Madness Returns, however, seemed pretty interesting in previews I’ve seen, so I decided I’d check it out as soon as it came out, though negative reviews all around made me decide to just rent it.

Since I haven’t come close to finishing the game (done with chapter 2), this is an impressions post rather than a review, though honestly I doubt the game throws any curveballs gameplay-wise, so I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything that is to be seen here (considering the total lack of BOSSES in the game…). So read on and see what I thought (I’ll make it short).

Developer: Spicy Horse
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Date of Release: June 14th 2011
Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC

Genre: 3D Platformer
Rated M for Mature (why?)

Basic gameplay

The basic gameplay is quite simple: jump on platforms, kill dudes, go to the next place where you’ll jump on platforms and kill dudes. The platforming is okay, though I find it incredibly easy since you actually have 3 extra jumps once you’re in the air AND a glide move ALA Princess Peach in Mario 2 (but less awesome). There’s generally not a lot of variety in the platforming, mostly due to how easy every jump is (so you do them all in the same way). And there’s no penalty for falling in holes, you just go back before the jump. The only variety comes from shrinking, which sometimes reveals invisible platforms (though the game places flowers around areas where you might want to shrink so you’re never at a loss as to where to go).

Combat is very Zelda Ocarina of Time-ish. You can target single enemies, you have a knife which has a single combo attack (more hits are added when you level the knife up), and you have extra weapons assigned to other buttons like the pepper grinder and the hobby horse. You have a dodge move as well, which is super versatile since it essentially lets you teleport behind enemies in addition to letting you dodge attacks in any direction. So combat ends up being super simple, with the only challenges being the first time you encounter the bigger enemy with 3 masks. You can level up your equipment, making it stronger or adding more hits, using teeth that enemies drop or that you find in various destructible objects. And if you’re having trouble against a bunch of enemies? Well, if you’re down to one health, you can go into a super-powered mode that makes you invincible and makes you stronger…. this is especially useful against multiple enemies since they seem to always drop health when you’re in this mode.

The problem here is that the gameplay wears thin really fast. It felt to me that I saw everything the game had to offer in the first hour of gameplay. And frankly I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun with it. It all worked well, but it felt to me like it should have been so much more fun to play. It may be due to the complete lack of challenge, it never feels like you’re actually in any trouble, so you’re just going with the flow… The game is just holding your hand all the way through, you barely feel like you’re playing it at all. Even the completely random side-scrolling shooter level didn’t really manage to break the monotony for me. It did bring variety, but not enough to actually make the experience as a whole terribly fun.

Graphics

Quality-wise… Alice’s hair looks lame, and there’s low-res textures all over the place. But overall it does look good enough to portray the style very well. Stylistically, this looks great. It’s a bit like if Tim Burton (the one who made Nightmare Before Christmas, not his less talented clone who made that Alice film) took the Alice story and made it in his own style. There’s a lot of very interesting locations, though each chapter has the very same look all the way through so the areas start looking the same. There’s a few nice touches here, like Alice having different clothes depending on the area she’s in.

A problem here is that, since you can jump so far, a lot of areas end up feeling empty, though that problem does start to die down in the second chapter (I don’t know if it goes back to feeling empty later on though).

Performance issues

I don’t know if this is a problem on the PC or Xbox 360 version, but the PS3 version has terrible performance issues. It totally lags out each time you pick up a memory, the framerate keeps chugging, sometimes the physics mess up… This really feels like an incomplete game at times.

Overall

The basic gameplay is solid enough, but it’s not really fun. I have ragged on negative reviews of this game before and… frankly I still do. The complaints I’ve seen have generally been stupid (stuff like “the platforming has traps that can kill you”… No, I’m not kidding), and none of the reviews really commented on whether the gameplay is fun or not. So I’ll say it: It’s not fun. It had a lot of potential, and the controls are really good for the most part so… I have no idea where they went wrong. It just feels really bland and it has nothing that really defines it. It’s just… there. I’ll say rent it if you’re a fan of Alice, otherwise don’t bother.

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But the biggest part of E3 is definitely the big keynote conferences, namely the ones by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. I have a few things to say about them after watching them, so let’s go! Keep in mind I’m only talking about the big 3 here, so there’s gonna be no mention of the EA or Ubisoft conferences (despite Ubisoft kicking Microsoft’s ass, and that JUST by showing Rayman Origins footage… but I digress)..

Read on! (wow, I wrote a lot more than I thought I would… Oh well)

Note before discussing the conferences

People must keep in mind that E3 is, first and foremost, a trade show. It’s a place when hardware manufacturers and developers go to show off to journalists and to their stockholders what they have coming out, and what they hope will sell. To their stockholders, it makes them see what they’ll be making money on. Journalists… are just happy to write about it and spur discussion about upcoming products. This isn’t primarily a show for gamers (sort of), it’s more of a show to present upcoming products, may it be exciting to “core” gamers or not. Sure, the gamer’s experience is what counts in that end, but money is what really counts here. I am presenting this from a gamer’s perspective, but do keep in mind that I also think of this as a trade show, so my opinions do change due to that.

Microsoft

Starting the conference
Microsoft opened with a few third-party games, namely Modern Warfare 3 (surprise! it runs on the same damn gameplay engine as MW2 and MW1!… fuck evolution, right?) and the new Tomb Raider game (which, from the looks of it, is actually a movie with minor interactions… but that was just a small portion so maybe it becomes a game later on?). It was a rather subpar start.

Kinect
If there’s one word that can summarize this conference, it’s “Kinect”. that’s basically all that was shown. First, integration in “hardcore games” was a main concern… at first. Talking to speak your choices in Mass Effect 3 (lame), directing your team with speech in Mass Effect 3 (possibly really cool), customizing your weapons in Ghost Recon (kinda nifty, though buttons would do the job just as well, and probably faster), looking at cars in Forza…. and yeah, that’s about it.

As for new “core” games announced, we saw a new Fable game (filled with false promises by Peter Molyneux right before showing the gameplay that makes it clear that his stupid speech was false) which is actually an on-rails shooter. We saw Ryse, a project by Crytek, which, by the looks of the trailer, will be an on-rails brawler (it actually looks quite cool, but the on-rails nature may be iffy). We saw Star Wars Kinect (okay, not really a new announcement, but shut up ), which is a crappy on-rails brawler with unresponsive controls… Okay, we get it MS, Kinect can’t deliver full control of character movement and as such going for on-rails is probably the best possible implementation for “core” games but… I dunno, I think this is the maximum Kinect can do for “core” gamers at the moment. Boost up this technology for your next console.

Then we got the “shit” no one wants to hear about. Kinect got a new sports game, a new dance central, a sesame street game, a lame Disneyland game… and that’s about the extent of that. One cool announcement for Kinect was the Kinect Fun Labs… though it’s hard to say what it can really do from their conference, it did look kinda cool… we’ll see!

Tim Schafer’s career destroyed?
The man who helped make the famous SCUMM engine, the man who wrote for Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, the man who created Psychonauts and Brutal Legends… Basically one of the big names in the gaming industry… is making a fucking Sesame Street Kinect game… Fuck you Microsoft.

New announcements
NONE! Because MS leaked their new announcements a bit over an hour before their presser… fail. Okay, let’s say that somehow didn’t happen. Other than a bunch of Kinect stuff that seems lame, we got 3 new announcements. First, an HD remake of Halo… which is already playable on the 360 anyways so it’s pointless (other than reviving the online maybe? I don’t really know). Then Minecraft on 360, which I guess is nice if you like Minecraft (I don’t get it personally).  And, finally, 3 new Halo games were announced. Okay, so most people will tell you only Halo 4 was revealed, but they said that Halo 4 was the dawn of a new trilogy. As such, they have effectively announce Halo 4, Halo 5 and Halo 6. Yeah, we needed that much Halo guys! </sarcasm>

TV on Xbox
You can watch TV… on your Xbox 360! …. That’s about the extent of that. They may as well not have mentioned it since they had no information about it at all.

