An over-turned prison bus gives Murphy Pendleton cause and opportunity to attempt a run through Silent Hill, and I was recently given some time with Konami to poke around the dilapidated buildings immediately awaiting him after the chance prison break.
Murphy’s arrival in the town where I’d like to build my dream house seems accidental, but then no one really ends up in Silent Hill by accident, do they?
The demo for El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron has been available on Xbox LIVE for a while now, though you may have overlooked its strange offering, as I initially did. In my capacity as an official Sugar Human, I recommend you reconsider.
The demo takes place in what might best be described as a bizarre drug induced hallucination; a world made of shadow and glass, laced together like a spider’s web. At one point, the perspective shifts to that of a side-scroller, where I leapt across rolling waves of clouds and flying rocks as the sun rose and fell, replaced by some ominous face in the background, again and again.
The demo is strange and dreamlike; sheathed in angelic armor that breaks away to reveal what appears to be some kind of surfer bro in jeans, the protagonist platforms through areas that seem only tangentially related, finding demons to fight in glassy arenas made of light and dark.
I challenged a boss, only to suddenly find myself somewhere else, platforming again, as in those strange dreams where you walk through a door to find the nature of the dream has completely changed.
It’s going to be a pretty thin summer for games this year, so it may be worth your time to check out this bizarre action entry; I played for half an hour, and though I’m not entirely sure what it is that I played, I can tell you that it was awesome. El Shaddai will arrive in North America on August 16 for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Otomedius Excellent has some issues, the least of which being that nobody will likely buy it when it is released next month. That’s a shame, because underneath its somewhat rough exterior lies a game that is just a heck of a lot of fun to play. There is a definite shortage of happy, colorful, silly shooters these days, and Otomedius does what it can to fill that void.
Do you remember Gradius (or, if you’re cool, Parodius)? Good! Otomedius is the newest member to that family of shooters. You take control of a spacecraft and fire away at waves of enemies and big bosses until you destroy them all. Oh, and the spacecraft is piloted by a scantily-clad anime girl.
I know, I know. You’d rather have Gradius VI. But Otomedius isn’t that bad, despite what you might have heard! Honest! Sure, it’s a bit mindless, but in a good way.
I’ve returned from Konami’s first Pre-E3 showing with a powerful yearning to sleep after a long day, but I’ll instead endeavor to string together some words for you Sugarfiends regarding the event – that’s just the kind of guy I am after all.
Members of Team Sugar attended the Toronto event, which consisted of video announcements simultaneously screened for audiences in several locations around the globe and online, which Konami cited as an effort to reach fans more directly before the more closed nature of E3 commands the thunder next week.
Marvelous Entertainment unleashes video for No More Heroes: Red Zone Edition, the Japanese PS3 exclusive return of Travis Touchdown, which follows up on a technically troubled effort to bring the Wii title to HD consoles via the release of Heroes’ Paradise in Japan last year.
With Konami bringing an entirely reworked version of Heroes’ Paradise to North American PlayStation 3 owners this year – with the addition of PlayStation Move compatibility – it’s easy to imagine that Marvelous’ reveal of Red Zone with Move support stems from that same effort.
We had the chance to ask Marvelous about the relationship between the two releases today, and learned that Red Zone is in fact the Japanese localized version of the reworked Heroes’ Paradise Konami is releasing to North America – Marvelous also stressed that this new iteration of Heroes’ Paradise, and thus Red Zone, have very little in common with the original Japanese release from last year.
Having never played the original Rush’N Attack, I approached the sequel, Ex-Patriot, drawing more comparisons to Shadow Complex than any other title; another in a line of products designed to leverage new technology against an old school experience—here, sadly, to not much effect at all.
Rush’N Attack takes place—gasp!—in Russia, where the player is on a mission to rescue a previously captured operative and investigate a possible Russian weapon program. What follows is an offensively bad string of dialogue sequences and awkward, lingering cut scenes that serve only to make the player crinkle his nose.
The plot may be standard NES-era fare, but it’s executed with none of the charm or self-conscious humor that has made modern takes like Explodemon a success, nor with the careful quality that made Shadow Complex an upstanding modern experience.
When I saw Battlefield: Los Angeles in theaters, I walked away with the distinct impression that the film could have easily been a Call of Duty game, with many of its events and scenarios seemingly lifted right out of that series. Indeed, Saber Interactive seems to recognize this, with their downloadable adaptation more than a little reminiscent of Call of Duty, but stale, unsatisfying design undercuts the experience from the very beginning.
The game takes a number of the plot elements and scenarios directly from the film and tells a rough approximation of the same story. The plot of Battle: LA unfolds in a selection of miserable, tone-dead motion comics. Lacking a single drop of atmosphere or attitude, these looks like pages from a children’s book more than art from a hardened shooter. Half-baked animations are awkward and often silly, dialogue is poorly scripted, and most damningly, the voice acting is terribly flat and either poorly recorded or poorly mixed.
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