Night Twenty-Two

So after making my way through two novels and three games, I appear to have left the restaurant (or theme park) and found myself solidly back in a childhood bedroom, hearing things moving in my house and trying to make it through the night.

Five Nights at Freddy's 4 appears to have left the setting of all the previous games behind, there is no longer a fellow calling on the phone, nor are there security cameras.

Instead you play a child in their own bedroom, listening to noises in your house and either shining a flashlight or holding the door closed as something makes its way towards you.

First up, the graphics are really good - the animatronics look incredibly detailed and the ability to move (even just moving across your room) makes the game feel much more immersive.

The problem for me comes from the sound.  Now to be fair, I think if I had a limitless amount of time I could more easily figure out which sound means which creature is coming and more importantly which door to guard, but as I've only got nine days left this month, I'm afraid I'll have to live with the half week I spent trying to get through this game and then move onto the fifth and most current game Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location - which is where I'll be spending my virtual time next week.

A really neat game and one I'm sure to return to when I've got the time!

Game Review: Red Dead Redemption

Yesterday I finished the PS3 game Red Dead Redemption (at 96.8% completion after a month, thank you very much), and overall, I'd have to say it's a pretty solid game.

The story moves ahead nicely, the visuals and music are really quite great, and except for the fact that virtually every group you can imagine is treated pretty horribly (Latinos, First Nations, Chinese, the Government, and women all come across very poorly in the game - not even Anthropologists are spared), and that some of the mini-games are crazy hard to do (five-finger fillet, anyone?), I would strongly recommend the game to people who are on the fence.

Also, although the cover of the game (pictured left), includes Zombies, they don't exist anywhere in the main game (although a couple of bites got me a little nervous), as Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare works as a separate game, with all the same characters as the main game, but with the addition of zombies and various monsters.

So now I've got a couple more weeks of the old west, followed by season two of The Walking Dead game, and then I'm off to figure out what all the hubub about Mass Effect is...

Game Review: Dead Space 3

As a quick side note before I get into this review, I'd like to thank The Parched Page for the loan of the game - having read about my excitement over Dead Space 2, he very kindly sent me his copy of Dead Space 3, and although it didn't end up working (I have a PS3 and it was an X-Box copy), I appreciate the loan none the less - also it showed me just how cool bloggers can be.

On to the game - Like many series, I was intrigued by the first, fell in love with the second, and wanted to like the third a little more than I actually did.  Dead Space was such a creepy, terrifying story which mixed fast zombies and a very Aliens-style vibe to create a truly terrifying story.

Dead Space 2, was a strong follow up, had a lot of sequences that were pretty fantastic (and also horrible), and had some sequences that were really interesting on a more cerebral level as well.

Dead Space 3 (and to be fair, I didn't take advantage of two key aspects - the co-play feature or building my own weapons), put much of the action on a single planet, which took away from the zombies-in-space feeling i liked so much from the first two, and the addition of cultist enemies didn't feel quite right to me - I prefer the man vs. environment vibe of the earlier games, this just del like adding a new enemy class to the game.  I did like the new enemies that moved incredibly fast - they were both strange and challenging.

In the end the game was fun, but I felt a bit of a let down compared to the first two.  A good few weeks of play but I'm not sure I'd revisit it for a while.

Game Review: Lollipop Chainsaw

So I just finished the zombie-themed horror comedy game Lollipop Chainsaw yesterday which pits an eighteen-year-old cheerleader/monster hunter against a potential zombie apocalypse and in the end it was pretty fun.

The best parts of the game were the concepts and dialogue, the banter was witty, the zombies were silly (think Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead wherein the zombies generally speak one liners and you get the idea), and the idea of racing through zombie hoards with the goal of getting home for your birthday party and pairing zombie destroying with interpersonal relationships was pretty fun.  A personal highlight - fighting the video-game themed zombies in levels which mirrored classic arcade games.

The game did fall a little in the control department - the controls felt a little clunky, and often I would be hitting the combos as outline with no result multiple times before a combo would occur.

I did like the fact that each level ends with a report card (counting zombie kills, number of continues used, etc), so it would be easy to play the game again and see if you could beat your old score.

Having long been a fan of the films of James Gunn (Slither, Super, etc.), I felt the game had a pretty fun feel overall, but could have had some help in the monotony of the levels - different types of zombies appeared, which was fun, but each level was a "clear the room and move on" type, with limited puzzles or other types of games involved.

Game Review: Batman: Arkham City

A year ago I reviewed the game Batman: Arkham Asylum, and at the time I mentioned that the big game (this was in July of 2012 mind), the Batman game du jour was Batman: Arkham City.

Well, a year later and I've finally got around to playing the sequel, and you know what?  I really love what they've done with this game.  Expanding far beyond the island that Arkham Asylum sat on, this game takes place in a large area of Gotham City which has been walled off and left to the criminals - think Escape from New York: Batman Edition and you've got a good idea of what to expect.

Many of the same characters from the first game appear, but now almost the entire batman expanded universe is added as well, with everyone from Robin to a playable Catwoman appearing, not to mention any number of my favourite Batman baddies (including the under-appreciated Calendar Man).

As with the previous game, my sixteen-year-old daughter was playing around the same time as me, but unlike the first game, this time she finished first.  At the moment I'm about 53% of the way to completing the game, which involves a large number of side missions, Catwoman missions, and collecting almost 450 Riddler trophies hidden throughout the city.

A lot of fun, especially after you win and you get to run around this hyper-realistic world as the Batman from the animated series - think Who Framed Roger Rabbit,  but with more batarangs.

