The demo for The Force Unleashed II is in the wild, and I have distilled its thundering contents into a collection of words arranged into a string of paragraphs for easy assimilation. If you are already familiar with forces and the task of unleashing them, you may wonder: have they unbroken it?
The answer is a resounding maybe.
As the second piece of DLC for Remedy’s psychological action thriller, “The Writer” continues Alan’s journey through the darkest of night via the exploration of Wake’s internal state of mind. Picking up where “The Signal” left off, Wake navigates a path through the fractured self exposed by the retail release.
By film or book or videogame, subject matter opens as many possibilities as it does the potential to fall into cliche, and I’ll suggest that once again Alan Wake manages to work within the trappings of the horror genre rather deftly considering how much of a tightrope that proposition creates – my investment in the character of both Wake and the world he is fighting to understand keeps psychological exploration from dipping into cheese.
That doesn’t mean that Wake’s latest outing cuts the fresh path the series seems capable of trailblazing however. But “The Writer” does cut a circular path through the events of the game to date to reach a rather inevitable conclusion, offering players a carnival ride through familiar memories, concerned with finding the significance in character relationships and happenings established by the game proper.
It’s 2010 now, and at this stage in the videogame universe reviewing a Halo game seems largely unnecessary. You’ve played it. You know what it is. You know if you’re prepared to spend your sixty-dollars for it. Still, there are some things about Reach that deserve to be said, so we’re going to say them, regardless of the fact that you already bought the game on launch day.
When I reviewed StarCraft II I wrote that a level of perfection in the gameplay design allowed the original StarCraft to endure, without sequels, far longer than any game has a right to. The Halo franchise is characterized by a similar condition with opposite results; in this case, a string of fundamentally similar sequels have been produced, capitalizing on the natural strength of the core gameplay mechanic.
Sony held their annual Holiday preview event in Toronto this week, spreading this year’s wishlist for the PlayStation set around the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts. A few titles that won’t be making it to shelves before 2011 were in attendance, such as Killzone 3 and LittleBigPlanet2, but the primary focus was on releases vying for your wallet before the end of 2010.
A quick tour around the building managed to reunite me with Vanquish, which meant a glimpse at a stage not available in the earlier released demo, which in turn gave me something new to think about regarding the game before it hits shelves on October 19th.
Soaking up the greenery this particular stage offered, I’m still pretty impressed by just how much seems to be going on within the game at any given moment, which makes AR mode something increasingly significant despite my initial doubts.
There’s a fiendish grin on my best girl’s lips, which slips into a smile nearly every time her battle rifle smacks across the face of an Elite.
In the futile rush to push back the Covenant invasion, there were plenty of times we lost track of one another, separating in the rush for cover, but often reunited by familiar Halo bottlenecks that never seem to leave enough ammo lying around when Hunters block the road ahead.
Greener pastures are open spaces where I can rush out to face the horde, pushing them back just as she circles around to catch them from behind with that crack of the rifle that makes her smile so.
Playing Reach constitutes her first steps in a Spartan’s boots, and a very long war seems fresher through her eyes. It gets a little easier to remember the first time I tried Combat Evolved, playing with a friend until my eyes burned from the purple of the Covenant fleet and the fact that the sun was sneaking up and cutting through the windows to glare against the warm glow of the television.
It’s so easy sometimes to treat anything popular with disdain, that I forgot how much I enjoyed playing through most of the damn campaigns in this series.
When the original Mass Effect was on its way to shelves, there was talk of expanding the galaxy map with a supply of downloadable content—an idea that never quite took flight. With Mass Effect 2, Bioware has produced content on a consistent monthly basis, finally delivering on the promise of an expanding galaxy—and what’s more, DLC has been employed to expand and refine the gameplay experience, meaning that Bioware doesn’t just give you more to play, they give you new ways to play. Today we’ll be covering the two most recent releases; the Lair of the Shadowbroker mission pack, and the Firepower weapon pack.
I once had the opportunity to overhear an peripheral maker chuckling about his belief that if you could convince a gamer that a controller would make them 10% better at Street Fighter, you’d have a sale. The memory came back to me while reading the press release for Microsoft’s newly revealed 360 controller yesterday, launching this November for a retail price of $64.99 USD / $69.99 CDN.
I suppose it was because this new controller’s transforming d-pad is said to offer the “ultimate accuracy and control for both directional as well as sweeping movements,” making it the likely desire of more hardened gamers – myself admittedly included. It also features concave analog sticks, matte silver/gray buttons, and packs-in a play & charge kit, because apparently gamers concerned with the highest level of control must be new to gaming and unquestionably require one.
I really have to give a nod to the way the entire spiel presents an evolution on the existing 360 controller, one which moves gamers into a more tactile and precise future, and not just some sort of overdue address to the shoddy d-pad gamers have been forced to endure since the launch of the 360 – including people buying new 360’s at this very moment.
Obviously if a company were just addressing a problem, some more affordable option for their customers might be in order, so thank goodness that isn’t the case here.
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