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April 2, 2012

Rolling With The Yakuza

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 10:57 pm

Yakuza Dead Souls
I’m reasonably sure Dead Souls is the only game about the zombie apocalypse where I’ve spent ten minutes at an arcade trying to win a toy Chihuahua from a claw-game. There was absolutely no reason for doing so, except that I really wanted it.

As a zombie epidemic spreads through the streets, large barricades are quickly deployed to seal off the infected area of the city, and the result is two very different realities – one in which life appears to carry on, and another where the infected are eager to feast on your delicious brains. The ability to walk the safer of these two streets while still enjoying the mini-game distractions and other interactions Yakuza has to offer probably makes this deviation the videogame most in line with the political commentary of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and more recent Land of the Dead.

Players will find themselves in Akiyama’s shoes as the outbreak begins, the chaos quickly engulfing the streets around Sky Finance while he works to keep his faithful assistant safe and absorb the events unfolding. After a brief bout of linear direction, Dead Souls cuts players loose to pursue the main narrative or slip into the infected areas of the city to tackle side-quests that involve clearing areas and rescuing survivors. This creates two zombie filled environments in the same setting, with players combating zombies while working toward a narrative goal, or using entry points to simply run around and fill the endless hordes full of lead.

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Your Yakuza: Dead Souls Swag Contest Winners!

Filed under: News Feed — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 8:37 am

Yakuza Dead Souls Swag Contest Winners
Greetings Sugarfiends!

I’d like to thank everyone who entered our swag contest last week, few things make me happier than hearing people talk about their experiences with games, and I earnestly enjoyed reading through responses that reminded me how lucky Sega is to have the fans it does. The downside is there can only be three winners this time around.

Earlier this morning I fed all your names into our RandomTron 5000, which harnesses the power of science to give us our winners.

Congratulations go to Xenoguard, Allie Ramstad, and Win Umali – please check your inboxes today.

Thanks again to everyone who entered, we’ll try to do something like this again soon.

March 28, 2012

Gamesugar’s Yakuza: Dead Souls Swag Contest!

Filed under: News Feed — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 4:54 pm

Yakuza Dead Souls Contest
Hey there kids!

This week I’m catching up with the zombie filled streets of Sega’s latest Yakuza game, and though I’m not quite finished grinding through the horde, I do have a chance to offer fans an opportunity to score some Dead Souls swag, courtesy of Sega of America.

Sega’s gone a little cosplay crazed, so three lucky people have the chance to win a prize pack consisting of Goro’s signature eye-patch, Shun Akiyama’s necklace, a dragoon tattoo sleeve, and a pack of Yakuza playing cards.

All you have to do to enter is hit up the comment section of this post between now and 11:59pm est on Sunday April 1st, 2012 – and tell me why you’re a fan of the series. If you’ve never played a Yakuza game before but find yourself curious now, you can alternatively tell me what sparked your interest. On Monday April 2nd I’ll pick three of you at random, so please make sure to use a valid email address when leaving your comment.

Good luck!

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March 24, 2012

Review – Ninja Gaiden 3

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:25 pm

Review Ninja Gaiden 3
Ryu Hayabusa’s latest outing opens on a briefly disorienting note that left me anticipating the worst.

Players begin as an unknown victim, looking up at Ryu before suddenly finding themselves able to control his movements – leaping from a balcony to slice into an enormous glowing deity with a series of obligatory quick-time prompts in tow. This quick sequence of events will make sense once players have come full circle, chasing a well financed doomsday cult across the globe, but it did little to ease the cynicism I admittedly brought to Team Ninja’s latest addition to the Ninja Gaiden franchise, and seemed to give merit to the scorn critics have been heaping on the title since its release.

However, the game shifts gears rather quickly, with Ryu responding to a terrorist group demanding his presence, and leaping into the streets of London to slice through the first of many soldiers offered two days of fast paced action I’ve gladly sunk my blade into.

This doesn’t entirely take away from complaints that the title is too straightforward and simplistic – because it definitely is – but rather that the truth of those accusations offers up an experience that is still inviting. Setting the game to normal difficulty presented some occasional bottlenecks, particularly during later stages, and aside from evading or blocking before slashing repeatedly, the nearly non-existent learning curve allowed me to keep the momentum of the story moving along quite nicely, which was appreciated since I actually enjoyed the story – no one is more shocked than I am about that.

There are plenty of legitimate complaints to lodge throughout the experience, and yet this straightforward affair finds a still pleasurable balance between ludicrous action sequences that feel empowering and overwhelming swarms of enemies that are often rather satisfying to slash a path through.

And insofar as others have no complaints about running around with Nathan Drake as he shoots countless mercenaries ad nausea whilst solving a few puzzles before wrapping up another adventure, I’ve still found a reasonable amount of entertainment on this trip with Ryu as he slices through helicopters, spider tanks and an obligatory dinosaur.

