Well, I’m finished with Bastion and I’m playing Skyrim – my Bosmer elf Leroy is already 11th level. But enough about Skyrim – I want to talk a bit about Bastion. I’ll say right out that I loved the game. Its music is one of the best parts of the game, but I also enjoyed the story and the unexpected twist. It’s no Heavy Rain twist, but I love when the story takes a turn that you never saw coming.

The gameplay and combat are very old-school, although they’re thankfully a great deal more forgiving than many other old school games. You may have heard about the game’s dynamic narration – the narrator will comment on actions that you take in the game as you take them, and his narration is keyed to certain progress points, so as you progress through a level, he’ll continue his progress in segments as you hit certain points. It works very well, and the guy is a great gravely-voiced voice actor who sounds like he’s stepped right out of a western.

It’s no Skyrim – you won’t be spending 50 hours in the game, but it is very good. You should buy the Steam version if you don’t own an XBox 360.

Where to begin? Back in 2009 when I first heard of Batman: Arkham Asylum, I totally wrote it off, like a dumbass. I was at the time in talks with a videogame distributor because I was considering opening up a small-town video game retail store in Colorado, and I remember scoffing. I scoffed. Pfft. Batman? That’s not gonna be any good. She assured me otherwise, but it wasn’t until a year later that I picked up the game and grew familiar with the flavor of crow.

I loved Arkham Asylum, and Arkham City refines the original game’s formula. The fighting is slightly more complex due to even more options, but still as smooth as ever, and now you can counter multiple opponents simultaneously and use the environment as part of your attack animations. The first time Batman slammed a thug’s head into the wall as part of a standard attack, my jaw dropped.

I don’t know whether the game was actually shorter than the original, or if it just feels that way. Time passes quickly when you’re thrashing hardened criminals. I’m currently listed as about 50% complete in the game, although I’ve finished the game’s main story. I still have a lot of side quests and riddler trophies to pick up. And I’ll probably try out the new game plus at some point. I may not get the calendar man achievement, finish all the combat and predator challenges, or finish all the augmented reality training – gliding through hoops is a bitch! – but I’ll try like hell to get every last Riddler trophy. I did it in the first game.

I really feel like the role of Catwoman has been overstated in the gaming media. She has a few very short segments, and aside from the non-story challenges and the post-story ability to roam the city as her collecting catwoman trophies, the amount of time you spend as Catwoman in-game is very small. I don’t mean to detract from Catwoman – she’s fun to play and very well implemented – but if I’d had to play without the DLC I wouldn’t feel like I was missing out on that much.

The last thing I’d like to say – and I can’t say much here because I don’t want to spoil anything – is that the game’s ending was wonderful. I won’t put it in the same class as the amazing ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but if Mark Hamill is quitting as the Voice of The Joker, he couldn’t have gone off on a stronger note.

Beyond Good and Evil is possibly my favorite video game of all time. I recently picked up the HD remake on the Playstation Network and happily ran through my sixth playthrough of the game in short order. The HD visuals were nice, but certainly not stunning. There were, however, a few other things I noticed.

Firstly, the camera controls are absolutely horrendous. At times, this makes the game nearly unplayable. In my playthroughs of the PC version of Beyond Good and Evil, I’ve sometimes used a usb game controller, and never have I had this much difficulty looking around in the game. Whomever messed up the camera controls for Beyond Good and Evil HD should be turned over to the DomZ to have their life energy drained.

Secondly, I really wish the trophies had been more stringent. You can get 100% completion in the game without getting all the pearls, without getting all the MDisks, and without getting all the PA-1 units for full hearts. It’s nice that they added a trophy for handing a PA-1 over to Pey’j or Double H, but they could have gotten far more creative with the trophies in the game. How about trophies for getting through the Slaughterhouse or Nutrapils factory without ever being spotted? How about a trophy for defeating a DomZ serpent within 60 seconds? How about for playing the hidden pearl game or redeeming a save game code at darkroom.ubi.com? They could have done so much more, and they didn’t.