Actors
FIST BUMP!
Anyways… Seriously Microsoft, do you really NEED actors that fail at pretending they’re having fun? May it be the child or adult actors you get to play the games, they’re all REALLY bad. Kids don’t act like that in real life. Adults don’t act like that in real life (that football-playing segment was pathetic). Just get real people to play the games instead of people acting like they’re enjoying them when they clearly aren’t. Sony and Nintendo get it right by getting the developers to play the games, you should do the same.

Overall
Meh? I mean, it could have been worse, I guess… maybe… They leaked their only announcements, and the actual presentation was really boring. Nothing that’s really interesting was announced, and it was all about integrating Kinect in games that don’t need Kinect… I was expecting Microsoft to not have much to show, so I guess they met my expectations….

Microsoft did what they needed to do, showed off what they had down the pipeline… it kinda sucks that all they have down the pipeline is multi-platform games, Gears, more Halo which isn’t needed and lame Kinect games.

If I were to rate out of 10… 3.5/10, “at least they were there”. I’m sure the stockholders are okay with the conference, but the gamers aren’t.

Sony

Apologies
I’ll say I was kinda hoping for a big joke with Kevin Butler about how he’s the VP of Hacking Sony, but whatever. An apology, as quick as it was, was all that was really needed here, and I think it was handled fine..

Random stuff shown
The Uncharted 3 showing just… showed me that they have no intention of making a new game, but rather just ra-taking the old one and adding new graphic technology. It does look nice though, and, despite always being the same, the Uncharted games aren’t bad.

Resistance 3 was shown. Boring generic FPS, yay! But I think the big problem is that they rushed to get a small demo out for the presentation, and they just picked 2 really bad segments of the game to show off. The showing of Resistance 3 was followed by the announcement of a cheap (499$) 24 inch 3D TV which is pretty nice (which includes a copy of Resistance 3), so at last there’s that. Also shown was the great idea of 2-player gaming with each player having a full screen to look at on the same TV by using 3D technology to remove the need to actually split the screen. Nice stuff, I hope to see more about this in the future.

There was a nice Bioshock Infinite Trailer which actually seems pretty good… Not much to say about that really.

Not a lot of announcements
Sly Cooper 4! And that’s really about it on the PS3 front. A new Star Trek downloadable game was shown which looks… like a standard cover-based TPS… Dust 514, a competitive FPS that is somehow linked to Eve Online, was shown to be a PS3 exclusive.

There were a few things in regards to Vita, but I’ll talk about that separately.

Move
There was some Move stuff shown, a lot of talking about integrating Move to various titles like Saint’s Row 3, and one Move game (Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest) that… oh look it’s an on-rails shooter… Come on Sony, this isn’t Kinect, you’ve already shown (apparently) with Killzone 3 that a “normal” game can work well with Move controls, you don’t need to fall in the same trap Kinect did.

Move had an… okay showing… Nothing really amazing, but at least it has some support that isn’t total crap/pointless.

Playstation Vita
Okay, Sony, I have a very serious question to ask here: How did you manage to bring the price down to 250$? I have no clue how you managed that… unless you’re taking a loss or breaking even with every console sold….
ANYWAYS… really good showing for the Playstation Vita… sure, it has a terrible name, but whatever (the worst is yet to come). My only big problem was showing Uncharted here… just because they streamlined the gameplay so much it’s stupid… “no need to actually time your jumps, just touch where you want to go!”…

But otherwise… amazing pricing, nice hardware, an okay lineup of software if you like the PS3 exclusive stuff (since, for now, it’s all ports/adaptations of sorts)… And I think Ruin looks cool too.

Oh, and, for the lulz, Vita has cross-game chat, but PS3 doesn’t. Awesome trolling there Sony, love it. Not like it’s a useful feature anyways.

Talkers
Microsoft had problems with bad actors, Sony had problems with the people they sent on stage to talk about their product. Okay, unless you have someone speaking in japanese getting translated, here’s a very simple rule you should follow: the person you get on-stage to talk about your game SHOULD BE ABLE TO SPEAK IN CLEAR, EASY-TO-UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. Half the people that got on stage to talk barely even knew the language, it’s crazy.

Overall
Not a bad presentation from Sony overall. I mean, nothing new was announced other than Sly 4 (which I’m pretty happy about), but they kept it simple: talked about a game, showed it, went to the next game. It never dragged out too much, some of the devs talking about their games were interesting (that Bioshock guy was great, for example) and it cut the bullshit for the most part. Oh, and no retarded speeches by Kevin Butler, happy to not have seen him there at all (unless the previously mentionned joke that would have been awesome).

The high point of the conference is obviously Vita with a pretty nice lineup and a great price point that’s really making me want to buy one…. Maybe

Score? 7/10. Solid. I wanted giant enemy crabs, a ridiculous price point for the Vita and RIIIIIIIIIDGE RACEEER (though Tretton DID reference it which was awesome) so that Icould laugh at Sony a bit, but a good conference is nice too (I AM a PS3 fan after all).

Nintendo

It’s Zelda’s 25th anniversary?
Ah yes, one of the best franchises ever is 25 year olds. Cool announcements here, like a symphonic concert tour for Zelda music across the world, FREE Four Swords for DSi (and, obviously, 3DS) in September, Link’s Awakening DX being added to the 3DS eshop during the conference (GO BUY IT! easily one of the best Zelda games ever, up there with LttP and OoT), certain OSTs (one that will come for Club Nintendo members who quickly register their Skyward Sword game, and some other OST of sorts, I think about that music tour I talked about earlier), skyward sword coming before the end of the year… Oh, and a BADASS Gold Wii Remote that comes with the game… Cool stuff, especially with the orchestra playing awesome Zelda music. Great start to the conference.

3DS
Star Fox, Mario Kart, Kid Icarus and Super Mario, all coming out before the end of the year… BADASS, they all look great. Who cares if they’re “just” sequels, they’re going to be great games and that’s all that matters. But not only that, but a long requested side-game of the Mario series is getting a sequel: Luigi’s Mansion 2. It seems to be a huge upgrade from the first with more varied environments. In addition, a bunch of third-party titles were shown, mostly games we already knew about, and Tekken. Tremendous showing for the 3DS.

Project Café
I don’t understand how Nintendo could screw up a NEW CONSOLE reveal. But lo-and-behold, they did. Through most of this part of the conference, it was mostly unclear whether this was a new console or just an add-on to the Wii.  The actual console WAS shown in the videos… but it was far away and, if you just looked fast, it looked like a Wii (though, after further observation, it looks like the lovechild of a Wii and Xbox 360). Speaking of looking like a Wii…. WII U… I thought Vita was a bad name, but this… Come on Nintendo, what the fuck? Are you insane? Did you make a contest through the company to find the worst possible name for the console? Or maybe you’re big Kung Pow fans? It took me about 5 minutes to accept the “Wii” name (said Wii, had a childish chuckle, and it grew on me just about right away). But Wii U? Come on guys, you should have distanced yourself from the Wii name.

