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November 15, 2011

Review – Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 1:40 pm

review assassins creed revelations
The latest innovations in stab-simulation from stealth-murder industry leader Assassin’s Creed can be had today, with the release of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The latest entry in the series sees the aged Ezio Auditore seeking to uncover the secrets of series originator Altair—who appears in a handful of flashback missions throughout the game. Meanwhile, Ezio also battles the Templar armies in Constantinople, and oversees the Assassin guild in that city.

Lording over your Assassin minions is much as it was in Brotherhood, with a few quirks. Assassin’s are recruited in small sidequests and can be deployed at the touch of a button to emerge from the shadows and nail enemy targets.

These disciples see upgrades through combat and can still be sent away on missions to gain experience, but the missions now have more tangible rewards—in that completely freeing a city of templar control yields continuing income and bonuses, much the way renovating shops does.

Additionally, Ezio’s Assassin forces wage a war for control inside Constantinople, whereby Ezio’s captured dens can be contested by Templar forces—resulting in Revelation’s most curious offering: a tower defense mini-game.

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November 14, 2011

Review – Otomedius Excellent

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 10:10 am

review otomedius excellent
After much doubt, delay, and speculation, Konami’s side-scrolling shooter, Otomedius Excellent, has landed in North America, hoping to tempt genre fans with barely clothed heroines and inspirational notes taken from the holy book of Gradius.

Aspirations to live my life as cliché stirred a desperate want to love this release – Travis Touchdown has Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly 5, and I was going to have Otomedius Excellent. But as much as I can appreciate this game upsetting the digestion of Western audiences with wrappings your mother would certainly disapprove of, I’d rather play the aforementioned shooter mini-game found within No More Heroes 2.

Beneath the bubblegum aesthetics, Otomedius Excellent is a hard game to love, striving to find ways to break my heart with an experience I could love nearly everything about, except for having to actually play it.

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November 9, 2011

Review – BurgerTime: World Tour

Review BurgerTime World Tour
BurgerTime: World Tour is a re-imagining of the arcade classic BurgerTime. Both games feature a chef named Peter Pepper, who must climb a series of Donkey Kong-style girders in order to assemble giant hamburgers – by walking on their vertically aligned ingredients in order to push them downward, all while avoiding an army of living man-sized food.

In almost every other regard, however, these are two radically different games.

BurgerTime is a lot like Resident Evil, in that both are games of survival and conservation of ammo in the face of hordes of the reanimated dead, the difference being that the deceased in BurgerTime were first pickled, or ground into sausages.

Hold on, I’m going somewhere with this…

With that comparison in mind, BurgerTime: World Tour is the Resident Evil 4 of the series, in which the protagonist is instead constantly armed to the teeth and stumbling upon more firepower than he can use. Once again, it is a controversial move, but for BurgerTime, the change isn’t as successful.

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November 6, 2011

Review – Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 4:41 pm

Review Uncharted 3 Drakes Deception
Today’s idiom of choice is the idea that if we all saw the world through rose colored glasses, society would enjoy an age of peaceful agreement for the wearing of them. Sure life would be tedious and boring in the absence of disagreement, but perhaps we’d accomplish more for the lack of arguments in that trippy hippy daze.

Philosophical detours aside, I’ve been thinking that a rosier tint might also assist me in playing Naughty Dog’s latest release in the Uncharted series the way they intended me to.

Over the last few days, I’ve watched Nathan Drake die a thousand deaths, all of them unnecessary if I’d only been capable of knowing exactly what the developer required of my admittedly awkward hands. As Nathan is chased across rooftops, there’s a very direct path toward the cinematic cut-scene I’m meant to reach, and dark suited adversaries do their best to herd me toward the point. But despite those efforts, I continually seem to make mistakes, take the wrong turn, plunge to my death or get caught for being too slow to deduce the way forward within the proper window of time. And this is problematic, because it breaks apart the cinematic flow of action in a game meant to be witnessed as an unbroken chain of seamless action sequences.