Lastly, I can’t count the number of times I tried to navigate menus using the D-pad and found that I couldn’t. Menus are navigated only via the left analog stick, which is annoying.

If you haven’t yet played Beyond Good and Evil, I don’t mean to dissuade you – it’s a great game, and the HD version finally brings it to modern consoles. I just wish that the port had been handled a bit better.

I just finished playing Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. I bought it after a strong recommendation from a few freinds on Google Buzz. I’d played the demo, and didn’t really like it. But when it went on sale on Amazon for $20, I grabbed a copy, figuring that I could sell it on EBay when I was done for at least $20. I’m not sure that I’m going to be selling it now.

Maybe it was my low expectations, but I enjoyed the game more than I’d even expected to. It certainly had its issues, but in general the game got better the more I played it. Once I got acclamated to the combat, it was certainly a lot of fun. I’m not trying to say that this game has no enjoyable gameplay. The controls are definitely a bit wonky – more than once I’d get stuck trying to jump from place to place because I needed to slide a quarter inch more up or down, and the camera angle often become difficult during some fights. Once, during a puzzle, I managed to somehow screw things up to the point that I don’t think I could have solved it without reloading. But this game’s most redeeming feature is not the flawed platforming.

I’ve heard it said that the story is what makes Enslaved a good game, but I’d like to disagree. The story is good, but what makes Enslaved a good game for me are its characters. Monkey is good. Trip is better. Pigsy is damn amazing. And the depth of these characters doesn’t really begin to come out until you’ve been playing the game for a while. That’s why I think the game gets better the more you play. When you begin, the characters are all strangers, both to you and to each other. As they grow to know each other, you as a player get to know them as well. And they must have used some advanced performance capture technology, because the performances of the CG characters during cutscenes are far too nuanced for a programmer to have coded. The humor and quality of acting in one cutscene at the start of chapter 13 made me think more of a scene with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fischer than of a typical video game cutscene. Yeah – it was that good.

Bottom line? Try Enslaved. It’s a great game.

Simply awesome. You can check out more images here.

My wife and I have always played video games together. Back when we were first dating, she bought a gaming PC and left it over my house so that she could come over and play Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate with me. Later, we played Dungeon Siege, Champions of Norrath and Gauntlet Legends together. These top-down or isometric action RPGs are amongst our favorite games to play together. Recently, we’d been looking for a game of that ilk to dive into on the Playstation 3. While Sacred 2 is by no means the most recent PS3 game, it was well-spoken of, so we figured we’d give it a shot. On a whim one weekend afternoon this past spring, we popped by a GameStop and grabbed a copy. I’m not a big fan of teh Gamestop, but it’s good for impulse purchases.

Sacred 2 is awkward and difficult to understand. Each character has three skill categories, and four skills in each for a total of fifteen powers/spells/techniques. Most of them are difficult to use well, don’t do much damage, and don’t seem very cool. You can combine two into a single power and slot that power on a given button, but I have yet to find a good use for that, as the powers are mostly useless anyway. The game’s weapon system is similarly opaque. You can see the damage and level of weapons, but is a level 8 weapon that does 10-28 damage somehow better than a level 5 weapon that does 12-36 damage?

So far, it’s nearly impossible to die in Sacred 2. And while this is infinitely preferable to an error on the opposite side of the scale, it means that strategy is absent. In Diablo 2, you’d dodge incoming enemy fire. In Champions of Norrath, you’d use area attacks to take out enemies before they could close. In Sacred 2, this is not an option, nor is it necessary.

There is so much more I could complain about in Sacred 2. And yet we continue to play. The game mechanics suck, but the running around and killing things is somehow enjoyable.