Anyways, the big problem with this was partly that they didn’t really show the actual console, but that they pretty much gave no information whatsoever. I know the focus is and should be the controller in this case (which I actually really like), but nothing about the actual console? Why not show it at all, even if it’s just an empty shell modeled after the console? Just have the console on a stand with the controller on top or something… And they really said nothing about it. Not a good idea Nintendo, people were pissed off after your conference.

On the positive side, the controller has a whole lot of potential, and the power of the system is getting a lot of developers on-board (and hopefully some of them will do truly innovative things with the controller).

Where’s Wii?
All that was actually talked about at the conference for Wii was Skyward Sword? What the hell? Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to play that, but… Your new console is coming out next year, you have to keep on supporting the Wii just a little bit… Okay, to be fair, a picture was shown right after the conference on the screen with a bunch of logos (click here) where you can see a Kirby Wii logo, and Mario Party 9… but that barely counts.

Information after the conference
It wasn’t long after the conference that information started to be given about the Wii U (argh… hate that fucking name)… But why not take an extra half hour or something to show the info there? I really don’t get it. The confusion I felt when the conference ended is mostly gone now… but it shouldn’t have ben there in the first place.

NEW SUPER SMASH BROS
Yay

Overall
GREAT 3DS showing, no Wii showing at all, and a badly thought-out Wii U (ARGH) showing that really didn’t do justice to the platform. There was not much new shown other than Wii U (dammit), but the announcement of Luigi’s Mansion 2 and Super Smash Bros on Wii U (fuck) and 3DS was definitely nice. Some new things were mentionned from 3rd parties, but not much really.

Score? 7/10, the lack of Wii and a rather weak reveal for the Wii U (… change this name Nintendo, seriously) was detrimental, but not enough to counteract the great 3DS showing and A NEW SMASH BROS!

Overall

This year was… pretty standard. Nothing truly mind-blowing, none of the big 3 showed off much that we didn’t know about already. But, other than Microsoft’s conference, it was nice. I’d put Nintendo and Sony about equal in this case since Nintendo had a sort of lacking showing of the Wii U while Sony had a great showing of the Vita.

But E3 isn’t all about the conferences (otherwise we still wouldn’t know anything about Project Café beyond the controller), tons of stuff is still to be revealed, and we’re gonna get journalist impressions of stuff at the E3 showfloor, which is the most interesting thing about E3. So keep on following what’s going on at E3! Stay on those news sites, there may still be surprises on the way! And a flood of gameplay videos and such.

Oh, and go buy Link’s Awakening DX… seriously.

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The main selling point here, at least when it comes to the advertising and first impressions, is the glasses-free 3D, something no other system has ever done (well… technically the virtal boy didn’t require 3D glasses… but I’ll consider the virtual boy as a whole to be a big pair of 3D glasses ).

So are Nintendo setting the world on fire with their new device? Read on and see!

Visual design/functionality

It’s a DS lite! Yeah, that’s about the extent of that. There’s nothing really new to the design visually. Why fix what’s not broken? The “3-tier” thing when  the device is closed looks fine. I don’t know for the blue version, but the black version is a fingerprint magnet, but that’s to be expected.

It’s actually a lot thinner than I was expecting. People were talking about how big the 3DS is, but it’s actually super thin and really not big at all. It sits fairly comfortably in your hands, I have very little problem with it. It doesn’t feel as good in my hands as the first DS model, but that’s hard to beat.

The buttons are really good, they’re sufficiently clicky and well placed. Seeing pictures of the system before release, I thought the analog nub and the d-pad were strangely placed, but, after playing with the system, they actually feel really good. The analog nub in particular is pretty surprising, considering how terrible the analog nub on the PSP was.

There’s one fairly big problem to me when it comes to the buttons though. The Start/Select/Home buttons are terribly placed, and, rather than each being separate buttons, they’re one single strip of plastic, making them hard to press. (*EDIT: After further use, I have found that they are indeed separate buttons, but the area where you press them is tiny, which is why I have trouble pressing them… better positioning/better buttons really would be good*) The power button is also slightly badly placed, with it being below the ABXY buttons, I find it rather easy to randomly press it during gameplay (happened to me once for now).

So overall, visually and in regards to functionality, the design of the 3DS is great. No really big problems, though the start/select/home button placement and the power button really should be elsewhere.

The 3D effect

This is the one thing that truly separates the 3DS from every other system out there. 3D, without cumbersome/annoying glasses to see it. Well, let me be the millionth person to say “it works!”, but let’s go a little bit deeper.

First, the sweetspot. Basically, the 3D is only visible if you hold the 3DS at a certain angle. Otherwise you’ll either only see a 2D image, or 2 overlapping images. While the sweetspot is fairly strict, it’s also really easy to get. Just hold it like you’d hold any other DS system and you’re basically set. For now I have yet to have any major problems with the sweetspot, though I sometimes see very faint doubles, or sometimes I’ll move around a bit and lose focus (just to get it back a few seconds later). If you have problems with the effect, you can turn it down a bit, it makes the sweetspot a bit bigger and the effect retains most of the depth it has at 100%. At worst, just turn it off.

As for the effect, well, it looks really good. You get a real sense of depth while looking at the screen, a bit like looking out of a window. While there’s not a lot of “pop-up” (which, by the way, is the same thing as “depth” 3D, I have no idea why people think they’re different), when there is it looks fairly natural. Visually, I really like the 3D. It’s a new way to look at games and it looks great.

Gameplay-wise, I find that the 3D effect has very little… effect (sorry). I mean, it’s slightly easier to judge distances, and having certain things popping up in your face is kinda fun, but it really doesn’t add anything to the actual gameplay. I find it to be purely visual. I like it that way, and I wasn’t actually expecting any enhancements to gameplay due to the 3D.

The best applications of 3D gameplay-wise is actually the AR games included in the console. The best effect with that was in the archery game, where one of the targets was actually in a deep hole that suddenly appeared on my table (in-game of course), and I had to look down into it to shoot it.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the 3D. Sometimes I find myself having to adjust the 3D slider during gameplay, to be able to see the game better (depends on the game, Pilotwings is the only one I played yet that I can’t play well with full 3D), but that’s really not a problem for me.

Included Software

AR games
This is actually pretty cool, if you can find yourself a proper setup that you can walk around or you can just spin the AR card around with your hand. Heck, you can actually play the AR games by placing the card in the palm of your hand (though that becomes annoying to play). There’s a variety of mini-games here, which are all pretty fun to play (from what I’ve seen). The effect with the dragon bursting out of your table is actually really cool, as is the previously mentioned archery game.

The AR games serve sort of as tech demos, but I’d say very solid tech demos. Though it is kinda weird seeing the environment being low-quality due to the 3DS cameras, but the game graphics looking really nice.

Face Raider
First you take a picture of your face, lining up the dots and line to your eyes and mouth, and then it pops out of the screen, laughs at you, and you have to defeat your floating face, which appears in the environment around you through the camera (so you have to physically move the 3DS around to aim), by throwing balls at it. Shooting the mouth gets you extra points, and there’s different versions of the face that will attack. The 3D effect is quite effective here, the animations on the faces are actually really good considering it’s doing them going by a static picture, but the game itself gets boring fairly fast. After that first level with your own face, you can start taking pictures of other people (I personally got a picture of Andross). It’s an okay tech demo if nothing else.

Other useless shit
You can take pictures! Taking pictures saves both a “2D” picture and a 3D version. The picture quality of the 3DS cameras is kinda lame though. And 3D pictures taken on anything that makes the proper file type can be shared. As such, I have 3D pictures of a japanese model in my 3DS… obviously… Actually… Check them out, they’re a great display of the 3D effect: Click Here (don’t worry, there’s no porn in there).

