Onelargeprawn
Back when I was a younger lad, I used to follow Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball Z series, based on the manga of the same name. The series was popular enough to warrant its own series of fighting games for the PlayStation 2. Now an HD remake of the first and third games is available for PS3 and Xbox 360. I put my fighting skills against the world’s finest to see whether this remake is any good. Ka-me-ha-me-haaaa!!
Decent puzzle games are an increasing rarity in the major console world. I’ve always been a big fan of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, so it was with some excitement that I got my hands on The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, a puzzle adventure game by Frogwares with an original story featuring The Great Detective. Let’s dredge out our magnifying glasses, deerstalkers, and pipes, and see where the trail leads us, shall we?
When Borderlands appeared on our consoles in 2009 (Ed: Really? Was it that long ago? Wow. Feels like last year), its popularity was a surprise. New IP has a hard time making a big splash in the world of console video games. Borderlands, with its co-op multiplayer gameplay proved a huge hit, and Gearbox Software, the chaps behind the game, decided that it was popular enough to deserve its own sequel, titled Borderlands 2. I definitely wasn’t expecting the “2”, so I took a trip around the planet of Pandora to see what the hullabatwo was about.
I am a big guy. 1.91m weighing in at a megaton, I don’t get to sneak around very silently very often. So sometimes playing a game like Hitman Absolution reminds me why I became a gamer. You get to do things you can’t always do in real life. Also I should do some sit-ups. Let’s find out why after the jump.
The other day I lamented about the lack of arcade racers but November saw no less than three *kart* racing games appear on the circuit. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is certainly the wordiest of the lot.
UK developer Sumo Digital have a track record with creating some of the Outrun games, and recently received a boost to their racing pedigree with the inclusion of staff from the now-defunct game development studios Bizarre Creations and Black Rock Studio. Taking cues from their previous outing in 2010’s Sonic & All-Stars Racing, the developers have added all new transformative elements to their mascot-based kart racer. Is it a welcome change? Let’s find out.
It’s been a decent few years for reboots of old gaming franchises, from Syndicate to Duke Nukem to just about anything in-between. The latest game to receive this sort of treatment is XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a reboot of the 90s game series, XCOM. The original series was an amazing tour-de-force of strategy gaming, and set an incredible bar for other games in the genre. Let’s see if the reboot is worthy of its ancestors.
Many decisions go into choosing to eat a meal at a new restaurant: will be it nice? Might it give me indigestion? Will I tell my friends about in the morning? (Ed: Will I live to tell my friends about it in the morning? We’ve all been to that restaurant.) Some of the similar decisions go into choosing the games we play. Arkane Studios’ latest stealth/action FPS title, Dishonored, is all about exploration and choice. Is deciding to play this game a bad decision? Let’s find out.
Just when we thought the music genre of video games was a dying breed, the folks at Harmonix come up with a way to shake things up. Cue Rock Band Blitz, a rhythm game that doesn’t require a whole new set of peripheral plastic instruments. Let’s rock this review!
Let me tell you a story. When I was a kid, I used to stay over at my cousin’s place during the holidays. He used to own one of the most amazing comic book collections I’d ever seen, and—to the ire of everyone around me who told me I was being thoroughly antisocial—I spent every holiday reading and re-reading every single one of those comics. He had them all: superlative quantities of Superman, great piles of Green Lantern, judicious amounts of Justice League, and of course, a buttload of Batman comics. I read them all, over and over again. I first got my love of the DC and Marvel universes from those days back then, and I never really lost it. As you, dear readers, know well, I also have a great love of Traveller’s Tales Lego series, so I was justifiably quite excited to get my hands on Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes.
Recently, Yager Development did a great job at proving that shooter games can have mature, thought-provoking storylines. While Spec Ops: The Line may have been a surprising blip in an otherwise tired genre, Saber Interactive’s latest entry is most assuredly not. Despite the promise in its title, Inversion did nothing to turn my world upside down. It’s not for the lack of trying though. With nods to a few other titles, Inversion never really finds an identity of its own, and the its much advertised gravity manipulation feature isn’t much more than a flimsy gimmick. My review continues after the jump.