I must admit, given the great time I’ve had with the game, that I’m a bit surprised to see it ranking in the low 80’s on Metacritic.  Now, I know that Metacritic isn’t the best site to look at for such things having seen first hand how their internal translation system turns a C+ into a 58 thereby skewing a game’s perceived quality downward.  Still though even reading through the reviews the common criticisms seems to be that rather than come up with their own gaming mechanics, Vigil decided to instead lift mechanics of off popular gaming franchises, namely The Legend of Zelda, Portal and God of War.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Darksiders does just that, however I have to question whether or not knocking the game for it is a valid criticism.  I say this because we as game reviewers seem to be incredibly tolerant of this when it comes to sequels but incredibly intolerant when it comes to new IP’s.  Take Uncharted 2, for example.  Uncharted 2 is, hands down, the most thrilling experience I’ve ever had while playing video games but it is, at its core, just a refinement of the mechanics presented in the first game, which, by the way, were taken wholeheartedly from other games such as Gears of War and Tomb Raider.  It isn’t the mechanics though that make Uncharted 2 such a great game, although they certainly help, it’s the pacing, the voice acting, the incredible technical achievements that, when all bundled together, make the game so damn exciting.

While we’re on the subject of unoriginal games you don’t have to look much farther than Gears of War 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  Both games are sequels, both games build upon, or refine mechanics created in earlier games and neither do much to move the franchise into new territory yet both are very highly rated.  It seems that we, as reviewers, are more than happy with more of the same if those same mechanics are presented in the franchises we expect to see them.

On this, I gotta call bullshit.

Now, if you want to argue that Darksiders didn’t implement the cribbed mechanics in a compelling way then I think that’s a valid criticism.  Personally, I wouldn’t agree with you, but that’s just my opinion and what works for me doesn’t work for everyone.  Slamming the game because it uses game mechanics that we’ve come to love in other games is patently ridiculous.  Nintendo fans the world over always complain about the long lengths of time between Zelda sequels.  Fans are similarly vocal about wanting a more mature, more violent take on the franchise, although I personally don’t think Zelda is the place for blood and guts.  When it comes to Portal, Valve develops sequels according to their own strange whims and who knows when a sequel for Portal will be coming, if one does at all.   So we want more Zelda and we want more Portal and here a game gives it to us, wrapped in its own style with its own world, story and characters and we’re supposed to say “no thank you” simply because it didn’t come from Nintendo or Valve?  Yeah, again, I gotta call bullshit.

The simple fact is that not all studios can come up with a new game mechanic that changes the world of gaming.  It’s simply not possible.  There has to be room in gaming for studios that can take existing mechanics and build compelling games around them.  Why we’re tolerant of first person shooters, a collection of mechanics that hasn’t changed in years, yet not so for something like Darksiders is not only stupid, but hypocritical.  It also can’t be terribly comforting to budding, young game designers to think that the only road to critical praise lies in either creating a completely new gaming mechanic or in getting work on an established sequel.

Now, I’m not saying that Darksiders is perfect, but I do think it’s better than that aggregated Metacritic score would lead you to believe.  It’s certainly better than Gears of War 2 a game that somehow managed to use the same mechanics as its forebear yet take a step backwards at the same time.  I love Zelda and while I don’t feel that it is the appropriate franchise for blood and guts, there are times that I want to play a game that combines the mechanics of Zelda and the visceral feel of a game like God of War.  Darksiders does just that and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

It’s easy, as a reviewer to fall into easy critical traps and I’m of the mind that knocking a game for using another game’s mechanics is one of those traps. If I go to a restaurant and order a bacon cheeseburger, I’m not upset that the chef took a beef patty, cooked it and then put cheese and bacon on it.  That’s what I wanted and while I may be happy to entertain some sort of alternate take on the sandwich, for the most part, I want what I ordered.  There has to be a place in gaming for bacon cheeseburgers where the only criticism is based on how good it tastes, the quality of the presentation and how well it fills you up.

Darksiders may not be incredibly original but it is one damn fine bacon cheeseburger.  For me, for right now, that’s more than enough.

