Gamesugar

April 29, 2010

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

Filed under: News Feed — Tags: , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:38 pm

Sin & Punishment 2
Word of Activision and Bungie dating made it awfully tempting to go back to bed today, skipping approximately 50,000 posts about nothing – with liberal sprinkles of complete bullshit, yum yum! There are already posts speculating about online being a major element of a game we don’t even have the working concept to yet – I shit you not.

But why should I let that ludicrous circus of predictability ruin my day? There’s a new dawn on the horizon, where waves of awesome titles wait to lead us to the promised land.

So let’s turn it all around by watching over eight minutes of video for one of those games, namely Sin & Punishment 2 – now with 100% more English!

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April 27, 2010

Gamesugar Spotted in Dotnia!

Filed under: News Feed — Tags: , , , , — Jamie Love @ 5:27 pm

Gamesugar in Dotnia
From the images I’ve just received it’s clear that someone around here is playing games without me, and possibly needs more practice with the 3D Dot Game Heroes’ character editor.

More images of our heroic sugar cube after the break.

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Review – After Burner Climax

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:13 pm

After Burner Climax
After Burner Climax has finally made the migration from the arcade to the consoles, serving up visuals in shiny HD that make me use silly two-string words like “retina-melting,” along with twitch reflex action that couples some nostalgic memories of the series with a new trick that really makes the game less of the trip down memory lane you might expect, and much more of a 21st century arcade love song.

The view from the cockpit is a mix of familiar Top Gun styled vistas and arcade fantasy that leaves players buzzing by volcanic islands, city skylines, and through mountainous pathways – all of it at speeds that seem ludicrous at first sight.

On my first run through I felt a bit like a high school lover again, wondering how I’d burnt out so quickly after all the pent up anticipation.

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Demo Report – Split / Second

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:27 am

Split/Second Demo
So I was more than a little disappointed that the demo for Split/Second only offers up a single-player track – three laps around the airport is all I’ve got to work with here. And let me state the obvious – this makes absolutely no sense, specifically with the goal of “selling the game” via the demo. I’m not handing anything over to Activision’s Blur, but I know plenty of people switched their interest off in the absence of a comparative multiplayer glimpse into Split/Second.

Split/Second is scheduled to release on May 18, only one week ahead of Blur on May 25 – which has had a multiplayer demo hit the press and gamers weeks ago. It’s not impossible to imagine some racing fanatics buying both, but economics makes it one or the other in my world – where the x-factor in making that decision involves how much fun it becomes wrecking my friends online and reveling in that jerk factor. A little bit of mystery is the spice of life, but I can’t help feeling that Split/Second threw in the towel in the fight for more attention.

Again, I’m not handing anything over to Blur just yet. I still prefer what Split/Second has to offer in its approach, a game focused entirely on racing across exploding tracks, with players earning power-play attacks by drifting, drafting, and jumping, rather than tedious item management. The trick often becomes using power-plays without destroying yourself, and there’s plenty of “oh-so-satisfying” moments in wrecking an opponent and watching their auto corpse spin in the air and over your head.

And while I only have that one track to work with, a few dozen laps last night has helped shape some talking points for how the game feels so far.

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April 25, 2010

Lazy Sunday – Hunting The Great Jaggi

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:00 pm

Monster Hunter Tri
I’ve been feeling out Monster Hunter Tri’s offline offerings this week, certain that I’ve fallen miles behind plenty of other players, but taking it in stride while grinding through Guild quests that slow expectations through some typical “go-fetch” requests, which have had plenty of influence in keeping my sessions with the game on the short side.

Gathering mushrooms, retrieving a few bits of monster guts, killing off a handful of smaller beasts – the game assures the player this is all essential training for up-and-coming hunters, likely to the aggravation of veterans, and leaving me at first rushing through those tasks without striking any hot sparks simply to raise my rank.

It wasn’t until accepting the challenge of hunting a Great Jaggi last night that my outlook started to improve. This was the first solo quest that really made me consider there might be more to this hunting business, specifically in the act of living outside the village, sent to an outpost to survive while tracking a reasonably cunning beast.

I say reasonably because, like most videogame beasts of burden, the Great Jaggi likes to charge in head first, striking out at me and swinging its massive tail to knock me off my feet, all to give a chance for the many smaller Jaggies and Jaggia summoned by the commotion and call of their Alpha to feast on my fallen flesh.

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April 22, 2010

Review – Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:05 pm

Sakura Wars
Within an alternate and slightly steampunk infused depiction of 1920’s New York City, the Little Lips Theater serves as a cover for an elite force of agents known as the STAR Division, who use mech suits to battle evil while also performing in musical dramas to raise the spirits of the city they defend – rounded out with a Samurai and a Cowgirl searching to find their place within the city and that group of heroes.

I’ve really come to savor telling people about this game over the past few weeks, because they can’t help but laugh and scratch their head over how a structured game would even begin to make unifying sense of those ideas with any degree of success. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is a game exploding with ideas, a late to the party visitor from Japan that has curiously shown up on North American shores exactly when titles of this kind are needed most – hard pressed as we’ve been for new releases that don’t wear their glib intention entirely in the straight-to-the-point box title making them 90% marketing, 9% entertainment, and 1% any of the fanciful things we’d like to say about the medium’s artful possibilities, were we not generally sick of kicking that dead horse.

Sakura Wars opts for putting the horse in an apartment, and brings an energy that succeeds in blazing a path free of any genre binding obligations or easy explanations – great for gamers, bad for indexing.

And in a rare twist Sakura Wars isn’t one of those games where I laud the ideas and forgive the actual playing of the game. I don’t need to make any excuses for a game that’s every bit as fun to play as it is to talk about, I just have to try and clear up what the hell is going on when playing it.

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April 21, 2010

Check Your Enthusiasm – Arc Rise Fantasia

Filed under: News Feed — Tags: , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:10 pm

Arc Rise Fantasia
If you’d asked me how I felt about Ignition Entertainment at E3 last year, I would have been fairly optimistic – the company genuinely seemed “in it to win it”, grabbing Muramasa away from XSEED and focusing on a social media push that worked pretty damn hard to spread the word and help that title perform long after its release.

Even now, the willingness of gamers to love a bad game for being bad, as in the case of Deadly Premonition, makes it appear as if Ignition is on the ball.

But let’s talk about Arc Rise Fantasia.

Siliconera posted IGN video from the game yesterday, with a pessimistic appraisal of the work so far seen in the dub of the title – producing a landslide of comments from gamers who have every right to rage when a game that is anticipated is so instantly derailed by an apparent lack of respect for the source material.

What remains is some of the worst voice-over work I’ve yet heard in a videogame, and I survived two Magna Carta titles.

I don’t use the phrase “affront to God” often, but I’m backed against a wall here – particularly when the potential for XSEED to have done an English voice track while still offering the original Japanese one was on the table.

But don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself after the break – and please give your own two cents, because it’s increasingly obvious that feedback from you needs to be continually ringing in the ears of people who let things like this happen. And also because the possibility of Ignition handling Heroes’ Paradise at this point makes me feel a bit ill.

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