Then there’s the Mii creator, which you can make normally just like on the Wii, or it can take a picture of your face and attempt to remake it in Mii form (which doesn’t work too well in my experience). Seems like you can also use QR codes to share Miis and connect to the Wii to get Miis from there. There’s a Mii RPG-ish game in the Mii Plaza which I have no idea how it works (you get new Miis for this with streetpass, and you can hire Miis by using play coins, which you get by walking around with the 3DS in sleep mode), as well as a puzzle game thing I haven’t tried and probably won’t.

There’s a sound studio , which is kinda useless… Well, you can listen to your own MP3s, record sounds which is useless, and screw around with the sounds a little bit (speed and pitch, or adding sounds with the shoulder buttons).

For now I have yet to meet any Miis or other stuff due to streetpass, so the Find Mii game and the previously mentionned puzzle game thing, as well as other game stuff (there’s a streetpass option in Samurai Warriors) hasn’t happened to me yet, but you never know. It should be much more effective at places like anime/gaming conventions and such.

More features will come eventually, as the system gets updates.

Games

Launch
The launch is admittedly weak. There aren’t any games that will end up being considered must-haves on the system in the long run. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth playing.

I’ve heard great things about the Super Street Fighter 4 port, and has the highest chance of being considered a must-have eventually.
Samurai Warriors Chronicles is more of a console-style game, but it’s quite fun to play despite the unskippable cutscenes (full review coming up soon for this one).
Pilotwings Resort is actually really fun to play, but only in small doses (playing it non-stop would make you play through it way too fast, so I limit myself to 10-15 minute sessions with it), and it seems to have good replay value (full review for this one coming sometime soon).
Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars is the surprise title for the 3DS launch, it’s a well made turn-based strategy game , though the graphics are pretty bad(I’ll also have a full review for this soon).
Steel Diver might be worth renting from what I’ve read (not really enough gameplay or replay value to warrant a full purchase…. I’m renting it soon and will have a full review for it).
If you somehow enjoyed Nintendogs on the DS, well, this one seems no different, beyond the better graphics and 3D (apparently the cats don’t do much in the game).
And I’ve heard some good stuff about RIIIIIIIIIIIIDGE RACEEEEER as well (though I’m not personally interested in it).

So, while this isn’t a perfect launch, dismissing it completely is slightly wrong (it is better than the DS launch after all… or many other console launches in general) since there’s some good stuff here.  And, at worst, there’s still some normal DS games you can play. Yeah, that’s right, the 3DS has access to one of the best game libraries out there too (albeit with increased loading times). And there’s the included software too.

Upcoming
But what’s really important is all the great games that are coming up. On the remake side, you have Ocarina of Time, still widely considered one of the best games ever and Star Fox 64, which is by far my favorite N64 game and it has unlimited replay value (I probably played through it over a hundred times on the N64, and I can’t wait to play it more on the 3DS).

Otherwise, for new games, there’s Paper Mario, Mario Kart, Kid Icarus Uprising (fuck yeah!),  2 Resident Evil games (which look great graphically), a new Super Mario (which will seemingly have Racoon Mario, holy shit!), Megaman Legends 3 if it ends up not getting cancelled (I’ve heard rumors, which I hope are wrong), Kingdom Hearts 3D, Cave Story 3D, Devil Survivor Overclocked, Professor Layton vs Pheonix Wright (this better get localized!!), Etrian Odyssey, and countless others I’m probably forgetting (and there were some tiny announcements regarding various series (DQ, FF, Contra, amongst others) that will begin 3DS development as well). And that’s just games that are currently announced, there’s sure to be a ton more great stuff on the way in the next 5 years that obviously haven’t been announced yet.

Oh, and let’s not forget the online store thing that’s going to be included with an update in May, which, from what I’ve heard, will include DSiWare, 3DSware and a Virtual Console for various consoles/handhelds.

Worth buying the 3DS this close to the launch?

Hum… I don’t know? Yeah, that’s the answer I’m looking for. It’s really up to you. The price won’t be going down anytime soon (at least not for the first year or so), and, other than better start/select/home/power button placement, there isn’t too much they can do for modified versions of the hardware, other than a bigger version (making it smaller would make little sense since it’s already DS Lite size), so I’m not expecting a revision for a while. Special bundles with games and different colors? Sure. Revisions? Not for 2-3 years at the very least, unless they really wanna go forward for an XL version fast.

The current game selection is a bit low-quality, and there’s really nothing in the launch window (I consider June kinda far away to say it’s still in the launch window), but that’s bound to change soon. Basically, buying a 3DS now is buying it based on potential. Potential that is 100% sure to be realized. I mean, when has a handheld Nintendo console ever had a bad game library? (hint: the answer is never) There are already a bunch of great titles announced by Nintendo alone, and, with the success of the DS before it, the 3DS is pretty sure to garner a lot of 3rd party support. There’s no way the 3DS won’t be worth it in the long run.

Why did I get it early? Well, for me it was a “just in case” thing. What if the console REALLY starts selling like crazy once the good games start coming out and Nintendo really starts going at it with marketing the device? (let’s be honest here, they’re not really doing much to market it at the moment…. the only people who even know about it are people who follow gaming news, and acquaintances of those people) Buying it at launch was just, for me, to be “safe”, so that I would have it already when games I want come out.

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If there’s one thing you’ll hear gamers complain about a lot, especially more retro-style gamers such as myself, is that the gaming industry in the last 5-6 years has been drowned by First-Person Shooters, and none of them are particularly good other than the online component (if that interests you at all). The only exception, to me at least, has been Borderlands, which is more like a “What if Diablo was an FPS?” kinda thing. And there’s Bioshock, but to me it was good more because of the awesome visuals than the actual gameplay.

Bulletstorm comes in as a game that, while it mimics the crappy grey-brown look of modern games, seems like it might be a lot more fun. But, as I always do, I was incredibly skeptical about this, since every FPS I sort of got excited for ended up being total shit, like Singularity. And, the title… Bulletstorm? Yeah, lots of thought went into THAT one (that was sarcasm, by the way). So I didn’t hype myself up too much, but I still kept a close eye on it.

So I played the Bulletstorm demo yesterday… Read on and see if it might be that one good FPS this generation!

What I didn’t like

Yeah, I’ll start with the negatives of the demo.

The graphics
It’s not a really pretty game. Why? Well, it’s brown. Like every other FPS out there. Sure, it’s actually a lot brighter, rather than being all dark and hard to see, but it’s still super brown. And the character design? Well, other than the female character following you around, all the characters have the same character model, with either different hairdoes or different skin colors (like those weird toxic green guys). Very lazy, though that’s just the demo, so we’ll see if any more cool stuff appears later on.

AI partners
I still have no idea why game developers insist on giving you useless AI partners. Here, from what I’ve seen for now (it is just a demo after all), they’re just annoying. They’ll frequently get in your way, preventing you from kicking an enemy, or sometimes they’ll kill an opponent before you get to do the skillshot you’re trying to do on it, preventing you from getting points. Just annoying.

What I liked

Scoring system
I love point systems. The system here is no exception, it’s actually all sorts of fun. Rather than just getting points for kills, you get points depending on HOW you kill the enemy. Headshots, certain shots in the ass, shooting the throat, using remote explosives to hit multiple enemies, or gagging them with said remote explosive, killing them after putting them on fire, using the environment to kill them, and the list goes on and on (in the demo alone I think I found about 20 or so skillshots, though there might be some I missed… and the full game promises over 100 skillshots)… There’s tons of different ways to get points, from kills to starting up traps to finishing levels faster than a target time. I love point systems, and the one here is incredibly fun. It’s a game that I see myself replaying levels all the time just to try and get better scores.