The two examples I like to look at for gameplay variety are The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Beyond Good and Evil. Twilight Princess has swordfighting, goat-herding, fishing, chicken gliding, sumo wrestling and wolf-howling. Beyond Good and Evil has fighting, vehicle driving, platforming, first-person shooting, puzzle solving, item collecting, air hockey, and my favorite: stealth. All are drastically different types of gameplay, and serve to keep the game fresh as you play.

Variety like this in what I can only term an “action-adventure” game is rare, but it’s hard not to love a well-made game with gameplay diversity as deep as that in the above two titles.

Indigo Prophecy had a good deal of gameplay variety, which is a large part of the reason I liked it, and games like Super Mario Galaxy and Space Rangers 2 certainly try hard. But I can’t think of any games that have come out in the past 2-3 years with gameplay variety close to that of Twilight Princess and Beyond Good and Evil. Can you?

It’s funny – I don’t remember quite so many bottomless pits in any of the Star Wars movies. Sure, there was the part in Empire Strikes Back where Luke lost his hand and fell, and there’s always the Pit of Carcoon and the place where the Emperor fell to his death, then there’s the one Luke and Leia swung across in New Hope and the place where Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan fought Darth Maul… okay, maybe Star Wars is actually about bottomless pits. But I’d never really had that feeling before playing Force Unleashed.

I died a lot. And it was nearly always while falling into a bottomless pit. Generally the same one at least 5-6 times. This gets old quickly, especially when you’ve got to wait about 60 seconds while the game reloads your last checkpoint.

Let’s look at one example: I was fighting two junk guardians. I picked one up with The Force and threw him, then carved the other one up with my lightsaber. Jumping up to a platform, I found two more. While I was fighting one, the other hit me. Once. This knocked me back a bit and pushed me over the edge into a bottomless pit. Although I can double jump, I apparently can’t jump in mid-air while beginning to fall into the pit. So I died.

…a minute or two later…

I’m fighting the junk guardians again. This time I defeat them all before falling to my own death. The next jump is a big one, onto a small platform. I get ready, positioning the camera just right, then jump. But while I’m up in the air, I can’t look down – only forward – so it’s hard to see where I’m going to land. I fall into the pit, missing the platform by inches.

…a minute or two later…

Fighting those damned junk guardians. This is the last one, and I’m kicking his butt. While attempting to hit the targeting trigger, I accidentally hit the “dash” trigger and dash over the edge into the pit.

…a minute or two later…

I kill all the junk guardians easily, making sure to stay FAR from the edge. This time, I carefully prepare for the jump, and once again fall to my death because I can’t tell where I’m going to land.

…a minute or two later…

I’m playing Pixeljunk Monsters, having resolved to sell Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on Ebay.

I’d been wanting to play Prototype for a while, and when I found a copy the PC version on EBay for $20 whereas it’s retailing for $40, I jumped on it. It wasn’t until after I’d bid that I noticed the tiny text that said “Import Version”.

Upon installing the game, I immediately realized that the install screens were all in Russian. It was as if I was living after the Red Dawn. But with the help of the inkjet-printed instructions included with the game, I muddled through the install screens, making sure to select “English” as the install language.

After that, the whole thing was pretty easy, and I found that the game played pretty much as I’d expect the U.S. retail version to play. With a few exceptions.

I can’t log into GFW Live from the game, which means that I can’t log achievements. I’m not sure whether the achievements alone are really worth $20, but I find that I’m not bothering to collect things I otherwise would since I know my accomplishments won’t be logged. Yes, I’d definitely prefer to have the achievements.

Another thing I found is that I can’t map my mouse 4 and 5 buttons in the game. I can’t say for sure that this is because of the import version, but I googled the issue and found that other people seem to be using their 5-button mice with no issue, so my working theory is that my  import copy of the game doesn’t carry that functionality for some reason. My options are to use Logitech mouse software to map the mouse buttons to letters that I can map to game functionality, or else try out a gamepad controller. I’ll probably end up using the mouse.

Anyway, that’s my story.