Game Review: Journey

A few weeks ago I got my wife the game Journey for the PS3, it came with two other games, Flow and Flower.  After she worked her way through each of the games, I tried them out myself.

Of the three, my favourite is by far, Journey, in which you play this guy (girl?) who travels up a mountain to find a strange light.

That's actually it as far as story goes.  The graphics are amazing, the music is great and if you are connected to the PS network, you can play with other players.

You know what, the best thing to do would be to actually check out the trailer - which you can do here.

The game is a whole lot of fun, had a great feel throughout and I will be inflicting it on my children and friends soon.

Definitely worth playing.

Game Review: Dead Space 2

Hitting a personal best in time through a new game, I finished Dead Space 2 after 18 days - now I know that compared to the really dedicated gamers, who finish these types of things in about 18 hours, it's not that fast, but for me it was pretty impressive.

After the pretty massive spoiler of the first game, Isaac spends a lot of the second game questioning his sanity.  The game has really impressive graphics, all sorts of eerie settings, and a really interesting story.  Like the first game you build your weapons as you go - unlike the first game, you actually get to see Isaac's face.  Also, instead of being set in a large spaceship, the second game is set in (and on) a vast space station.

The game still did give my kids the creeps (in fact my youngest refused to come into the room while I was playing at all - strange, as she was the one who gave me the game), but on the positive side, the version of the game she got me included the additional game Dead Space: Extraction - which I'll get totally obsessed with in about a month, when I'm finished my classes for the term.

Overall, and a few years late, I think the game is pretty impressive, lots of fun, and I cant wait for the next game in the series after the price drops to where I'm willing to pay for it.

Genre Character of the Week: Toby (Kung Fu Rider)

Having just finished Batman: Arkham Asylum for the PS3, I’ve now moved on to a new game called Kung Fu Rider for the Playstation Move.  In it you take the role of either our genre character of the week - a private investigator named Toby, or his assistant Karin, who are attempting to escape from the mob (or to be more technically correct, the triad) through the street of Hong Kong while riding office chairs.

You know what?  That’s actually pretty much it – take a look at the attached photo and read the above paragraph and you know everything about Toby I do – the only time he even speaks in the game (past saying “I hope Karin’s all right” at the beginning of each level) is in the opening menu where he asks his assistant exactly why the mob is after them.

Reviews of the game are either pretty bad (game control seems to be a big issue) or good but with the caveat that the game is quite short. My only complaint is that I feel a little uncomfortable playing the female character as she seems pretty overtly sexual for a family game (living in a house of women I tend to notice these things).

For my money (which I didn’t actually spend – I got the game as a trade during my last used-book store run) the game is a lot of fun and the short levels mean it would do well as a game to share with company as well. 

Game Review - Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Today I thought I would take a quick look at my latest game for the PS3, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I know that this game is almost five years old now, but as I've only had my console for about a year, I'm just getting around to these classics.

A quick note - the game has twenty-three chapters and I'm only on Chapter twenty, so although I've played the majority of the game, I haven't finished it yet.

The three points I want to make about the game are as follows:

1) The game is pretty similar to the Tomb Raider series, basically you enter an environment, kill whatever is running around there and then move things about to find the exit.

2) That said, the graphics are pretty darn amazing and the fight scenes demand any number of creative solutions - going in and shooting Rambo-style will work for a few of these fights but most of them require some sort of strategy.

3) This game (and I say this as a hard-core Zombie fan), really doesn't need the (mild spoiler) Zombies in the final act. Seriously, the entire game up to the last few chapters has done a pretty good job of being an Indiana Jones-style game wherein a treasure hunter is fighting off other treasure hunters - why exactly does the game need to go all Resident Evil in the end? Also, for a game with such incredible graphics it is a little annoying to spend the last few chapters chasing (and running from) zombies in dark cement hallways.

In the end I'm enjoying the game, but I'll probably trade it away after I've beaten it - a fun play, but the sudden switch of genres at the end seems kind of forced and ends up taking the game out of my library of games.

Game Review: Brütal Legend

This morning I finished my first game for the Playstation 3: Brütal Legend. And although I already posted about the main character in one of my recent Genre Character of the Week posts, I felt the game itself deserved a review.

First of all, here's what I loved about the game - the music, the humour, and the view. The game features 107 tracks from 75 different Heavy Metal bands, all the original bands doing their own music. This alone was one of the strongest features of the game as I loved being able to switch between songs throughout and the music added a really fun dimension to the game (which is inspired by Heavy Metal lyrics, imagery, and album covers). Secondly the game had a great sense of humour, adding a fun dimension to an otherwise standard action game (it sort of felt like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver to me, but instead of being filled with grim intensity, enjoyed poking fun at itself.) Finally, the graphics are just freaking amazing - speaking as someone who has never played a PS3 game before this one, I cannot stop commenting on how beautiful this game looks.

The negatives can mostly be tracked back to my inexperience with more recent games: in later levels of the game you end up playing strategist in that you send out squads of your men to attack different armies in real-time, requiring a skill-set I don't have a great grasp of yet. There were a few glitches, but overall I loved how smooth the gameplay felt.

For the $20 I spent on this game, I loved it - it kept me busy for a months worth of weekends, and it's open-world concept (wherein you can follow the main mission, side missions, or explore as you like), allowed me to have a really big sense of control throughout.

Like Jack Black says in the opening of the game, "This is so epic, it won't just blow your mind, It'll blow your soul."