The actual gameplay
It’s actually incredibly good. You can shoot stuff, of course, but there’s way more to it. You have a kick and a slide kick that you can use to push enemies back. You have a “leash”, which sort of looks like an electric whip that you can use to launch enemies towards you, or into environmental traps. You can also use the Thumper, a limited ammo thing on the leash that lets you slam the ground, launch any nearby enemies in the air. Various combinations of shooting, kicking and using the leash leads to various different ways of killing dudes. Overall the game is really fast-paced, the kills are really fun to do and can even require some creativity to find certain skillshots.

The weapons
The weapons here are actually really fun. You have a standard assault rifle which is the basic normal gun. You have a pistol which is a bit shotgun-ish. And you have a “flail gun”, which shoots a rope with 2 weighted explosives attached to it, which can bind enemies, stunning them or making them fall down, and you can remote explode said explosives. The flail gun is awesome. All weapons can also be “charged” by pressing R2, which is like a secondary fire mode. The assault rifle shoots a huge blast that kills anything in a hit, the pistol (called the Screamer) shoots a firework which launches your enemies around and explodes them (various killshots possible with this), and the flail gun releases a bigger explosive, but the “rope” cuts enemies now instead of binding itself to them. Just awesome. I love it when FPS take the fun alternative to weapons and really go crazy with it, like Duke Nukem did so long ago, or Unreal Tournament. Can’t wait to see what other weapons they’ll have here in the full version. My only complaint here is that you can only carry 3 weapons.

Overall

I had a LOT of fun with this demo. The fact that I probably replayed it over 12 times (and I’ll certainly play it a bit more) is a testament to that. This is the first time this generation that an FPS really got to me. FPS are generally so formulaic that it’s pretty much 100% clear that the developers have no fun making the game, and, as such, they’re not fun to play. They just make games that they know will sell because people will buy it despite it being the same damn thing every time. In this case, it’s a complete opposite. They obviously had tons of fun making the game, making up skillshots and different ways to kill enemies, and finding funny names for some of them… They had fun making the game and, as such, I have fun playing it.

The gameplay is fun, fast-paced and surprisingly varied, and the scoring system keeps me coming back. This is something that no FPS amongst the millions of boring FPS that come out every year has yet managed to do. Bulletstorm is the first (other than Borderlands… but I mentioned that already, it’s more of a Diablo-like action-RPG than an FPS).

Judging from what I’ve played, this might really be the FPS I’ve been looking for this generation. The one FPS to actually be really good. Sure, Bioshock was good, but it lacked… something… Maybe it was just that I really liked the visuals and not really the gameplay (which was very average), I don’t know. Borderlands is great, but barely counts as a pure FPS. And Portal was more of a puzzler. Bulletstorm might have the lamest title for an FPS ever, but it’s definitely not as generic and boring as the title makes it sound, and it has some of the most original gameplay in the genre since Portal.

I am definitely hyped for this. Not sure if I’ll get it at launch, but there is no doubt that I will be getting it. It seems too fun to pass up.

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Pinball is awesome. Marvel is awesome. So, obviously, mixing the two should result in awesomeness.

So yeah, this is made by the guys who made Zen Pinball, and I LOVED Zen Pinball. As such, I don’t really feel the need to do a complete review of this, but, instead, I’ll quickly comment on each of the tables available in the package.

So read on and see if they’re fun here!

Developer: Zen Studios
Publisher: Zen Studios
Date of Release: December 14th 2010
Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 (as DLC for Pinball FX 2) (PS3 version reviewed)

Genre: Pinball
Rated E for Everyone

Wolverine Table

Actually a fun table. It has that Wolverine vibe to it, with adamantium pumps used to shoot the ball, a big hand with claws that can pop up from the top of the table to shoot the ball, claw marks. It also has ninjas to fight in the middle of the table if you go to the second “launch” area, a “last chance” sort of thing where you have to try to hit a certain ramp if the HEAL things are lit up when you lose your ball, and, of course, having the fight the Sentinel, Silver Samurai and Sabertooth, each with their own “missions” and ways to activate them. Like all the tables in the game, you have 3D versions of various characters on the board, moving around and doing various things. Here, Sentinel serves as a skillshot, Silver Samurai can lock your ball and… I haven’t been able to activate the Sabertooth mission yet (yeah, I suck at pinball). It’s a fun table, and you get a TON of scoring chances here, huge bonuses when you lose you ball, so high scores should be fairly easy for most people and the ramps and targets are generally not too hard to hit.

Spiderman Table

I really like this table, because there’s actually a lot going on. You can fight Doctor Octopus, Mysterio and the Green Goblin, each has his own gimmicks. Doc Oc if just simply hitting a ramp, but the other 2 are special. Mysterio is also hitting ramps, but, in his case, your flipper controls are reversed (though your ball will constantly be saved and points can be collected REALLY fast here). Green Goblin is also hitting a ramp, but, instead of shooting him with your usual ball, a pumpkin grenade comes on the board and you have to hit him with that, but that’s not easy since he’s always moving around to different ramps. The board looks really nice as well, really having that Spidey feel to it (heck, one of the ramps has the ball coming out of spidey’s wrist, just like his web). Another really fun table. Getting high scores here can sometimes be really easy, since some ramps have given me over a million points in certain conditions.

Iron Man Table

This table isn’t too bad. There’s tons of ramps, each leading to various ways to get points, and, after dropping the 3 targets in front of Tony Stark, you can get in a hole to go to a mission. I’m not 100% sure how the mission is selected, it might have something to do with the targets in front of Whiplash and Mandarin (this board’s vilains), but I really have no idea. I think that, by doing all the missions, Ultimo can pop up in the middle of the board, but I suck at pinball so I didn’t get that yet. There’s some missions that have you shooting cannons not only at targets, but at Whiplash (and maybe Mandarin, I haven’t seen that yet) which is pretty crazy. The vortex mission is particularly awesome, it starts a vortex with 4 balls and shoots them around the board for badass multiball play. I really like this table, nice stuff and some of the animations are really nice.

Blade Table

That’s my least favorite table in the bunch. There’s fewer ramps, not a lot of targets, and some of them are way too hard to aim at. It’s not without its good things though. This one, rather than having some cool animation on the display screen, actually has mini-games on the display screen. You can buy equipment, capture vampires/doppelgangers and choose missions. I’m completely unfamiliar with Blade, but there’s this big demon-like guy that pops up when day turns to night, who you can try to defeat. Overall though, I feel like it’s just… sort of empty. Not a bad table, but definitely not the best Zen Studios have made.

Overall

All the tables are quite solid. I find that they’re a bit easier than in Zen Pinball, but they’re also really fun. There’s a few functions here like Hero Score which… I’m not sure what it does, other than giving you a point for every million points you have and multiplying it by the number of tables you’ve played, as well as giving you points for the number of points each of your friends who have played each board. Kinda weird.

A minor annoyance is huge boxes with messages popping up to tell you if you’re close to increasing your hero score or beating your current record, but it doesn’t happen THAT often.

I really like the idea of realistic physics like this in a pinball video game, because it enables you to do things you can’t do in real tables, like having the Green Goblin flying around the board, or Mandarin shooting a flamethrower at Iron Man, and various other things, so it gives them a unique feel. And the prospect of downloadable tables (seems like the next might be Ghost Rider if the voting continues as it is at marvelpinball.com) is awesome.

