Gamesugar

July 6, 2012

Review – Gravity Rush

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:20 am

Review Gravity Rush
Sony Japan’s effort to leave an early and definitive mark on the Vita begins rather simply, asking players to poke the touchscreen of the hardware in order to nudge an apple. It isn’t long for breaking from the stem and falling to the ground, only to roll off the floating island where the tree has grown, falling to the unseen depths below.

If you enjoy reading into such things, there’s room to suggest that letting that forbidden fruit fall away without taking a bite invites the idea that the player should abandon knowledge, that they should forget everything they know before stepping into this gravity shifting playground – that this experience is unlike any other to come before it.

And I rather like this idea.

It’s certainly the type of bold statement one expects from Sony, and Gravity Rush does indeed fight to turn the familiar upside-down, creating a play space where the often wasted space above one’s head becomes as important as the ground beneath their feet.

But Gravity Rush is also a prisoner of gravity and circumstance, struggling with the structure of that space and occasionally bumping against the ever present walls that contain it, and further burdened by a need to justify the Vita release by making the most of hardware features makes for some hard landings here.

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June 9, 2012

E3 2012 – Sound Shapes

Sound Shapes E3 2012
Sound Shapes’ quirky visual style was seduction at first sight, a natural fit on Sony’s new handheld, with organic and charming designs that offered surface reminders of Sony Japan’s Patapon and Loco Roco, as well as the continuing work of Q-Games.

But while Sound Shapes has always presented easy eye candy for me, it’s never simply represented another pretty face at the dancehall.

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E3 2012 – Hands On with Guacamelee!

Filed under: Features — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:50 pm

Guacamelee E3 2012
There’s some humour in the idea that I traveled to Los Angeles in order to play a game being made in Toronto. Of course there were plenty of other reasons to make the trip, but catching up with the latest creation from Drinkbox Studios was high on my radar and necessitated a priority stop at Sony’s booth during E3.

Drinkbox’s Graham Smith was on hand to aid me in a co-op session of Guacamelee!, which puts players behind the mask of a burly luchador, but also offers the chance to transform into a chicken with the press of a button. There’s something rather joyous about running across the screen with your beak in the air – in fact Graham might have had to wait a few moments while I abused the opportunity to keep doing that.

Eventually I regained some composure though, and the demo was able to move forward.

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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.

February 17, 2012

Review – Twisted Metal

Review Twisted Metal
Calypso’s apocalyptic tournament of car carnage returns, bringing one of Sony’s legacy franchises to the PlayStation 3 with an emphasis on multiplayer as the primary reason for investment and potential longevity. With a franchise that has seen successful releases on every piece of Sony gaming hardware to date, sans the new Vita, Twisted Metal has a strong list of accomplishments to draw on when it comes to maintaining its title as the King of vehicular combat. Mind you, that genre is far from crowded, particularly today.

It’s also worth noting another long-standing Sony franchise, the Wipeout series, as one that hit the PlayStation 3 with a digital release to deliver the core experience of its anti-gravity racing without unnecessary trappings to round out retail expectations. Under the watchful eye of David Jaffe, Twisted Metal stretches for retail justification with a single-player campaign again accompanying the multiplayer priority, see-sawing while struggling to beat familiar expectations for a story mode in addition to bringing the old war horse out for another round of competitive action that has certainly been wanting on the console.

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January 29, 2012

Mutant Blobs Attack Your Ears

Mutant Blobs Attack Shaun Hatton
Following up on last year’s retro science-fiction platformer, Tales from Space: About a Blob, Toronto’s DrinkBox Studios is unleashing another dose of blob mayhem and carnage this year, this time on Sony’s new handheld with the upcoming Vita release of Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack!!!

In addition to the in-game soundtrack created by musician Peter Chapman, it was recently revealed that game journalist, musician, and long-time Sugarfriend, Shaun Hatton, will be lending his audio talents to the game by contributing a song for the ending-credit sequence of the game. This weekend I had a chance to catch up with Shaun to talk briefly about that project as well as his work for the upcoming Indie game, They Bleed Pixels – which I’ve since distilled into convenient MP3 format for your listening pleasure.

Catch a rare audio sugar fix below, along with Shaun’s track for Mutant Blobs Attack!!!

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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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