What did we think were the best PS3 exclusives?

Continue reading to find what our 5 winners are!

Demon’s Souls

This game is hard. But it’s also very fun and rewarding.The flawless integration of online functionalities to the single player just makes it that much better. Great gameplay, not too bad visuals, awesome difficulty that doesn’t feel cheap. This game was a big surprise to me, and everyone who played it.

inFamous

InFamous is one of those games that had a lot going for it, and accomplished most of the hype it had. Great free-running gameplay, nice visuals, combat was fun, lots of powers to play around with, and 2 distinct skill sets depending on your actions. I find that the morality system could be just a bit better, since there’s no reward for staying on the gray line between good and evil, but that might just be in the sequel, whenever that will come out.

Uncharted 2: Amongst Thieves

Uncharted 2 arguably pushes the PS3 in many more ways than anything else. With lush, vibrant greenery, beautifully rendered forgotten temples and derelict cities, the PS3 brings life to these amazing locales with ease. The lack of loading screens during gameplay and the lack of an install just go further to prove that what’s in the package is possibly the best the PS3 has to offer yet. (Thank you Wintrale for the text here)

Cross Edge

Yeah, this is a list partly made by me, so it has to have this weird choice no one agrees with, right? Cross Edge was riddled with problems. Lag, slow loading time even after the 5GB install, SD graphics and spotty voice acting at times. It was obviously made for PS2 and not optimized for the PS3. Yet, despite all those problems, it’s really fun and addictive. A great fighting system, a pretty interesting story, the power to make any team you want with a huge selection of characters, lots of customizing and various leveling systems. Anyone who wants a good RPG and can look past the few technical problems (you know, caring more about actual gameplay instead of caring about fluff) will find a really fun game here.

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time

Ratchet & Clank games are always high-quality. And this is definitely not an exception. Near Pixar-quality cinematics, great visuals, great humor, great gameplay and controls, interesting puzzles, and fun upgrade systems make this game really fun. And as the final game in the series(or so says the developer) it ties up all the loose ends well enough.

Share/Save

Apparently you can get inFamous, a fairly recent game, for 40$ less than normal retail for the next few days.

SmartCanucks reports. Please click through to their site for more details!

Also, I’ve spoken to a friend of mine that works at EBGames and he told me they were matching the price. Talk about save factor…

Share/Save

Other than that, I’ve purchased a few other titles on the DSiWare store but I wasn’t AS impressed as I was in the previous title mentioned. I tried AQUIA (AKA AQUARIO) from Art Style as well as BOXLIFE (AKA HACOLIFE). They didn’t hook me as much as PiCTOBiTS. They both have a pretty good level of difficulty in them though so if you’re in for a challenge in something that would seem like a simple game, you’ll find it there. BOXLIFE has a pixel like charm to it, which is neat.

I got a title named Mighty Flip Champs! this one has an increasing difficulty as well, but the first few puzzles are a complete walk in the park. you basically walk this super deformed girl over to her frog lover or something like that. Eventually you’ll need to gather things before you meet him. Apparently this is a game meant to be taken as a speed run type game. You want to improve your time and see just how much you can optimize out of it.

And the last title I will have a small blurb on it Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! This is a series that interested me from the beginning but I never got to play with any previous version of it. You have wind up marios that basically go forward from the time you do the first crank. They will collect coins and open the door to exit the level. It’s fairly simple. There are boss stages that are entirely different however. I didn’t get a chance to play this one too much but I will give it another chance eventually in the future.

Onto Peggle now. I’ve been playing this on my iPhone, it was a dollar a while back and I figured I’d check it out. This game is totally worthwhile. It’s exciting to play it well, when you finish a level you get an over the top congratulation. You just want to do it over and over. I finished it in a few sittings. Now I’m playing through it again and trying to get an even better score. I use the zen owl. Having the green peg upgrade from him totally rocks on non-moving stages. Also, this it totally pick up and play on the iPhone, it will save your state and allow you to resume whenever!

Enough of the Handhelds now!

I’ve sunk most of my time recently on the following titles: Team Fortress 2 (PC), Left 4 Dead (XBox360 and PC), Final Fantasy XI (Xbox 360 and PC), Demigod, Plants Vs Zombies (PC) and Prototype (Xbox360).

