in it’s own right.
Sequel to the PSN-exclusive eroge-esque RPG, Record of the Agarest War 2 has been given a release date of Summer 2012. The previous game was notable for its cast of characters, multiple protagonists, ecchi dating sim elements, plenty of cute girls, ecchi, and a story spanning multiple generations (did I mention the ecchi?). Very few RPGs have utilized the generations mechanic, and I personally can only name two that have; Romancing SaGa 2 and Phantasy Star 3.
The King of Fighters XIII is a game that successfully blends new school aesthetics and style with old school skill-based gameplay. KoF has got the depth and balance to be ranked in with genre classics like Third Strike or Garou: Mark of the Wolves, and its more than pretty enough to compete with Capcom’s latest, but unfortunately, one major technical shortcoming keeps it from truly being the king of the fighting genre.
Ezio’s final journey takes him down a familiar, well trodden path, but outside of a few ill-advised detours, it’s still a trip worth taking.
The combination of slick imagery, new interface, collectibles, features and classic humour make Saints Row: The Third a whole new experience, different from its predecessor while still managing to keep the elements that worked.
When Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came out last year, I overheard some classmates talking about how they spent the whole weekend playing the game’s multiplayer, telling the usual gamer war stories of close matches or about how some weapons were overpowered or how the other team was filled with cheap bastards. For their entire conversation they talked exclusively about the multiplayer aspects of the game until I finally interjected.
“What about the single-player?” I asked.
“What? Single player? Nobody plays the campaign in these games anymore.”
I sat down and played through the whole Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 campaign (because it looks like three, maybe four other people did as well and I kind of wanted to even the playing field) in five and a half hours. The following are my thoughts on the campaign in its entirety.
No series of games is more synonymous with PSN than Q Games’s PixelJunk series. Spanning across numerous genres, each game in the PixelJunk series is a unique, creative take on an established genre — PixelJunk Racer was a fun (albeit hard) throwback to 2D racers on the NES, Monsters was an excellent tower defense style strategy game, and Eden was an indescribably beautiful take on 2D platforming. 2009′s PixelJunk Shooter was perhaps the most innovative in the series so far, marrying elements of a twin-stick shooter, a Metroid-style adventure game, and a physics based puzzle game into one amazing package. Now, Q-Games has given us their take on the traditional side-scrolling shooter, and while the result isn’t as fresh or innovative as their previous products, it’s still a solid game in it’s own right.
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