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September 29, 2011

Review – Kirby Mass Attack

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Mister Raroo @ 4:05 pm

Review Kirby Mass Attack
HAL Laboratory was the first developer to truly show just how cool games could be on the Nintendo DS. Those of us who survived the dark, dreary days that were the DS’s first few months of existence know how slim the pickings were. But, like the sun breaking after a long night, along came Kirby Canvas Curse, and gone was any buyer’s remorse we had been feeling.

Canvas Curse skillfully demonstrated that the DS’s touch screen could be used for more than gimmicky mini-games, while also taking the Kirby series in an interesting new direction. I still play it on a regular basis all these years later – it is fabulous, and if you haven’t played it, do yourself a favor and track it down immediately.

Now we find ourselves in the twilight of the Nintendo DS’s reign, and HAL returns once again with an absolute knockout release. Kirby Mass Attack, like its cousin Canvas Curse, does away with a traditional control scheme and opts instead for stylus-driven control. Thankfully, the wizards at HAL superbly integrated this type of control scheme into engaging and intelligent level design and aesthetics, and the end result is one of the most interesting, innovative, and fun games to hit the Nintendo DS in quite some time.

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September 21, 2011

Review – Driver: San Francisco

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 8:42 am

Review Driver San Francisco
Before I begin discussing Driver: San Francisco, I feel it’s important to mention that I have an issue with driving games. There’s a conversation that happens between myself and any such game I sit down to play, and it goes like this:

“Use the handbrake for sharp turns, Brad!”

“Okay, driving game—oh, I made the widest possible turn, spun out and crashed into a wall. Thanks.”

As a result of my crippling deficiency, driving isn’t usually a lot of fun for me. The driving games I play are invariably the ones where I can mitigate my incompetence with offense. That is to say, there’s a gap between me and the amount of skill necessary to win a driving game, and I close it by shooting other drivers. Mario Kart, Extreme-G, Blur—these are the games I can contend in (just barely), because I can leverage missiles and mortars and heat-seeking koopa shells against my fellow racers.

Driver: San Francisco doesn’t have any of that—but it does have something even more unusual.

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September 20, 2011

Review – Gears of War 3

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 2:24 pm

Review Star Fox 64 3DS
So, here’s Gears of War 3 in a nutshell: somewhere on the battlefield, a Locust drone fell to his knees, and out I ran—because it wasn’t acceptable that he might just bleed out. I had to get to him, so that I might ram my flamethrower into his chest and burn him from the inside out.

Yeah, that’s a thing you can do.

I think what makes Gears of War special, as a franchise, is its unique aptitude for making me want to do things like that, and, more importantly, for making me need to shoot monsters.

That’s the impetus of any shooter, of course, but the focus here is notably more pure. Every asset is leveraged toward this end. Whether it’s brutish dialogue that can only rightly be answered with a shotgun, the satisfying kick of the rifle, the suffering atmosphere of the world, or a story that demands good old-fashioned revenge, everything in this game compels me to shoot monsters, and fashions that need into the most satisfying experience possible.

It’s the art of the shooter, and Gears of War 3 is a symphony on the subject.

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September 18, 2011

Review – Star Fox 64 3D

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:49 pm

Review Star Fox 64 3DS
Nintendo and Q-Games have joined their power rings together to bring the definitive version of Star Fox back for the 3DS. It’s a sensible partnership considering that the N64 release owes its existence and primary ideas to the original Star Fox on the Super Nintendo, and the unreleased Star Fox 2 – titles forever linked to Q-Games president Dylan Cuthbert.

This remake is also a beacon of hope for a series that has often appeared to baffle Nintendo, and in many ways was left keeping company with Metroid on the outer rungs of Nintendo’s famous franchise list.

Depending on your feelings toward last year’s release of Metroid: Other M, you may or may not agree that Star Fox has received far less respect over the years, often acting like a square tube Nintendo frustratingly attempted to squeeze through a circular hole – whether calling team Star Fox into service to make Rare’s Dinosaur Planet more marketable with Star Fox Adventures (2002) on the GameCube, or attempting to force the series into a more robust but less focused action game with Star Fox Assault (2005) on that same system.

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September 16, 2011

Review – Renegade Ops

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 8:58 am

Review Renegade Ops
While thumbs are largely celebrated for granting humanity dominance over the planet, those same two stubby digits have also allowed us to sink countless hours into videogames, and are perhaps overdue for a salute on that front considering how such diversions allow us to temporally forget our poor management of that larger inheritance.

Though we were content in ye olde days with games requiring little more than two thumbs for admission, many have gone on to greedily ask players to nearly grow a third hand over the years. Perhaps this is why touchscreen gaming evokes a special kind of Zen, and also why Sega’s latest digital offering strikes an immediate and inviting feeling that leaves me all warm and fuzzy.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the ancient proverb, “Give a man the ability to cause immense destruction, and he shall want for nothing – at least until the ride is over.”

Developer, Avalanche Studios, takes this idea to heart when creating videogames, this time tapping into the imagination at work in the sandbox of my youth, where I once rolled toy tanks into battle while making ridiculous sound effects to simulate the explosions I envisioned.

Though this latest release doesn’t haul out an antiquated franchise from the Sega vault, it definitely stirs nostalgic memories.

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September 13, 2011

Review – Hard Reset

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 6:45 pm

Review Hard Reset
I’m going to be honest with you: I have no idea what Hard Reset is about.

Indeed, the problem is even more fundamental and more deeply rooted than that: I have legitimately no idea what is happening in this game.

As a disciple of electronic entertainment simulations, I’ve endured some pretty miserable narrative constructs. I managed to make some kind of broken, incomplete sense out of games like Vanquish, and endured the emotional incompetence of Gears of War, so I feel like I’ve run the gauntlet of bad videogame stories and come out the other side with my sanity mostly intact.

Hard Reset, however, elevates poor storytelling to an artform—though, fortunately, it doesn’t make the game any less fun.

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Review – The Gunstringer

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:21 pm

Review The Gunstringer
His name had once sent chills through the Internet – the one who sharpened words for weapons and sought to bring meaning to an insensible and lawless land. Along the way, he’d tackled every genre, never backing away from the challenge to ply his trade across every console.

They called him, The Reviewer…

But the years had taken a heavy toll, and he’d eventually succumbed to the sins and excesses of his profession. The Reviewer had sunk into a world where the pixels were as cheap and lifeless as the jaded opinions of the cynics surrounding him at the local haunts, where the only topic of discussion was the good ol’ days of gaming thought long gone.

And though The Reviewer seemed destined to fade away with the last traces of optimism that had led him down this road, it seemed that fate had other plans. Stumbling home one night, he discovered a mysterious package at his door, and tearing it open revealed a copy of The Gunstringer.

Setting skepticism aside, The Reviewer placed the disc into his aging Xbox, which sparked to life with a dull whirring kick like an angry mule. And within five minutes of waving his hands before the glow of the television, The Reviewer felt the old spark within his chest, and knew that it was finally time to write again…

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