Topic: Rate The Last Game You Played

[broodwars]

I always thought Goldeneye was better played using the Classic Controller Pro.

As did I.  It's just easily the more comfortable of the control options for me.  Anyway...

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - A decent P&C Adventure game that translates...ok...to Dualshock 3 control.  The puzzles aren't as amusing as they were in the first game, and if you're going to play this game I highly suggest using a walkthrough.  It's just really hard to take a look at any given screen and tell what you can and can't interact with, and many of the puzzles are maddeningly obtuse and nonsensical.  The writing is as amusing as ever, though the ending is just bizarre.

Deus Ex Human Revolution - I never played the first Deus Ex (and I never will), but I did play Invisible War and thought it was a pretty decent game.  Playing this game, though, I feel like I just did play the first Deus Ex.  It's a very good game, but that comes with some huge caveats.

First off, this game advertises itself as a game where the player is always free to decide how to tackle a given situation.  However, the game puts an absurd emphasis on stealth, and it showers XP upon players who do so.  Sure, you can just shoot guys in the head and essentially play the game like a 1st person shooter, but when you can obtain 50 XP from taking a guy down non-lethally in melee combat (with additional 250 and 500 XP objective bonuses for not being seen and never triggering an alarm) and a maximum of 20 XP from taking a guy down with a lethal headshot, 9/10 players are going to go the stealth route.  If you throw a gamer a purely mathematical situation, most gamers are going to go the route the benefits them the most.  There's no reason whatsoever to play this game like a traditional FPS, so the combat option might as well not exist.

Another extension of this is in the hacking.  Apparently, no one in this entire universe can remember their computer passwords, so the thorough player will clog their logbook with a sea of codes they'll never use.  Why?  Because you can get 25-125 XP (plus cash and XP bonuses from the mini-game) simply hacking the terminals, and hacking is not difficult.  The developers also apparently thought players love reading emails, because there's a ridiculous number of them in the game and 99% of them are useless fluff.  And because 99% of them are useless, most players will never read any emails after a while because they are so tedious, and there's interesting story stuff hidden in the garbage.

What this all leads to is a tedious amount of repetition that builds to the breaking points towards the end of the game.  While you do acquire upgrades that change how you can progress through an environment and the level design is really good, most players are probably just going to do the same things in every environment because it's how the game conditions them to act.  Simply put, if you don't like playing stealth, don't play Deus Ex HR because there's nothing for you here.

Another issue I have with the game is that the sidequests are both pathetically weak and few in number.  They are neither memorable nor particularly difficult, and I had several as well that broke due to bad coding (thankfully, various internet forums guided me to where I was supposed to go in the quest, and the quest fixed itself).  The game looks alright with an interesting art style, but it does get tiresome towards the end and there is really very little environmental variety.  The voice acting is decent, with some performances better than others but it's all pretty flat overall.

Overall, a good game that's getting a bit more of a pass from the media than it deserves.  I still think it's very much worth playing, but only if you're willing to play the game its way rather than your own.

[Ymeegod]

Finished up a few games:

Quick reviews:  Mafia 2 (PS3)--good when's you're in quest mode but the game lacks alot of side-missions for an open gameworld.  The driving is a bit stale and you'll be wasting lots of time just driving extra distances just to start quests.  Still it's decent and it's the best you'll get to an Godfather game.

8/10

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow(PS3) --it's a great reboot of the series and it's copies alot of modern day action games like GoW.  Good pacing for the most part (it's only a couple hours long) and I loved the story, especially the ending which leaves you drooling for the next installment (hopefully there is one).

Another 8/10

And lastly there's Infamous 2 (PS3)--it really does have a faster feel to the game as other's mentioned but I wished there was more compeling side missions.  The ending boss was such an letdown.  Not sure if I'm going replay to get the evil-powers and I never did any of the UGC levels.

An 8.5 for this one.

[broodwars]

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare (DLC) - When this DLC shipped last year, it was truly astonishing how many people lost their **** over this DLC pack, so much so that it was actually shipped as its own standalone game on disc.  So after all that hype (and after getting my RDR disc back from the friend I loaned it to), I finally sat down and played through it.  Wow, what a letdown.  There isn't a single aspect of this DLC that is above-average.  The missions are lame and extremely lacking in objective variety, most just generic fetch quests all over the damn map.  And speaking of which, this DLC was a great opportunity for Rockstar to really cut loose and just fill the game world with cool stuff to see and do, to really play up the tongue-in-cheek spookiness they were obviously trying to go for.  But no, the game world is just as barren and empty as before (and just as much of a snore to slowly cross on horseback), if not even more so because so many of the towns are destroyed and/or overrun by the Undead.

