Category: Reviews
I’ve seen some interesting things done with YouTube’s annotations feature. Mostly providing your own subtitles, notating certain points of a video, or taking you to a related web page.
I’ve also seen some YouTube channels where the page “breaks”, or is otherwise interactive. However, these are always done by major companies, not your average guy with a camera.
The crew of Hey, Ash Whatcha Playin? (HAWP) has found an awesome middle ground between these two and created a review of Mad Dog McCree (ported to Wii). If you want to watch the full review, you’ve got to “play” the quickdraw game and get a perfect score to finish.
As the review requires you to view the page directly from YouTube, I can’t embed it here. Check out the full review here and good luck.
The Ace Attorney series proved to western shores in 2005 that a game in which you play as a lawyer could be not only fun, but downright awesome at times. Sure it had a tendency to be silly and extremely over the top, but snappy writing and simple and intuitive gameplay made the original game a joy to play. Sequels followed almost yearly, culminating in this year’s instalment: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth.
The original BioShock was considered a masterpiece by gamers and critics alike in 2007, and whenever something’s successful a sequel usually gets announced. Now the time has come to return to Rapture, but is this a welcome one?
BioShock 2 puts you in the diving suit of one of the prototype Big Daddies, the first one to be successfully bonded to a Little Sister. On New Year’s Eve, 1958, your Little Sister was forcefully taken away from you, putting you in a chemically induced coma. Now, ten years later, you have awakened to find a city in utter ruin, with a constant need to relocate your lost companion.
In the mid-to-late ‘90’s, the PC gaming market almost seemed like a sort of secret society, offering a consistent level of thrills for quick-learning gamers who knew how to use their PCs for more than just The Oregon Trail. First Person Shooters were all the rage back then, adding fast-paced action, copious violence, and the occasional bits of profanity and nudity that made committed computer players feel truly rewarded.
Eventually, videogame consoles would catch up to the PC market with 3D visuals and “edgier” releases, and it was during the turn of the century that Serious Sam was released, almost as a send-off to the FPS days of yesteryear.
Fast forward to today, where the team behind Sam’s previous adventures brings back their classic for a console and PC re-release. Not content with merely porting the game at a budget price, developer Croteam has given the original game a serious HD makeover, appropriately titled Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. But does the untouched gameplay still remain fresh in a time of an overabundant FPS market?
Welcome to space. Aliens live here. Angry ones.
That’s the premise behind Team 17’s new top-down shooter for the Xbox 360, a remake of the original Alien Breed for the Amiga, Alien Breed Evolution.
The game has gotten a new coat of paint and a new set of wheels, so to speak. The graphics and musical score have been updated for the Xbox 360, and the controls rely on both analog sticks for movement and aiming. Movement is done with the left analog stick, while aiming in any direction is done with the right analog stick.
It seems to me like we’re living in the age of nostalgia, where many of us are almost constantly looking back to what we remember as a golden age of gaming, when all the games were great and no one was shouting “noob” at us from across an internet connection. The Xbox Live Arcade has slowly built up a library of remakes, reboots and upgrades of old arcade classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Pac-Man and Galaga.
Another such title just released is Qix++, an improved version of the old arcade game from 1981. Originally released by Taito, the point of Qix (pronounced /kɪks/) according to Wikipedia, is to fence off, or “claim” a majority of the level’s playing field. Every level is a large, empty rectangle containing the titular Qix, a computer virus according to the game’s back story.
It was the third of December, and it was a Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays – for me it is right in the middle of my work week, and thus a day I couldn’t hate or look forward to. Yet, here I was queuing in the wet on a Thursday, about to break from the norm.
I was in line to see Video Games Live at the Cardiff International Arena. Headed up by veteran composers Jack Wall (Myst, Mass Effect) and Tommy Tallarico (Metroid Prime, Earthworm Jim), the show brings forth the soundtracks of games new and old with an orchestra and choir taken from the chosen locale.
If you’re a gamer and Star Wars fan, you’ve more than likely heard of LucasArts, the videogame developer side of Lucasfilm. Most of us associate LucasArts with the point-and-click adventure game craze of the 80’s and 90’s, when the company wasn’t just milking the Star Wars franchise for all it was forth. And for a time, it was good. But then adventure games sort of just stopped, their market value having fallen once full 3D and the Quake era had begun. LucasArts decided to make Star Wars games instead, which has obviously payed off despite some quality issues on certain games.
So imagine my jubilations when I saw an interview with LucasArts president Darrel Rodriguez on GTTV, who promised to bring LucasArts back to their old style of game developing. Star Wars was still their bread and butter, obviously, but he wanted the company to branch out and bring more quality games onto the market. The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition had just been released on Steam and Xbox Live Arcade, and more LucasArts adventure games was coming to Steam. LucasArts shut down for a week in order to generate new ideas and concepts. One of these concepts was Lucidity, which they decided to make into a full game.
Rocktober is upon us, and you should all know what that means: Tim Schafer is back, with a game that could only rock harder if it was made out of stone. But that wouldn’t be a very great gaming experience. Brutal Legend has a lot to live up to considering Schafer’s history with LucasArts’ adventure games and his previous game that no one bought: Psychonauts.
Brutal Legend kicks off, where else, at a metal concert. Jack Black plays Eddie Riggs, the world’s best roadie who’s working for the world’s worst metal band: Kabbage Boy. They have a tween audience, which doesn’t sit well with Eddie. There’s nothing that Eddie can’t build or fix, except the band itself. After an on-stage accident some of Eddie’s blood spills onto his belt-buckle, in reality an amulet of Ormagöden, The Fire Beast, Cremator of the Sky and Destroyer of the Ancient World.
Stellar voice acting and a great script makes characters come alive. Jack Black is perfect for the voice of Eddie Riggs
Most superhero games have the same bad luck as most movie based games: they usually downright suck, with some exceptions here and there. Batman: Arkham Asylum is a bold attempt at the latter category, with characterisations, locations and overall theme ripped straight from the world of the comic books. Fans of Batman can rest assured that Arkham Asylum delivers, and then some.
The game kicks off as Batman, once again, has apprehended the Joker during his latest crime spree. As he brings the Clown Prince of Crime back to Arkham Asylum, he’s naturally suspicious about how easy it was apprehending him.
The perpetual spit quickly hits the fan as Joker breaks free from his shackles, beats up some guards and promptly takes over the entire Asylum, with a little help from Harley Quinn and his goons newly shipped in from Blackgate penitentiary. Police Commissioner Jim Gordon, as well as the asylum’s warden, Quincy Sharp, are kidnapped and it’s up to Batman to rescue them, defeat the Joker and find a way to survive among the rest of his rogue’s gallery in the veritable hellhole that is Arkham Asylum.
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