I only played ME and ME2.

Gotta admit, I was not that impressed by the series.

The gameplay is actually pretty weak. ME2 made an effort to make the combat more interesting but ME3 has very mediocre level design and I am really hoping that cover based shooters are a fad that is going away. Hiding behind the safety and just popping out to play whack a mole really isn't that much fun. I've been playing gta 4 again and it really shows how much of a fad cover based shooting was since its totally inappropriate for the type of game GTA is supposed to be.

I want to play the whole ME series again if they come out with a collectors edition but I will probably just put it on easy so I can play through the combat as fast as possible. I guess I just tolerate because I am a sucker for scifi RPGs and there aren't many good ones around.

Hotline Miami

The game is like $5 on steam and is one of the best games I have ever played, the soundtrack & design of the game is flawless, the game play is awesome, it involves strategy, skill and sometimes you even need to get lucky to make it through some of the insane levels, the story is weird, but I really enjoyed it.
9.5/10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HQshGnjpo0

Really hoping for Hotline Miami on PSN. It looks like a mediocre top-down GTA or Smash TV clone but yea like you said, it's supposedly incredible. Partly inspired by the movie Drive.

Gears of War 2

It's more of the same with a few small improvements. If anything it's even more guilty then the first of sacrificing game play for scripted action movie setpieces. Too often it's one minute of action to two of cut scene. The giant creature riding parts are new and they were the highlight for me. The giant Worm was the low point it looked promising. I was expecting a 3d re imagining of the last level of Contra what I got was a bland chase down a corridor before effectively one button quick time eventing a couple of week points. I look forward to seeing what People can fly do with the franchise because I think if the levels where larger the AI better and the player offered more control rather then being shunted from setpiece to setpiece it could be a really great game.
6/10

+1

Game is phenomenal. All of the levels have great attention to detail. The npcs have some very funny small talk conversations and there's some good subtlety in certain spots. Graphics and environments are rich.

Most of the levels have at least a few different ways to approach the objectives and they created a challenges screen which has multiple ways to accomplish some of the objectives. For instance if your objective is to kill bad guy x, there might be 2-4 different ways to do it using environmental advantages such as rigging the gas oven to explode or sniping a guy over the edge to simultaneously kill and hide the body. The more challenges you do, the bigger bonus you get to your point score. It also shows some point score averages which are interesting. The game rewards you for trying to be as stealthy as possible, which caters to a slower and calculating play style.

The only negative I found is that at some points the stealth ai detection would be inconsistent and frustrating. For instance, getting spotted loses you points and severely caps your top end score for a level, yet there are certain times where I'd pop out to shoot a guy in the back of his head and the "spots" me a millisecond before he's dead, yet I still get penalized. Other times, it didn't seem to happen.

Super fun game overall IMO. Good storyline that continued from where blood money left off. Would recommend both games as I played/finished them back to back the last 2 wks.

Ratchet & Clank: Quest For Booty

PSN game that I'd been waiting for a discount on for almost 3 years, finally got it this Christmas. The $15 regular price is way too high.

The game is standard R&C, which I'm a bit sick of at this point. Hopefully A Crack in Time has more interesting mechanics (I've heard that it does).

The story and production are okay, again, standard R&C. This takes place in-between Tools of Destruction and Crack in Time and is only 3-4 hours long. Play it if you're a completist or are really aching for 3-4 traditional R&C levels, otherwise skip it.

3/10 - that's not to say it's a bad game, but for the $15 non-sale price it's moronic.

Dwarfs!? - PC
Steam Page | Developer Page



A year old game that recently went free to play (but as far as I can tell, all the good stuff is free). Not sure how to categorize it other than the now fairly broad Rogue-like category. You control a group of dwarves in a proceduraly generated landscape, mining blocks and minerals for gold while avoiding trapped caves filled with water and lava that can flood your entire mine, monsters that can overrun you if not handled, or treasure. Each game lasts a set amount of time that you choose, 15m, 30m, 45m or 1hr, and your goal is to get the highest score possible.