Bottom line: Zen Pinball was fun, this is basically the same thing but with Marvel characters. Thumbs up!

The Save Factor

The game is 10$ and includes 4 tables. When Zen Studios releases a new table, it’s always 2.50$, which is a great price. Here you get the “base” game and 4 tables for 9.99$, which is the same price as just 4 tables. Good stuff I say. Much better than spending 1000$ on a real pinball table.

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After hanging it to the ceiling and hitting it from the underside, something came out! (okay, I didn’t really do that… yet)

I’ll say that it looks pretty badass. The paint isn’t perfect, like Peach’s lips aren’t colored at all. And the plastic is a bit on the cheap side. But overall it’s a very nice little statue.

Speaking of little, this is actually fairly small. It’s a good size but… I have a 4 inch tall mario figurine that I bought earlier this year, and it’s actually as slight bit taller than this one.

Anyways, this is a pretty fun Club Nintendo reward, and I’m currently looking as to where to display it in my room…

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Well that’s a game I was not hyped for. Which is sad since I love the Castlevania franchise. I mean, I even beat Simon’s Quest. Other than a few crappy games in the series, such as… most of the 3D games (I haven’t played the ones on PS2… though I haven’t heard much good about them) and Encore of the Night, Castlevania has been one of the most solid series in the history of gaming, with incredible super-challenging side-scrolling platformers on the NES, SNES, Genesis and Turbo CD, to more exploration-based platformers on the Playstation and portable systems.

When I saw that this one was rebooting the franchise, and going for a more God of War style of combat, I couldn’t help but be very skeptical about it. The gameplay videos I’ve seen, as well as various previews/impressions have done nothing to convince me that this was not much more than a God of War game with Castlevania elements tacked-on to it.

Well, the European PSN just got a demo of the game, and I had to check it out, see if it would prove me right about what I thought the game might be like, or if it would actually prove to be awesome.

Usually, for demo impressions, I usually name what I liked about the demo and what I didn’t, but here’s I’ll go for a more standard style.

So, read on!

Combat
Well, like any other action game, if the fighting sucks, the game sucks. Ehis is the part that worried me the most, because it looked like God of War. After playing, I can say that my assumption was… sort of wrong. It’s definitely inspired by God of War, with the chain-like weapon circling your character nonstop. But it works differently. Rather than “light attack/heavy attack”, you get “Direct Attack” which aims for one enemy, and “Area Attack” which hits everything in an area in front of you, and a bit behind as well. There’s no lock-on mechanic which can make things a bit complicated, but for the most part it’s not really needed. There’s various combos to do, and more to be learned, which is potentially cool.

That Area Attack thing was what I thought would be the equivalent of the shitty “hold L1 and mash square to kill everything without effort” thing in the God of War 3 demo.  Thankfully, that’s wrong. Mashing the Area Attack button just makes you get hit. It does minimal damage and it doesn’t always make enemies flinch, so you really have to balance out when to use which attacks, and also when to dodge.

Speaking of dodging, it sort of sucks here. It’s not as bad as in God of War, where you have to use the right analog stick to dodge which is just really clumsy and unintuitive, but it’s rather weird. Here, you have to hold the L2 button, and press in a direction with the left analog stick. It’s kind of annoying not pressing a button to dodge (it worked so damn well with DMC and Bayonetta, why not copy them for dodging controls?), but I guess I could get used to it.

But the most annoying part here? Since the right analog stick isn’t used to dodge you expect it to be used to control the camera, right? Nope, there’s actually no camera control at all. That would be fine, if the camera wasn’t terrible. But here enemies come at you from directions you just can’t possibly see them coming and you get cheap hits from that, and all that because you have no camera control, or at least a good angle to view all of the action from.

Just a quick note on sub-weapons: they’re here, but I could only try one of them in the demo, and it kicked way too much ass…. the dagger dealt big damage to the big enemies, and one-hit-killed everything else. There’s limited ammo (5 daggers in the demo, though I’m guessing that can be increased), and the ammo is random drops from enemies, so you can’t overuse the things.

There’s 3 difficulty levels in the demo. I tried the “normal” difficutly and the one that’s supposed to be harder… and both difficulties were a cakewalk. There’s barely any difference between difficulties in the demo, the only differences I could find were getting slightly more damage from enemy attacks and lower sub-weapon drops. The monsters take as many hits. It was really easy, but it’s the first part of the game so maybe it’s always easy no matter the difficulty setting? We’ll see.

Just a quick note, the second part of the demo features a horse-riding sequence, and that sucked. You really just need to button-mash against the enemies’ mounts and they can’t do anything against you. It sucks and I hope there’s no more of that in the final game.

QTEs
QTEs are bad, and those are no exception. This game has 3 types of QTEs. You have “optional” QTEs, which require grabbing monsters. This is sightly better than the average QTEs, since you can press any button, as long as you time it properly (according to a special icon that works similarly to Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents). But it’s still annoying and pointless. There’s “random/mandatory” QTEs, which work like the optional ones, but only happen when the game decides it wants you to do them. Then, there’s the “mandatory” QTEs, and they’re the ones that really suck. Those are the ones that should frankly just be cutscenes. And those generally suck more since they require pressing/mashing specific buttons and they add nothing to the gameplay, just wasting your time.

Leveling
As you gain experience by killing monsters, you can buy new attack combos… that’s really all I know. I don’t know if there’s some sort of skill trees or something, but it gives a good amount of character advancement. I don’t know how deep it gets, but I really hope it does. It seemed to feature a lot of different new attacks to gain, even with sub-weapons.

Presentation
Really nice. Not much to say about this other than it looks really damn good. The graphics are nice. The monster design is classic. There’s sadly a lot of brown and grey, but thankfully colors managed to sneak in making it nice to look at. And the characters look good.

Oh, and the voice acting… well, not much is heard in the demo, but even the random villagers sounded believable and seemed like they’ve had some work put into giving them good voices… that’s just awesome.

My one complaint is the music… why does music in modern game never sound like game music anymore? Instead it sounds like movie soundtracks…. and I really don’t get it. Game music should sound like game music. I guess that even classic franchises like Castlevania (which are known for having great music) aren’t safe from having movie music instead of video game music.

Cutscenes
Not much to say about them, but there is one thing I really need to mention. There is something that a lot of modern games just don’t do when it comes to cutscenes. A lot of games just seem to never let you pause during cutscenes, which is really stupid. Most games with cutscenes will also not let you skip them, which sucks because, a lot of the time, cutscenes are just boring to watch. Well, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow gets THAT right. Not only can you pause cutscenes, but you can even skip them. Awesome.

Why is it a reboot?
Just a minor complaint, nothing to do with the demo but… why is this a reboot? Seriously, I don’t get it. It features a Belmont, and other classic Castlevania characters like Carmilla, so why can’t it be part of the Castlevania timeline? Why does every developer think that rebooting franchises that don’t need rebooting is a good idea *coughcapcomcough*? There has to be some place in the timeline where this could have fit in the series’ canon. What, did they run out of things to talk about in the current timeline? A timeline which, by the way, goes in completely weird directions all the time? Reboots should just be used if a series has been sucking recently, not when a series is still being awesome like Castlevania.

Overall
Well, I’m… sort of surprised. My expectations were stupidly low, the little that the demo lets you play is actually sort of interesting. The fighting is slightly better than I expected. It’s not as much of a button-masher as God of War, which is a good thing. But the dodging sucks, and so does the camera. The sub-weapons could be interesting if handled properly. The game seems really easy though, hopefully the full game pits you against really strong enemies.

