Where Is My Heart? aims for opposite goals compared to most games. While so many current gen titles try to woo us with fanfare, Where Is My Heart? takes a more quiet and contemplative approach. Perhaps not so surprising for a game that was inspired by the story of a real family lost in the woods and the way they fall apart when forced to rely on just their senses and each other.
We can only hope you fare better as you navigate this enchanted wood…
A “biased” review of a videogame is a hot topic in today’s Internet societies, which always seems hilarious to me: any review of any thing, whether book, film, food, business or perhaps a device which allows one’s cat to fly, will naturally be colored by the thoughts, imaginations and opinions of the reviewer.
I’m telling you this, of course, because if there’s anything I love in the world, it’s horror stories and visual novels. Tell me that a game contains either of those two elements, and I’m absolutely, positively, 100 percent in for the ride. Tell me its got both, and you could complain about bias, because I’m obviously getting to review two of my favorite things, right?
All that aside, though, Corpse Party is tremendously good, and for reasons other than my hardcore love of its themes and approach.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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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