Like so many other XBLA exclusives that eventually come to other platforms, I played Limbo much later than everyone else. I really enjoyed it though. Dark, disturbing, and pleasingly puzzly, Limbo is a perfect bite-sized downloadable game. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote all kinds of hints posts for it. Limbo gets a B.

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles was largely about nostalgia for me. Resident Evil 2 was probably my favorite game on the original Playstation, exceeding even Symphony of the Night. The fact that Umbrella Chronicles retells that story within an on-rails shooter sounded awesome to me.

The reality is that while it was fun to re-experience the story, on-rails shooters never end up being as fun as I want them to be. And like Darkside Chronicles, it got extremely hard towards the end and I was unable to finish the game and see its ending. Too bad. Darkside Chronicles gets a C.

My wife and I have always enjoyed playing RPGs together. We’ve played Dungeon Siege, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, Champions of Norrath, and we’re currently trying out Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. So back before we’d tried Dungeon Siege 3, we tried Sacred 2.

As it turned out, Sacred 2 wasn’t that great. The game mechanics were weird and hard to grasp, the leveling and combat weren’t satisfying, and in the end we just quit before we got very far. Sacred 2 gets a D.

Before the big holiday releases of 2011 started hitting, Shadow of the Colossus HD was one of my most looked forward to games. I’d loved playing the original, and I’ve always loved replaying good games. Now, I got to replay this one with trophies! It’s ridiculous to think I’d try to get all the lizards or fruits in the game, and I didn’t have much interest in time attack or hard mode, but I did very much enjoy the playthrough. The HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus gets a B. I plan to get to Ico HD sometime in early 2012.

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.