One big problem here is that nothing in the demo seemed to have a Castlevania feel to it at all, and even the whip is actually just a long chain. They could have called the game anything else and it still would have worked. It’s not really Castlevania, but it might be an okay game anyways.

Maybe not great, and definitely not good enough to make me want to buy it, but I’m looking forward to renting it when it comes out (which is more than I could say before playing the demo). Now I’m at least willing to give it an honest chance. The demo doesn’t really make the game seem deep at all, partly because it shows basically nothing from the actual game (doesn’t show if there’s exploration, or how platforming works, or how deep the leveling can go, and various other things like the light/shadow system), so I really want to see just how deep it really is beyond the demo.

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Well, this is a moment I was quite hyped for. Finally getting the play the demo for Vanquish. One part of me is very excited for this game, and then there’s the part of me that says “calm down, it’s probably just another bland TPS”. SURE, it’s being made by Platinum games, who made the incredibly badass Bayonetta, but, on the other hand, it’s a TPS with a cover system, which has pretty much never been really enjoyable to me (too slow, too easy, rarely actually any fun to play).

Me getting excited about a TPS is all sorts of weird. Almost as weird as me getting excited about an FPS. In both cases, I usually end up being disappointed (most recent example: Singularity… Please don’t suck Bulletstorm, PLEASE), and this is why I’m being VERY skeptical about Vanquish.

So does this game follow the blandness of most TPS, or is it actually good?

Read on and see!

What I liked

Well, let’s start with the big one first: The game is actually really damn good. That was a big surprise to me.

The actual gameplay is well done. Rather than the average “take cover and kill stuff when it shows up” gameplay of modern TPS, here you rocket around the battlefield, the pace of the gameplay is just awesomely fast. While you CAN take cover to fight, it’s not the best method, and it’s very slow. Just boosting everywhere killing anything that gets in your way is not only more efficient, but it’s a whole lot more fun. There’s a lot of different ways to handle each situation as well, which makes the experience as a whole really interesting. And there’s a fun little upgrade system for your weapons too, and the HUD is really well-done (showing tons of useful info). And there’s a scoring system! Very few modern games have that unless they’re shmups, and I love getting points. The grenades are good too since you can actually throw them a reasonable distance. Oh, and I like that you can carry 3 weapons and 2 types of grenades… Still not as good as carrying all of the weapons at once like in older FPS, but it’s better than just carrying 2. Very few complaints in regards to the basic gameplay.

I love boosting around the battlefield. It’s smooth, easy to do, and it’s not unlimited so you have to gauge your use of the thing. And every other power uses your boost meter too, which really requires you to do some fast decision-making.

The bullet-time here is actually really good. I thought it would just be a lame gimmick that just doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the gameplay, but in this case it’s fun to use and incredibly useful. You get the slow-down when you’re close to die which enables you to react better to surrounding attacks (but that depletes your boost meter so it’s not really that cheap). You can also slow down time during dodges, and during boosts as well, which has tons of great uses.

I like the visual style too. It’s not incredible, but it looks really well done. It’s not just brown and gray, there’s a good array of colors here (though there’s a lot of white…. but I’ll take that over boring/overdone grey-brown ruins any day). The animation is top-notch as well, everything is fluid and fun to look at, and nicely detailed too.

OH, and something that I’m pretty happy about here: while you have unlimited continues, you are actually penalized for dying. I love that. Most modern games hold your hand so much that dying is rarely a bad thing (and sometimes it’s a good thing). Here, you are scored for your performance through a level, and you lose a bunch of points if you die.

When I first saw the controls, I thought it was way too spread out and would be tough to use. After playing around for a few minutes, I barely had any trouble with the controls. A few hiccups here and there due to awkward things (like slowing down time while boosting, it’s kinda tough to do properly). A bit of practice and any veteran gamer should have little trouble playing this.

What I didn’t like

It has QTEs. QTEs suck. Though here you don’t need to do them to kill the boss (and hopefully none of the bosses will require QTEs to kill), so it’s not as bad as in some games. And you didn’t even have to activate the QTE against the boss at all, so you might not even see it at all. But still, using QTEs is weak gameplay design and shouldn’t be here, especially when the gameplay is as solid as it seems to be here.

I don’t like that melee attacks completely use up your boost meter. It’s just annoying. And the attacks themselves are pretty pointless despite being one hit kills on standard enemies, shooting is usually a better option (since it doesn’t fully deplete your boost meter).

There’s regenerating health. I understand why it’s there… I mean, enemies are relentless and you die really fast… But why not make the enemy a bit less relentless, and/or give you a life bar and give a few health packs from random enemies or hidden on the battlefield? That would be just as good, if not better. With the regenerating health, you can basically survive anything without trouble, which kills the challenge. A health bar would force you to try harder to survive. I don’t mind the system too much, I just think a health bar would be so much better.

The weapons kinda suck. Basically just the standard FPS/TPS selection. Assault rifle, sniper, slightly slower but stronger machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, etc. And the tutorial DOES show off the “Disc Launcher”, which seems awesome… I just hope the retail version has more original weapons like that.

And I don’t really like the music. Not “video game-y” enough.

Overall

After playing the demo, I’m quite excited to play the retail version. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that either. TPS are generally pretty boring games, with their “just stay in cover and you’ll never die” gameplay with barely any action going on (and, when they try to steer away from the cover gameplay, they usually fail heavily or make things needlessly hard because the game engine isn’t built for that). This, on the other hand, plays almost like an action game rather than a TPS, which is awesome.

The gameplay is fast, the visuals are great and complement the gameplay nicely, there’s barely ever any “lag” because there’s too much going on on-screen, and it’s just a total blast to play. And I like that the cover system is kinda secondary compared to the rest of the gameplay. Yeah, I do have a few minor problems with what I saw in the demo as you can see above, but they’re nowhere near game-breaking. The good MORE than outweighs the lame here.

So yeah… I’m not cancelling my pre-order on this one. Good job Platinum Games, you have done something I thought to be impossible: making a TPS I could actually enjoy. The world must be ending soon… (yeah, technically inFamous was also a TPS that I enjoyed, but that felt more like an action-adventure game to me…)

(Note: my fastest time through the demo was 7 minutes 16 seconds… getting pretty close to that 6 minutes 12 seconds the developers did)

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Earthworm Jim, amongst the biggest badasses in the video game world. I mean, they just don’t make heroes like him anymore. Random earthworm who had a super-advanced space suit falling on him from outer space, making him a super powerful, lasergun-totting, super hero? And he can use his head as a whip? Awesome.
He hasn’t seen lots of action in quite some time (let’s just forget Earthworm Jim 3D, shall we?), but finally Jim is back and awesome as he should be.

I wanted to do a full review of this, but, well, I can’t find the motivation/originality to write a full complete review of such a classic game without sounding like a broken record. Instead, I’ll just quickly give my impressions on it, which will be a lot simpler.

Read on!

Graphics/Sounds
Like any game with “HD” in the title, this gets a graphic boost from the original. And they succeeded in making this really good looking. It keeps the same overall visual style, but the amount of detail is a lot higher than in the original. I was sort of scared that it would lose some of its original charm, but I’m happy to have been proven wrong. The sprites are a lot more detailed, you see more things on the screen, the animation is smoother and just great-looking. The backgrounds look a whole lot nicer too, which is great. The boost to the graphics is great, but the fact that they didn’t remove the original’s awesomeness in the transition is badass. While the graphics are basically the same as in the iPhone version, the much higher resolution offered by the PS3 on an HDTV just makes it look so much better.