The graphics look a little bland, but it has a great style that drew me in quickly, and pretty simple gameplay that can get a bit hectic as your dwarves get further and further away from the starting point. There's only a limited pause function, that only lasts for a short time and has a cooldown between uses, so the challenge lies in getting more points by expanding outwards with your miners while not letting them accidentally expose lava/water/mobs that can overrun the map.

One of the best games I've played recently. Can't argue with free!

just finished this. been around games for a while and this is the best game I've ever played in terms of value for money. I actually feel bad now that I have only paid $7.50 for it on Steam, it's worth alot more.

Just overall a brilliant game, everything works together, the music in combination with the gameplay is fantastic, rarely have I been glued in front of my PC so much. Just to show how good the game is, my GF bought me a brand new xbox and I went and bought 5 of what is considered to be good games for it and all I've been playing is Hotline Miami.

Anyone remotely interested in video games should buy this game.

Edit: I got 11h of play out of it and are excited to get back at it and break highscores.

9.5/10

New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wii

I recently bought a Wii to go with my newly purchased home as I figured it'd be fun to have a game system that was accessible to everyone at a party. Bought Twilight Princess, Galaxy 1 and it came with NSMBW which I started with.

This is the kind of game that is usually bad for me because I'm OCD with some games (not all though, not sure how to translate it) and this was one of them. Must. Collect. All. Special. Coins. Part of it is a big trip down nostalgia lane because I was always a Nintendo kid growing up with the NES/SNES/64 but hadn't owned a console since then. I think the game captured the magic of SMB1 and 3 quite well while throwing in some new features with the motion capabilities of the WiiMote. There were abilities I wasn't even discovering until late in the game, maybe it speaks to my lack of console play in recent years but I'd like to think the game was just designed with good scope.

Overall the game was not overly difficult, it took a bit of play to get used to a remote again but it was like riding a bike. I'd say the difficulty of the game ramps up extremely when playing with multiple players, especially at 4 and friends and I have had a blast playing it. As a single player it had its challenges at points but again not very difficult. Final battle is unique, worlds are fun. I'm not technically done with the game as I still have to go back and collect a bunch of coins to go through the *spoiler* star world *spoiler* but I've beaten the main game and haven't posted a review in a bit so I wanted to do that.

Pretty good, pleased with the purchase on this game alone and from my understanding I won't be disappointed with the other AAA titles I don't think.

8/10

I think ME1 and ME3 were fine and not completely based on cover, but ME2 was really cover-based. I think with ME2 you could probably put your guy behind cover, go to sleep, and he'd still be alive in the morning. ME1 had enemies that would at least flank you, and ME3 had grenades, as well as really strong enemies like Banshees and Brutes that could negate the advantage of cover.

Just thought I'd issue a buyer beware warning. I bought the $2 Endless DLC that lets you play without a time limit, but the game has tons of problems crashing during saving/loading of any map size bigger than the smallest and seems pretty much broken. The steam forums seem to have a decent number of people with this problem, and no word from the developers, so I wouldn't recommend paying for any of the DLC.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

I got the MGS HD pack on PS3 for Christmas, including MGS 2, 3 and Peace Walker. Decided to play through in that order, so over the last couple weeks have been playing MGS2.

I played the game partway through when it was released and remembered the story being tough to follow - that was an accurate memory. I just finished the game last night and I couldn't tell you exactly what my character did or did not accomplish, which of the bad guys were working together, which were double-crossing, which were secretly aligned with the good guys, or who won. In short, the story was a mess, but I actually kind of enjoyed how chaotic it was from a nostalgic standpoint this time around.

Also, the REALLY long cut scenes got pretty noticeable at the end of the game. I think there were periods where you would have 40 minutes of cutscenes in a row, with the only gameplay maybe walking from one room to the other. They also had the minorly annoying habit of doing a lot of switching back and forth between animated or video cutscenes and your radio communication, each one with a brief black screen load time. (And I'm sure it's been commented on before, but there must have been 10 times in the game where two people are talking standing next to each other, but they switch to talking over "nanocommunication", or high-tech radio. Supposedly this is to avoid eavesdropping, but each person still has to speak their words out loud. So it's like two people sitting next to each other on a couch talking into walkie-talkies.)

