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November 29, 2011

Review – Jurassic Park: The Game

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , — TJ "Kyatt" Cordes @ 8:06 pm

Review Jurassic Park The Game
Remember that knife fight against Krauser in Resident Evil 4, the one that consisted entirely of quick time events? Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Krauser had been a bunch of dinosaurs, and the fight lasted several hours while being interrupted by inconsequential dialogue trees?

I’m guessing no given that if that had been the case, I sure as hell wouldn’t be wistfully mentioning RE4 at the beginning of a review once again.

Alas, my bizarre question is rooted in reality with the release of Jurassic Park: The Game, Telltale’s newest episodic movie-to-adventure game adaptation. Events unfold around the time period of the first film courtesy of a new cast of characters; some of whom work on the island, some of whom are mercenaries flying to the island to evacuate that first batch of people, and still others are sneaking onto the island to retrieve the million dollar Barbasol can full of dinosaur embryos that Nedry was trying to steal at the epicenter of this dino-disaster. In fact, ol’ Newman himself is the only character from the movie to appear in the game, though only as a mangled and faceless corpse.

For the record, there actually is a QTE-driven knife fight between one of the mercenaries and a Velociraptor, which turns out to be pretty awesome.

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November 20, 2011

When Duty Redials…

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , — Brad Johnson @ 1:30 am

Review Modern Warfare 3
MW3 is out and about, scorings its eights and nines and commanding the lives of adherents the world over—though, interestingly, the game has received something of a flogging on Metacritic, with the user score ranking a paltry 3.2 (Xbox 360 version) as of this writing.

Meanwhile, the game sold seven decazillion copies in the first ninety seconds after its release. True fact.

So, you understand: never mind that Metacritic score. The verdict is in, and everybody loves Call of Duty. As a registered and licensed Digi-Herald and Internet Chronicler, it pains me to inform you, dear reader, that your internet voice, and my internet voice, and the score of 3.2 on Metacritic do not matter. The score could be zero, and it would not matter. The gaming community voted with their wallets November 8—and if you don’t like Call of Duty, well, you lost.

Call of Duty is the President of Vidyagaems. Sorry.

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November 15, 2011

Review – Rayman Origins

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 4:34 pm

review rayman origins
Over the last few days I’ve hovered on the wind along with scattered leaves in order to ascend mountain peaks. I’ve battled a giant electric eel while riding on the back of a spitfire mosquito, and I’ve even quenched the fiery indigestion within the belly of a beast. I’ve experienced all these moments and more within a game that begs for some ridiculous new benchmark in hyperbole to match the bar it raises for the platformer genre.

Perhaps something along the lines of, “and on the eighth day, Michel Ancel and company created Rayman Origins”.

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Review – Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 1:40 pm

review assassins creed revelations
The latest innovations in stab-simulation from stealth-murder industry leader Assassin’s Creed can be had today, with the release of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The latest entry in the series sees the aged Ezio Auditore seeking to uncover the secrets of series originator Altair—who appears in a handful of flashback missions throughout the game. Meanwhile, Ezio also battles the Templar armies in Constantinople, and oversees the Assassin guild in that city.

Lording over your Assassin minions is much as it was in Brotherhood, with a few quirks. Assassin’s are recruited in small sidequests and can be deployed at the touch of a button to emerge from the shadows and nail enemy targets.

These disciples see upgrades through combat and can still be sent away on missions to gain experience, but the missions now have more tangible rewards—in that completely freeing a city of templar control yields continuing income and bonuses, much the way renovating shops does.

Additionally, Ezio’s Assassin forces wage a war for control inside Constantinople, whereby Ezio’s captured dens can be contested by Templar forces—resulting in Revelation’s most curious offering: a tower defense mini-game.

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November 14, 2011

Review – Otomedius Excellent

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 10:10 am

review otomedius excellent
After much doubt, delay, and speculation, Konami’s side-scrolling shooter, Otomedius Excellent, has landed in North America, hoping to tempt genre fans with barely clothed heroines and inspirational notes taken from the holy book of Gradius.

Aspirations to live my life as cliché stirred a desperate want to love this release – Travis Touchdown has Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly 5, and I was going to have Otomedius Excellent. But as much as I can appreciate this game upsetting the digestion of Western audiences with wrappings your mother would certainly disapprove of, I’d rather play the aforementioned shooter mini-game found within No More Heroes 2.

Beneath the bubblegum aesthetics, Otomedius Excellent is a hard game to love, striving to find ways to break my heart with an experience I could love nearly everything about, except for having to actually play it.

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November 9, 2011

Review – BurgerTime: World Tour

Review BurgerTime World Tour
BurgerTime: World Tour is a re-imagining of the arcade classic BurgerTime. Both games feature a chef named Peter Pepper, who must climb a series of Donkey Kong-style girders in order to assemble giant hamburgers – by walking on their vertically aligned ingredients in order to push them downward, all while avoiding an army of living man-sized food.

In almost every other regard, however, these are two radically different games.

BurgerTime is a lot like Resident Evil, in that both are games of survival and conservation of ammo in the face of hordes of the reanimated dead, the difference being that the deceased in BurgerTime were first pickled, or ground into sausages.

Hold on, I’m going somewhere with this…

With that comparison in mind, BurgerTime: World Tour is the Resident Evil 4 of the series, in which the protagonist is instead constantly armed to the teeth and stumbling upon more firepower than he can use. Once again, it is a controversial move, but for BurgerTime, the change isn’t as successful.

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November 6, 2011

Review – Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 4:41 pm

Review Uncharted 3 Drakes Deception
Today’s idiom of choice is the idea that if we all saw the world through rose colored glasses, society would enjoy an age of peaceful agreement for the wearing of them. Sure life would be tedious and boring in the absence of disagreement, but perhaps we’d accomplish more for the lack of arguments in that trippy hippy daze.

Philosophical detours aside, I’ve been thinking that a rosier tint might also assist me in playing Naughty Dog’s latest release in the Uncharted series the way they intended me to.

Over the last few days, I’ve watched Nathan Drake die a thousand deaths, all of them unnecessary if I’d only been capable of knowing exactly what the developer required of my admittedly awkward hands. As Nathan is chased across rooftops, there’s a very direct path toward the cinematic cut-scene I’m meant to reach, and dark suited adversaries do their best to herd me toward the point. But despite those efforts, I continually seem to make mistakes, take the wrong turn, plunge to my death or get caught for being too slow to deduce the way forward within the proper window of time. And this is problematic, because it breaks apart the cinematic flow of action in a game meant to be witnessed as an unbroken chain of seamless action sequences.

I can’t help feeling broken, like a child in the middle of a very important and carefully arranged production, underfoot and tripping up the performance. And it’s frustrating, I don’t want to ruin Naughty Dog’s shiny game, and I certainly don’t want to be driven into a corner where I must conclude that at times Uncharted 3 is the Dragon’s Lair of its day. That’s entirely too simplistic an appraisal of the work here, but there are occassions where I must repeat a sequence so many times over that such comparisons bear some fruit.

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