I’ll start by mentioning Team Fortress 2. Ever since the last patch, I’ve spent a decent amount of time playing with my friends. I like to jump classes in all my games. I have invested far more time in medic in this game however. This, for some reason is the class that’s lacking in a team most often, but in my opinion it is the most exciting and it will often make or break a team. I’ve played a decent amount of Pyro as well. This game is great. There’s just so much community love out there for it that there’s tons of youtubes out there with dubbed sound clips. The achievements are neat too. Some are clever. I got one for getting a guy to rage quit apparently. I had no idea an achievement like this existed! Here are my stats! I really don’t have any sniping skills.

Still playing Left 4 Dead on both XBox360 and PC. But mostly Xbox360. Not playing no mercy constantly is pretty nice. The fact that the Xbox version got patched up to current was very sweet a few months back. It unbroke the game, but it’s still pretty cookie cutter and you’ll use the same tactics over and over again. It’s mindless fun though and that’s what counts!

I’ve come back to an old favorite, Final Fantasy XI. I mostly play on Xbox 360 but sometimes on PC. Saving macros on the server makes everything really easy for me! I decided to level jobs I wouldn’t have even considered in the past. I dropped my goal to get Ninja to 75 (currently 65) to level other jobs. Scholar was my main goal, but I’ve kept White Mage and Red Mage at the same level. I plan to do this for as long as I can. After this is complete I may go back to melee. I’m thinking I’ll cap up my Ninja and move over to Monk. Eventually, I would like to get back into Assault/Nyzul. I’ll have to get into Limbus and Dynamis for a short while too. Einherjar is another one I’d like to try. Everything mage is semi-new to me so I like the change of pace. It’s funny how this game after so many years still stands apart from the rest of the MMOs. The cross platform aspect of it is also quite wonderful.

I’ve been playing Demigod still, less frequently though. I love this game but on the steam platform it may have flourished a bit more than on the Impulse one. The game has some pathing and balancing issues. It’s also quite annoying to play with a person with high ping as it makes the game choppy and nearly unplayable for everyone else. I also cannot play this with my friends easily.

I got Plants Vs Zombies for both me and my significant other. We both played this tons. I would have loved the progress to be saved on my Steam profile somehow. I’ve had to replay the same parts twice because I move it over to my Asus N10J (semi-nettop).

I also purchased and played through BlueBerry Garden. It’s a pretty game. I liked the music and the art but it offers no replay really. It’s cheap though so if you don’t think that’s going to hold you back go ahead! I’d also suggest And Yet It Moves. Not entirely the same thing but it’s got charm also!

Finally, I’ve been playing Prototype on Xbox360. I love this game! I don’t care about graphics, they’re more than acceptable. I’ve seen people complain about them but honestly, that’s being pretty picky. The abilities you unlock, using them and the exploration of NYC is pretty fun. I’ve gotten quite a few “orbs”. I’ve heard people complain about the difficulty but I’ve just been caught by a spike once honestly. It’s quite easy to feed off poor random innocent bystanders while doing your thing. I’ve been listening to a lot of people on destructoid talk about both these and inFamous. I believe episode 102 of Podtoid had a few people discussing these. Anyways, I’ll try and complete it this week. I believe some review will be incoming soon on behalf of Dave. Metacritics don’t do this game justice however. To me, between this and inFamous I totally prefer this one but it’s quite frankly a pretty big coin toss.

Share/Save

At first I had little interest in the title, but a little while back I got early access to the demo and I knew right away that I wanted to buy it. The demo showed interesting gameplay and overall was really fun.

So does the final game live up to the expectations I made after playing the demo?

Read on and see!

Looks and sounds
The graphics are quite good. Cole’s model looks great and the changes depending one whether you go Good or Evil are pretty nice. Other character models are average. Story characters look a bit meh (Trish looks weird, Zeke looks very fake). Pedestrians look fine. All are pretty generic, but they represent well the situation that is going on in the city. The enemies are pretty cool. Each area in the game has it’s own type of enemy. Each type of enemy has its own “generic” look, but from that basic design they manage to make a few different looks, so that they look similar but still different enough. Dustman in particular have to very interesting enemies, including garbage-made mechs. Nice.
The areas in the game are a bit on the downside. They look okay and there is SOME variety to some areas, but overall the look of the game is quite repetitive.
Graphically, the high point is the story segments made in comic book-style. They look great and stylish, and do a great job in explaining the story. The drawings are really good.