I can’t help feeling broken, like a child in the middle of a very important and carefully arranged production, underfoot and tripping up the performance. And it’s frustrating, I don’t want to ruin Naughty Dog’s shiny game, and I certainly don’t want to be driven into a corner where I must conclude that at times Uncharted 3 is the Dragon’s Lair of its day. That’s entirely too simplistic an appraisal of the work here, but there are occassions where I must repeat a sequence so many times over that such comparisons bear some fruit.

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November 4, 2011

Review – PixelJunk: SideScroller

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Mister Raroo @ 1:00 pm

Review PixelJunk SideScroller
Way back in 1990, when I was but a freshman in high school, I received R-Type for the TurboGrafx-16 as a Christmas present. As anyone who has played the game knows, it is an absolutely punishing horizontal shooter. I lost count of how many times I blasted off to destroy the evil Bydo Empire only to be met with failure, and I’m not too ashamed to admit that I never cleared the final stage. Nevertheless, I refused to give up, and in fact, the game’s extreme difficulty level may have made me love it more.

R-Type requires players to methodically conquer each stage one small step at a time. Getting just a tiny bit further in a level is cause for celebration. The more I played, the further I eventually progressed, learning exactly where on the screen I needed to position my humble spacecraft at any given moment. I can’t think of any other shooter in which so much trial-and-error, memorization, and perseverance is required to succeed.

“But Mister Raroo,” you might wonder, “Why are you spending so much time talking about R-Type in a PixelJunk: SideScroller review?”

Because, dear readers, playing SideScroller is very much like playing Irem’s masterpiece. SideScroller is clearly a love letter to the classic horizontal shooter genre of yore, and it contains elements that bring to mind games like Gradius and Darius, though more than anything, I couldn’t help but think it would fit most comfortably in the R-Type family.

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November 3, 2011

Review – The War of the Worlds

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , — TJ "Kyatt" Cordes @ 12:26 am

Review War of the Worlds
About a decade ago, when I first played the Dreamcast classic, Seaman, I was greeted by the voice of Leonard Nimoy. At this point, I was under the assumption that any game could be made great by adding narration from a Star Trek character.

Then I played The War of the Worlds on XBLA.

I think the difference is that, while Nimoy’s role was buried under the fact that the game was about a fish-man that you talked to with a microphone peripheral, The War of the Worlds wears the fact that Sir Patrick Stewart narrates it like a badge of honor – a shiny badge on an over-starched and uncomfortable jacket.

The War of the Worlds is about a British man named Arthur, who resists an alien force that wishes to dominate and destroy the Earth. I think his last name is Dent, but I could be wrong.

Wait, it’s Clarke – Arthur Clarke – a man who must flee from genocidal Martian technology, destroy it, find his family, and do it all while narrating his journey with the gravitas of Captain Picard. In his role as narrator, Sir Patrick Stewart doesn’t disappoint with his vivid yet bleak descriptions of the incoming Martian invasion, maintaining a tone of awe-stricken despair throughout. Trust me, if the gameplay were half as good as the voice acting, this would be a real gem of a title.

Unfortunately… well, I have a few paragraphs about the graphics before I can start tearing this thing down.

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November 1, 2011

Review – Kirby’s Return to Dream Land

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 4:10 pm

Review Kirbys Return to Dream Land
For the second year in a row Nintendo’s pink pudgy star brings his insatiable appetite for adventure to the Wii, as well as his seemingly never-ending vendetta against a familiar tree. It would be forgivable to view this release with a pinch of cynicism, as a kneejerk attempt to pad out a Wii release schedule that hasn’t thinned out so much as dried up with the shift in focus to the 3DS and Wii U.

And though it only took a day to lightly pass through Return to Dream Land, I’m not feeling quite that cynical. Kirby’s latest outing sports significantly less yarn this year, instead offering a traditional Kirby platformer that gives Hal Laboratory another chance to strut their penchant for visual flair and rather magical stage design. However, Kirby’s return does suffer for want of a point to all the wonderful abilities Hal can grant him, and in the absence of any real challenge the finer points become so ridiculously subtle that one could miss the treats entirely for never being encouraged to discover them.

The old rules apply, and Kirby once again becomes who he eats, which makes the menu of potential powers the emphasis, and though stages never slouch about finding space for moments of inspiration that leave me smiling at how clever Hal continues to be, the playing is much more an act of design appreciation over tactile engagement.

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