As for gameplay itself, very solid and very similar to the original MGS. Great focus on stealth, and possible to go through the game with no kills at all. (I tried to do a no kill run actually, but one time when I got caught and decided just to die and start the room over with a continue I just took out the machine gun and grenade launcher and started laying waste - didn't realize those kills would count even if I died right after and continued - oops). I guess the biggest change for me from the first game is that you don't have access to radar in MGS2 until you find the computer node in each section of the game. This made getting to a new area much more tense for me, not being able to know where the guards were (and which way they were looking).

Boss battles weren't quite as good/memorable as the first MGS in my opinion. There are fewer boss characters this time around, and while Fortune Vamp and Fatman had character, the boss battles were more bland this time around, with only Fatman's bomb disposal really offering an interesting twist on a standard weapon duel. That said, the sniper support portion of the game towards the end was really fun I thought, and the fight against a swarm of Metal Gears was a lot of fun.

My stats at the end of the game were pretty weak: over 40 continues, over 40 alerts and 53 rations used. My ranking was "Elephant" which I assume means "As much noise as a..." I did give myself a little credit, though: I went the wrong way at the beginning of the game, so I didn't get the tranquilizer gun until way later than I was supposed to, almost 1/2 way through, when you can get it right at the start. This means I had no way to incapacitate guards for way longer than I was supposed to.

I enjoyed playing, weird story and all, and if I didn't have a list of games 20 deep that I already don't have time to play through I think I would have enjoyed going through the extensive VR Training missions, plus optional Snake Tales missions, which is a cool extra they added which basically tells the story of the game using the same characters,but different events and outcomes. However, it's not quite the classic that MGS1 was.

Rating: 7/10

One follow up note: I bought MGS3 when it was originally released, but never got past the very first part of the game before giving up on it. I fired it up last night and now I remember why. They took away radar! I gave up on my first playthrough after not being able to get past the first two or three screens without getting spotted by guards, and so far I'm having the same hard time now. Ugh. This is almost universally regarded as one of the best games ever, but I may just not have the stealth chops to get to experience it. I'm bummed. Anyone remember any particular adjustments you made? I just constantly find myself getting seen by guards before I see them.

Football Manager 2008

After playing two long term career saves I'm now done with FM08. For anyone that doesn't know Football manager is a long running series in which the player takes the role of the manager of a soccer team and is responsible for buy players setting their training schedules and match day tactics then sits back and watches the match play out with no direct involvement other then to tweak the tactics and make substitutions.

FM08 is the last of the series without a three dimensional representation of the match. Instead you see the players as dots from an overhead perspective. The Match engines good you see a lot of different goals and because your using your imagination the animations are endless. Too many shots hit the woodwork and are then caught by the goal keeper and occasional players don't respond to the ball at all while the clocks still running but overall its good enough that you curse your players not the developers when things go against you. The new players the game creates to replace the real ones who retire are a bit strange but a definite improvement on FM07. The financial modellings very week it far to easy to build up giant reserves of cash. The transfer market works pretty well, bigger teams come in for your best players and smaller teams are willing to take your unneeded squad players off your hands. Many consider FM07 the best of the FM series and despite FM08 having a better match engine and player creation system I'm inclined to agree. FM08 is the first in the series to see the media and player interaction start to be intrusive, annoying and grossly repetitive. Every time you face a former player your asked the same question and given the same five answers to choose from. Likewise before every match your asked about the opposition and the more players you short-list the more you will be interrupted to respond to transfer speculation.

I have spent hundreds of hours playing this game so clearly I think its good but I also think it's the start of a nasty trend of boring repetitive multi choice questions slowing the game down that has grown worse with each subsequent FM. 8.5/10

Journey (PSN)

One of this past year's critical darlings, frequent GOTY winner and candidate etc. It's often used as an argument for games-as-art.

You basically just go on a journey by foot, constantly moving forward with some brief puzzle solving. By default you're online and will occasionally be joined with one other player. There is no communication except for one generic sound/signal. I wound up playing for about the final 90 minutes (the total game is only 2-3 hours) with one other player. A bond and emotions develop between you, which is part of the game's conceit. When it became clear that the game was about to end the other player and I signaled a "goodbye" to each other, which was quite emotional.