So sound-wise. Well, the gunshots are standard. The electricity sounds are great, but it would suck if they weren’t, right? The voice acting is pretty nice. Cole sounds like your regular badass, Zeke sounds like an asshole, Trish sounds like an idiot, Moya sounds strong and commanding, all like they are in the game. And the music is okay, but not memorable.

The game looks and sounds pretty good. Not outstanding, but it’s good enough.

Story
Cole, some deliveryman, is carrying a package that he must bring somewhere. Well, the package is actually some sort of bomb, and it explodes. It destroys a small part of the city, kills a bunch of people, and Cole wakes up, quite hurt but still alive, with the power to control electricity. The city is put in quarantine, there’s a big epidemic going on, and other super-beings and street gangs are screwing with the lives of people in the city.
Once Cole starts doing better, he decides to help the people in the city. After trying to get out of the quarantine area, he is asked by an FBI agent to find someone(random guy named John) and get the Ray Sphere, which is what exploded and  gave Cole his powers.

That’s pretty much it. You have to help people doing errands and stuff, find clues towards where the Ray Sphere is, find John and figure out what exactly happened. Overall the story is pretty interesting, though it does occasionally seem to just randomly go from one event to another without proper continuity. But most of the time the events make sense and the story is not too bad at all.  The characters aren’t overly likable, other than Cole, but they still carry the story along just fine.

Gameplay
As Cole, you are given a slew of electric-related powers. Lightning bolts, lightning grenades, lightning rockets, lightning ground pound of doom, lightning shield, lightning hovering powers, electricity drain, grinding on electric wires and train tracks, sensing residual energy, and other things like that. You have to use those to fight enemies, move around the city and achieve objectives.

For navigation, the most important aspect is the parkour element. The parkour element is pretty fluid. When you jump, if you’re close enough to an object you can hang on to, you will be attracted to it automatically and hang on to that object. From there you can jump off in any direction and get to whatever other place you want to go. This works really well… MOST of the time. Sometimes you’ll be chasing after someone or something and you’ll be jumping around and be latching onto things you don’t want to, or sometimes the game will forget to register that you’re supposed to latch on to something and you’ll just fall to the ground. But overall it’s not too hard to get where you want. The only problem is that you can climb on almost everything in the game… EXCEPT chain-link fences. HE can climb up buildings without trouble, but he can’t climb on a chain-link fence, which even I could climb on? This makes no sense.

The combat is fairly simple. You have projectile attacks, area of effect attacks and melee attacks. Most enemies are vulnerable to head shots, but still go down in a few normal hits. Some enemies have shields, some of normal machine guns, others have rocket launchers and grenades, some(called Conduits) have super-powers just like Cole (but they’re pretty weak anyways). There’s a nice variety of enemies, but most are dealt with the same way. Each battle is a bit different though, as the situations frequently change. Some times there’s turrets everywhere, sometimes there’s different kinds of enemies making the available strategies different. But overall it’s pretty fun to fight Reapers/Dustmen/First Sons.
Cole is a bit on the weak side though, as his health goes down really fast. You can get back health, as well as energy used to do certain attacks, like grenades, by draining electricity from surrounding electric-powered objects, and if there’s a downed enemy you can leech of their energy to fill yourself up.

Missions are the beef of the game. There’s story missions and side-missions. Story missions obviously advance the story. Side-missions give EXP and free areas in the city, making enemies less likely to attack you in those areas. Side-missions are pretty varied. Finding stuff hidden in the city, removing security devices, killing a bunch of enemies,  and various other things. There’s also some side-missions based around the whole “good/evil” aspect of the game. Doing one of those cancels out the opossite mission (so doing a good mission removes an evil mission). Story missions also have some variety. Some involve getting through enemy bases, or destroying planes and getting info from them, or fighting bosses… There’s more than enough variety there too.

