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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 15, 2011

Refresh Rate – The Darkness

Filed under: Features — Brad Johnson @ 1:07 pm

Refresh Rate The Darkness
Next year, developer Digital Extremes will revisit The Darkness—after a significant four year gap since the original Starbreeze cult hit. The gap of time was long enough that it was fair to think the sequel might never materialize; after all, though The Darkness was well regarded critically, it did not seem to strike pay dirt with audiences—much like Mirror’s Edge, the future of the franchise seemed doubtful before it ever really got started.

With The Darkness II delayed into February (having been originally slated for an October release) after having mercilessly teased me with brutal gameplay footage, I had to satisfy my need for more Darkness by revisiting the Starbreeze original.

The Darkness was one of the first handful of games I played for this generation of consoles (I was something of a late adopter), and it seems like an obvious game for me to play: as a super-powered shooter based on a comic, it covers most of my bases. I picked the title up based on those very virtues, but truth be told, when the game began, I thought that maybe I had made a mistake.

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September 14, 2011

In The Year 2027

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 4:37 pm

Deus Ex Human Revolution
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is in the wild, and if you familiarized yourself with my review, you know I had a few words about the narrative and what it offered me. Since then, and in light of some of the opinions that have since filtered onto the Internet, I’ve felt that line of thought deserved an even greater number of words.

It’s been suggested that Deus Ex doesn’t have a story, but merely a plot; that is to say, it is a piece driven by events, not characters, whereby the actors within contribute little to the proceedings. This is a common enough ailment in the circumstance-driven videogame medium, and maybe even a reasonable assessment of Deus Ex, but perhaps not a fair criticism.

It’s curious to me that Deus Ex is the title to elicit this response among some far more serious offenders; perhaps it is that the title makes so much of its story that any supposed deficiency is more vividly felt. The condition is most apparent in the main character of Adam Jensen, a man who has no character arc, and indeed, little emotion about, opinion of, or even response to the whirlwind of events that encircles him.

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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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