9/10

It's all about using the camouflage and laying down so they can't spot you. You have different sensors in your inventory so try them out. I only just finished this game on 360 so I would say don't give up as it's a really great game. (Don't be so hard on yourself for getting spotted, shoot them and then hide the body then carry on)

That sounds like a fun game, but the problem with this is it doesn't sound like a game that would be as powerful or emotional 3 years from now when hardly anyone is playing it, unless they have some awesome AI to fill the void.

Veiwtiful Jo PS2

Made by Clover studios the team behind Okami this is another great looking cel-shaded game that's aged very gracefully. You play Jo a young man whose date with Silvia goes wrong when the villain of the film they are watching reaches out and abducts her. Jo joins Silvia in the movie and gains a V watch which allows him to manipulate the movie by slowing it down, speeding it up or zooming in. It plays as a 2D scrolling beatem up with puzzle elements. Its pretty tough. I beat it on easy, I don't think I would have persevered on normal. A couple of boss battles had me pulling my hair out until I had to look hints up on-line. It's certainly no button masher you have to tackle each type of enemy with the appropriate attack. If your playing for high scores you need to line enemies up so you can string attacks together with out punching air or being blocked.
The story's got its tongue firmly in its cheek it's fun and silly and delivered in nice short cut-scenes that don't out stay their welcome. Its also got some great ending credits.
It does have a couple of problems. The slow motion power is much more useful then the speeding up and the zoom is too close to see what's around you making string attacks together very difficult but overall I had a lot of fun with a game in a genre I generally don't enjoy.
7/10

Yeah, I agree, I beat Viewtiful Joe multiple times on Easy, tried a playthrough on Normal, and couldn't pass either the second or third boss (either the some like it hot boss or the shark boss).

Bastion

I wanted a game to play that was small and not overly involved where I'd have to spend weeks doing stuff. This was cheap and looked interesting enough to try out.

Loved it. The narrating is great, the music it top-notch and it's fairly easy. I was worried it was going to be like DeathSpank, which was cool the first time, but was just the same game as the sequels. This has similar mechanics, but there is a cool story, even though I'm not sure what it was. I also like how a lot of the things you can build you character as high as you need him by just playing the game. Huge games I don't mind having the level up before you move on, but this game isn't big enough for that and they did well balancing that out. Just a really fun game to play around with an hour here and an hour there.

9/10

Just finished a play through of Super Mario World for SNES on Wii VC. Didn't full clear, cuz **** that. Did every exit on Star World, plus the Special levels. Went thru the final star to change the palette (does anything else change?) and then warped to Bowsers castle for a quick kill. Picked areas 3 and 6. Went in with 2 feathers, left victorious as small Mario. Only hit once during Bowser fight, twice in area 6, once in 3 (got two mushrooms from peach during the final battle).

Only cleared the game up to the blue switch palace. Must have only played a total of about 4 hours or less. Meh. Controls were less responsive than I remember them being on SNES. Guess that's to be expected. Not a bad time though.

got all the star coins and...

Like the pigeons in GTAIV. All the other hunt side missions in the GTA games gave something. And some of it was damn good to get. But jack squat for those damn pigeons.

The Cave (2013) DOUBLE FINE



Finished one playthrough of The Cave. It reminded me of Trine, but with Double Fine humor. Each character has their own level, and there are 7 characters. You pick 3 and begin each game. So it's good for about 2 1/3 playthroughs. :P I looked on the forums and it looks like it's taking people 3-4+ hours for a playthrough. Things I didn't like were the levels were rather large, and you found yourself backtracking quite a bit since you are moving 3 characters. The puzzles were definitely challenging. One thing that annoyed me was that you came to like a central hub for all the characters, and you could still interact with portions that you weren't meant to. So I ran around for like 15 minutes trying to figure out something I wasn't even supposed to be working on. The character trailer gives you a better sense of the game, but it contains spoilers.

7/10

Definitely interested in The Cave, I downloaded the demo. I know that reviews have been just "okay" to mediocre, but I like the genre (and Maniac Mansion) enough that it's probably worth buying once it goes on sale.