The big element in the game that’s been talked about was the choice between good and evil. Well, I found that this element was over-hyped. There’s never a grey line between the choices, it’s always either good or evil. When you start the game, you have to decide whether you’ll be good or evil. Because being “neutral” is completely useless. You don’t get any “neutral” powers, and it just makes it impossible to upgrade your character beyond better defense and melee attacks. You need quite a dedication to the side you chose, because sometimes you get lower/higher karma for weird reasons. Once you get to Hero or infamous though, you can pretty much do what you want. Doing something evil as a Hero will lower your karma, of course, but healing a couple people will get you back on track within seconds.
Depending on your choice, you will get different powers… kinda. What you actually get is different effects for the same powers. It can be quite interesting. Good is better against single enemies, while Evil does more widespread attacks. So the choice does have an effect on gameplay.
Story-wise the choice is pretty pointless, by the way, other than a small scene at the end. Really, I just hoped to see more than just pure evil or pure good, and have different powers and story progression depending on all your overall actions instead of just a number of points given to either the good or evil side and the highest number of points decide if you’re good or not…. I do like that the look of the city changes depending on your karma though, that’s a nice touch.

The upgrade system is not too bad. Each time you rank up in the good or evil side, you get access to a new set of upgrades for most of your skills, and with the experience you get from missions and fights, you can buy those upgrades. Upgrades range from increased range to bigger area of effect to completely different things althogether. The normal lightning attack, on the good side, can be upgraded to increase your health and energy when you hit, for example.
The upgrade system isn’t overly deep, but at least it works. And if you somehow lose a rank, you also lose access to powers that require that rank. So it makes you stay on the path oyu took.

Glitches
There’s a big problem with the game though. It was NOT thoroughly tested. At all. It should’ve stayed in testing for another month or 2, just to find all the glitches and correct them. Here’s a few examples.

I’m climbing the prison. I get to a small part in the corner of the wall, and suddenly the camera starts turning on its own.
In one mission, I’m chasing after and enemy, and Cole just starts running in circles on his own out of nowhere.
After a certain “protect the police station” on Warren, there was a downed policeman. I go to heal him, since I was doing a Good run. Well, when he’s healed, all the other cops aroundd start shooting at him like he’s a bad guy. When he’s down, they stop shooting. If I heal him again, they shoot him again.
Police randomly starting to shoot at civilians is seemingly pretty common, even though they shouldn’t be doing that.
In one of the prison missions, I had 1 dustman left to kill, and but he was stuck behind chain-link fence and there was no way to hit him, no matter what I tried, so I had to suicide and start that part again.
I had times where I passed through buildings and got stuck in them.
Once I found a reaper and he was doing the “getting hit” animation, but he was stuck in that animation, despite me never attacking him.

There’s probably more. I heard of people falling through the ground, stuff like that. It’s a shame too. And the fact that it can be patched is not a good excuse. Not when the game is as glitchy as this one.

Overall
The gameplay is incredibly good, some of the most fun I’ve had on the PS3, and there’s enough variety to make it feel not TOO repetitive, and there’s some challenge to be had with some missions and battles. The story is interesting enough, and the good-evil thing adds some replay value.

This is a great game on the PS3, one of its best exclusives I’d say, and there’s little reason not to like it. At least give it a rent, but I say it’s well worth buying full price. The only thing making it a bit lame is the incredible amount of glitches, which SHOULDN’T be in such a well-made game.

Share/Save

Instead, let’s get hyped for next month!

With a few interesting releases… Well, it could be a fun month, we’ll see. For now, let’s look at the releases for each system!

The multi-platform games are at the bottom of the list, and the japanese import games will have (JAPAN) written next to the titles.
And slightly bigger boxart sizes for the more interesting games O_O

Read on!!!

DS

Desktop Tower Defense
Originally a fun little flash game, now becomes a DS game. It was a fun little time-waster, so it’s probably gonna be no more than that on the DS either.

Puchi Puchi Virus

This game was supposed to come out a long time ago, sometime last year, but it never did(despite the ROM being leaked). Well, now it’s actually coming. A fun little puzzle game published by Nippon Ichi Software America. Souldn’t be too bad.

Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Stardust Accelerator: World Championship 2009

It’s Yu-Gi-Oh… Not much more to say. If you like children’s card games and don’t have a yu-gi-oh game on DS yet, this will be worth checking out.

Naruto Shippuuden: Ninja Council 4

I had it last month, but I guess it was pushed back. I don’t have very high expectations for this, but it’s probably gonna be a bit fun for Naruto fans.

Steal Princess

I don’t know… It’s published by Atlus so it’s pretty sure to be rare fast, and the trailer on youtube makes it look not too bad.