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March 23, 2012

Review – Kid Icarus: Uprising

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 6:29 am

Review Kid Icarus Uprising
Starting this review off by confessing that the act of playing Kid Icarus: Uprising causes my hands a great deal of pain is a frustrating situation. For every positive point I’ve discovered within the game, and for every reason that keeps me returning to the newest 3DS release from Nintendo, my hands ache that much worse for the extended sessions.

Assigning controls to the upper one side of the 3DS leaves my pinky fingers dangling while the rest of my fingers work to hold the weight of the system, and playing through the game’s plethora of stages finds those digits going numb, kicking off a painful throbbing that moves up my hands the longer I play and forcing me to break repeatedly from Pit’s sprawling adventure sooner than I’d like.

Playing Kid Icarus: Uprising is quite a bit like being offered a bowl of your favorite ice cream, and then being told to eat it with a steak knife. The task is not impossible, and many delicious sensations are waiting to be experienced, but the process is going to leave you scarred – in this case with wretched claws where your hands once were.

And the pain extends further, because no matter what one says about the content of the game, of which there is a great deal to be discovered, this issue of control keeps presenting a barrier that prevents me from enjoying the experience as much as I otherwise might.

While I suspect that many others will share my pain after taking flight with Pit, I can’t assume everyone will suffer the same experience however – perhaps some of you are monkey bar champions and can take down a bear with your fingers. And it’s also worth noting that despite the complaint, I keep returning to the game to cause untold damage to my digits, which certainly speaks to the quality of the content.

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March 21, 2012

Review – Sine Mora

Review Sine Mora
Time is the fire in which we burn, and pilots seeking to survive the hazardous skies of Sine Mora will want to cling to every fading ember for the chance to learn why the flame that burns half as long also burns twice as bright.

The joint 2D side-scrolling shooter from Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture places the emphasis entirely on that flickering flame, with a time clock often reserved for boss battles in other shooters continually ticking down throughout the entirety of this game.

Make no mistake, every second within Sine Mora counts, because allowing time to slip away is the only way to die.

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March 20, 2012

Sweet’N Low – My Journey

Journey
Reviewing Journey would be a bit like watching the sun set over the water while holding a lover’s hand, and then breaking the silence of that precious moment with a number from 1-10. I understand that it’s some people’s jobs to stick a number to everything, and I sympathize, even if the act suggests knowing something about the price of everything and the value of nothing.

But don’t take that to mean that I’m in a hurry to help rekindle the games as art you hang on the wall angle either.

Journey is simply an experience, and one that I wouldn’t have been able to understand had someone tried to explain it to me beforehand, which someone did. Chris Lepine was going to write about the game here, and has since crafted some fine words you can catch up with here, but the moment I read them I knew that this was a Journey I would have to make on my own in order to discover some sliver of understanding.

Since my desire to have the longest scarf possible seems rather vain however, I’m still left wanting for words to begin describing what I found.

I can tell you about sinking heavy footsteps into glistening sands, or floating ever higher to ascend a tower, or even sliding down hills while the camera bends to let the light of the sun break through ancient ruins.

I can tell you lots of things, but I can’t convince you of the feelings such a journey inspired within me.

Maybe I should tell you that I met eight different people along that journey. I know this because the game has told me so, and I can only take that on faith since every encounter with another person provides the same anonymous companion that shares my own likeness. Perhaps one companion is less eager to chirp back with the musical notes of expression I continually sought to communicate some primitive intentions with. Perhaps one companion remains close at hand rather than rushing off toward the mountain in the distance. The only time the difference of your companion stresses itself is when they rush off beyond your line of sight with little regard for your company, and even then I can’t help feeling happy to find them again.

The nameless stranger that lingers on my mind is the one that crossed the icy mountain path with me, taking shelter behind stone markers as strong winds threatened to thwart our advance, and huddling in the shadows while large beasts flew overhead. As we overcame these obstacles, the path forward began to vanish in the rising winds, and my feet became heavier with each step forward through the thickening snow.

What kept me pushing forward on the analog stick was my companion, slightly ahead and providing a beacon, a reason to continue pushing against the blinding storm.

I had imagined that Journey’s limitations on communication would leave me saying that the game is about the most earnest connection two people can share, that it cuts away all the things we think we know about each other.

But Journey cuts deeper than that, to the raw source of motivation and hope we find in others, to the fact that our existence on its own is not enough to necessitate that we continue for our own sake. Certainly we live for ourselves to project strength and obey the demands of our DNA, but beneath that skin, we always hope for others to connect and share the journey with, strangers that we’ll never really know, but who when you strip external constructions away, are perhaps exactly the same as us.

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