The music also gets an upgrade. The game uses much higher quality instruments and sounds than the Genesis or SNES could produce, but they don’t change the composition of any of the game’s very memorable tracks, so while everything sounds better, it doesn’t sound different from the original, so that’s a big plus here. Like the graphics, the sound is basically the same as in the iPhone version, but much higher quality since it comes out of much higher-quality speakers than the iPhones’.

Gameplay
Maybe it’s because the Genesis has a very awkward button layout (that works well for 2-button games, but not as well for 3-button games), but I was never very good at the Genesis version (only played the SNES version once). And I could barely play the iPhone version because, let’s face it, and games requiring a d-pad and buttons just don’t work well on the platform, at all (making the iPhone version of the game terrible). On the other hand, this new version controls really well. The fact that the PS3 controller has a good d-pad and good button placement make it very easy to get into. Earthworm Jim has never been this intuitive.

The gameplay itself is solid. Running around shooting all the weird enemies (but not while you’re jumping… which I actually don’t have a problem with since the game is built around that), being able to shoot in 8 directions, picking up health and ammo for the more powerful version of the gun, platforming, using Jim’s head as a whip to hit enemies or swing from certain objects… it’s all very fun and very smooth, as it always was.

There have been some minor changes from the original version though (changes that were originally in the iPhone version). One of the funnest changes is the fact that you can actually stock up on plasma, by switching back to your normal gun with the R1 button (but you lose all your plasma ammo if you die). Some levels have new parts to them, where Jim is out of his power suit, and you have to platform through a new level up to getting your suit back, at which point you continue the level normally. And some new levels were added to the game, which you can access after completing the game.

And multiplayer was added to the game. It enables up to 4 players to traverse new levels together. Some have small puzzles which aren’t too tough to figure out, and, while they reuse graphics from other levels, the level design, while easier than the actual levels, is still very well done. I haven’t actually played it myself (well, I did go through level 1, alternating between controlling player 1 and player 2, just to see what it was like… but that doesn’t count), but I’m sure it’s pretty fun.

Overall
While most of the game takes heavily from the iPhone version (lots of the additions are in that version), it looks, sounds and controls a whole lot better. The iPhone version had the right idea for the game but, well, the iPhone sucks for any game that requires buttons… Earthworm Jim has never been this easy to control and fun to play. EJ is one of the big classics of gaming, and this remake doesn’t just do it justice, it surpasses it. It’s sadly not a sequel, but that doesn’t matter much when it’s such a great remake of the original.

I highly recommend this game. It’s fun and challenging, and it’s a game every gamer should experience at least once.

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It’s been out for a while, and I finally got around to renting it, and after quite some play time, I just can’t get into it at all, and, as such, I’ll just give my impressions on the game, and explain why I don’t really like it, or at least why I don’t feel like it lived up to its incredible potential.

Read on!

What I liked in Blur
The game isn’t without its good points. The strongest point is the concept. I mean, a whole “what if Mario Kart used real cars, and took place in the real world” idea? That’s just awesome. Lots of things in the game are very well thought out. The different types of weapons and power-ups are fun and interesting to use, the multitude of objectives for each track is fun, there’s a variety of vehicles… It’s a recipe for awesomeness.

I also actually like the graphic style. I’m not a big fan of realistic graphics, but here it’s very fun to look at because of the non-realistic elements flawlessly added to the realistc parts, everything actually looks really good. While realistic, it still looks fun and colorful. Bizarre Creations really showed their stuff with this one.

I find that the items are pretty fun to use. Other than barge, shield, lightning and repair, weapons can be shot forward or backwards, even the turbo. You have the shunt, which homes in on enemies, the bolt goes straight until it hit someone or the walls, the turbo gives you either a speed boost or stopping power to take turns easier (though you never seem to have the turbo at the right moment for that anyways), the mine can be placed right behind you or shot in front of someone for a trap, barge hits anything really close to you, lightning places “lightning domes” in front of the first place racer… the items are really fun. Sure, they’re mostly variations on Mario Kart items, other than the lightning which is quite unique, or repair, but they still a blast to use. And I like that you can store up to 3 items, really useful feature. And the fact that there’s no Bullet Bill/Blue Shell equivalent is awesome.

So I’m up to talking about what I didn’t like about the game. But before that, I didn’t mention the Fan system, which is an okay way to progress through the game, unlocking vehicles as you do various things (hitting enemies, responding to fan requests, etc.) isn’t a bad system. And, really, I should mention that Blur could have been an AWESOME game if it wasn’t for the few problems, and I can’t see why people couldn’t enjoy the game without said problems.

Why I didn’t like the game
So what’s the biggest problem with the game? Well, there’s the fact that the controls are completely horrible. It’s like they weren’t sure if they should make realistic driving controls, or more arcade-style controls, so they did a bit of both but didn’t iron them out. The cars just handle horribly. Braking barely works so you always have to brake way too much in advance to actually slow down enough to take any slightly tight turn. Basically, your car barely turns at all if you’re not going slow enough… Which makes no sense. The hand brake… sort of varies. On grippy vehicles, it just slows you down a little bit. On drifty vehicles, it makes you lose control completely. Basically, the idea is to not use the hand brake at all, even if you want to drift (just brake/let go of the gas at proper times, the chances of getting a proper drift out is a lot higher). The precision, brake timing and angle of approach basically needs to be perfect if you want to clear any curve past the first part of the career without ramming into walls.

But a game requiring perfect precision for curves really screws things up when you add weapons to the mix. So you have a tight turn, and you’re going through it perfectly… until someone shoots you in the back, making you lose control and ram into the wall. And this happens all the time since there’s almost always items before curves. It just feels really crappy when you’re following the best possible racing line in a curve and you’re shut off by someone shooting you. If the game didn’t require so much precision I’d be fine with it, but because the steering sucks, you really have to apply yourself properly to turn, and that just doesn’t work when you have mines to avoid and projectiles to get away from. Yeah, projectiles coming from the back are really tough to avoid, I only managed to avoid a few shunts by total luck (or shields/barges). You can avoid shunts if you turn at the right time, but the timing needs to be so precise it’s not even worth trying.

So after a while I started getting used to the controls. It was still not ideal, but at least I figured out how to take turns as fast as I could without ramming into walls too much (other than when I got hit by weapons). But then I ran into another problem. The CPU is kinda cheap. For some reason, no matter what car I took (though I don’t have them all unlocked), they were always faster than me. And, also, they never screw up in a curve unless they get hit by a shunt. At the beginning of the game it’s not too bad, but, as you move on, you really have to go through each track perfectly, never getting hit and never touching a wall, or you’re not winning the race.

The other problem I have is a certain element in the programming… There’s something really weird going on here. So if you hit a wall hard enough, the game resets you on the track and puts you back in the right direction, though it does make you lose a bit of time. You also reset if you lose control of the car (which makes no sense, but let’s roll with it). The problem here is that it’s actually completely random. Sometimes you’ll hit a wall hard and not reset, making you waste even more time having to get back on track. Other times you’ll hit the wall hard while boosting, getting back on track fast despite the crash since you get back lost momentum from the turbo, but it will reset you anyways. And the game will sometimes reset you when it thinks you lost control, even if you haven’t (sometimes did it during drifts for me). There’s no excuse for such bad programming, testers exist for this type of thing, right?

Overall
Well, I won’t say Blur is a BAD game, but it’s nowhere near its full potential. If Bizarre Creations had taken some extra time to iron out the controls and the few problems it has, it would have been one of the best racing game of the year probably. But, as it stands, it’s just about on par with Split/Second, another racing game that fell short from the expectations I had.

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