Gyakuten Kenji (JAPAN)

A must for Phoenix Wright fans. In this one you play as prosecutor Miles Edgeworth. But considering the type of game it is, it’s probably not gonna be possible to play if you don’t know japanese.

A Witch’s Tale (JAPAN)

This was supposed to come out some time last year in the US, but the developpers randomly decided to change the game’s genre(from an Action RPG to a normal RPG) and, of course, they pushed back the release. It’s now coming to japan, so the US release should be coming in not TOO long…

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (JAPAN)

It’s Kingdom Hearts… And the 3 seconds of gameplay I saw last year looked pretty good, so this should be interesting.

PSP

Patapon 2

Budget priced, and just now it was announced to POSSIBLY be downloadable only(despite them still shipping the game with boxes…). A bit random, but whatever. The first game was apparently really fun, so this one should be just as good.

Bleach: Heat the Soul 6 (JAPAN)

A fighting game with Bleach characters, and the sixth in the series. I’ve only had… around 10 minutes of experience with that series, so I don’t know if it’s really good, but it must be doing something right if it went up to 6 games in the series (hopefully that “something right” isn’t just “being about Bleach”…)

PS2

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon

AKA game with uselessly long title. Not familiar with the “Devil Summoner” sub-series, but it should be interesting enough.

Secret Agent Clank
(yeah, it’s the PSP boxart, probably won’t change for the PS2 version)
Another PSP game gets ported on the PS2. A good option if playing it on the PSP isn’t possible…

Wii

New Play Control! Donkey Kong Jungle Beat
(japanese boxart, expect the same thing for the US boxart)
Another “New Play Control” game, this time it’s Donkey Kong taking center stage. Be ready for some random Wiimote Waggling! >_>

Klonoa

Klonoa was a fun game originally, and the remake should also be really fun.

Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus

More Guilty Gear! Another version of XX. This time, from what I’ve read, Kliff and Justice are back, and there’s a bunch of random balance fixes and tweaks.

Punch-Out!!

It’s Punch-Out, but this time with Multi-player and awesome graphics! Should be badass enough.

Boom Blox Bash Party

Didn’t play the first Boom Blox and frankly I have no interest, but this should be a pretty popular game…

Xbox 360

Raiden Fighters Aces

A compilation of Shoot ‘em ups. Seems pretty fun from the videos I checked. The only interesting 360-exclusive release for the month of May.

PS3

Cross Edge

Finally! Looks to be a really fun RPG with characters from Disgaea, Darkstalkers, Ar Tonelico, some other random stuff, and some new characters. The Battle mechanics look fun, so this could be worth looking into.

inFamous!

It was just announced that it was pushed up one month, coming near the end of May, and it looks really fun. If interviews about the game are to be believed, everything that LOOKS climbable is, and the lightning powers look cool. Should be a very interesting release!

PC

Crysis: Maximum Edition

It’s Crysis… Not much more to say.

Plants vs. Zombies

Zombies are quite overused recently, but whatever. Seems like a little tower defense game where you place various types of plants to kill zombies.

Multi-Platform Games

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (PS3/360/DS/PSP/PC/Wii/PS2)

This looks like it could be pretty fun. Expect much lamer version on PS2/PSP/DS/Wii, but it should be really good on PS3 and 360. The PC version is the “uncaged” edition, and I have no idea what’s different about it. If it’s well optimized (not like that lame PC version for the latest Spiderman game), it should at least be playable. Oh, and you can have the classic yellow-blue outfit, awesome

Bionic Commando (PS3/360)

The gameplay videos for this are really not convincing me, but this will at least be a rental. The ue of the robot arm might be good, and the gunplay looks… just about as good as in any third-person shooter.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel (PS3/360)

Didn’t like the PC version much, but if you liked the first game, you should like this one too.

Left 4 Dead (Game of the Year Edition) (PC/360)

Not really a big release. All it includes is the game with all the patches up until now and the free DLC already on the disc. Nothing special… But if you don’t have L4D yet, it’s well worth checking out.

Terminator Salvation (PS3/360/DS/PSP/PC/Wii)

Well… the latest trailer was vastly unimpressive… Maybe it’s because so many games lately are third-person shooters that all play the same?

Share/Save