That leads to the gunplay, with the big change this time around being that you have to shoot the Undead in the head or they'll just get back up again.  But because the default aiming difficulty (Casual) just aims for the head anyway, that changes precisely nothing.  It's not like you'd want to individually aim anyway, considering the undead can irritatingly mob you swarms of around a dozen or so.

"But surely the trademark Rockstar wit and clever writing with the story make up for all that, right?"  Eh, no...not really.  There are some attempts are dark humor in some of the sidequests, but they are so predictable the punch line is worn out well before it's triggered.  And the story itself is not particularly interesting, and it features no interesting twists or turns.

In the end, Undead Nightmare has a fair amount of content, enough to justify my $5 sales purchase anyway.  The problem isn't that the content is bad, just that it isn't altogether noteworthy (especially in contrast to the two other big pieces of DLC released last year: Mass Effect 2's "Lair of the Shadow Broker" and Bioshock 2's "Minerva's Den").  If all you want is an excuse to roam around New Austin shooting zombies by the dozens, well you're in luck because that's just about all this DLC knows how to do.  It feels cheap and a little lazy, with quite a few missed opportunities and obvious signs of budgetary constraints.  Pick it up if you can find a good sale price.  Otherwise, you're not missing much.

[UltimatePartyBear]

Homefront (Single player) 4 horrifying war crimes out of 5.  This game obviously wants to be Modern Warfare, but I think it's actually a better game.  The story is easier to relate to, leaving aside the massive suspension of disbelief required to accept North Korea both making a huge economic turnaround and remaining a belligerent jerk (and that's all I'll say about anything political).  Staying with one player character helps the story a lot, even if he is a typical video game mute even when it makes no sense for him to stay silent ("I'm not dead!" might have been helpful to share with the others at one point, but at least that didn't last long).  There are a lot of interesting details in the story, like the American born Korean on your team facing some rather unkind remarks and the aforementioned war crimes.  Early on, there are so many children crying amidst the carnage that it was honestly a little difficult to deal with.  Most games shy away from involving children in violence.  Half Life 2 wrote kids entirely out of the setting, and MW simply doesn't ever show kids even when there logically should be kids around, such as the infamous airport level in MW2 (not that I wanted to see kids there).  So props to Homefront for taking that extra step to drive home the horrors of war, and here's hoping I never see it again, even virtually.

This game also drives home the war by using product placement.  Among others, there's a major battle at a Tiger Direct store, and a White Castle features prominently in another.  I have to admit that it made the game seem more realistic than it would if the store had a lame faux brand name, but I'm still cynical enough to cringe at any product placement.  Not that I can figure what Tiger Direct gets out of having their store burned down in the game.

Control wise, there's not much to say about the on foot action but that I found it much easier to get head shots than in MW.  Almost laughably so at times.  The helicopter level was problematic near the beginning, but fortunately you don't have to be as good at flying as the game tells you to be.  For example, you don't have to "hold it steady" to let your friends jump to a moving vehicle; just zip in close enough and hit your use key.  That gave me fits until I figured it out.  Fortunately, it's virtually impossible to actually crash the thing.  Most of the problems come from the helicopter controls being simplified in the single player campaign, I think, but I haven't tried them in multiplayer.

Like MW, the other characters ask quite a lot of the player character.  I didn't feel like it was quite as bad as MW in that regard, but considering they only recruited you because you're a former USMC helicopter pilot, and a huge part of their plan requires a helicopter, they use you to do a few too many of the really dangerous things.  One notable part involves climbing into a church's bell tower to do some sniping so they can sneak through an area.  This involves you killing about a dozen guys all on your own just to reach your perch, and then while they hold the position you helped them stealthily reach, you have to run a gauntlet of bad guys to catch up with them.  Not that any modern FPS ever makes much sense, what with the player character being the only one who can do much of anything violent even though he can't operate a door knob.

Overall, though, I can only really fault the game for feeling a little short.  It really isn't all that short (again, compared to MW), but the ending is so sudden that it makes the game feel shorter, I think.  It's a really good MW clone, essentially.

[Lithium]

Goldeneye Wii

It's pretty much call of duty with a james bond spin to it, the controlls are pretty nice but the AI on the final boss gimped, he was basically running into the wall while i shot him point blank with a shotgun. The graphics are pretty much late era Ps2 level (and on online multiplayer it looks like early ps2 era), but thats to be expected for third party games on the wii. This was a good effort overall, so the development team gets some points out of me for actually trying to make a decent shooter on the wii. Get this game for the single player because the online multiplayer is pretty weak imo, but thats more the fault of nintendo wifi connection than the actual game.

6.5/10

[Ymeegod]

Quick reviews:

Dragon's Age 2 (xbox 360)--rushed job, there's only a couple of levels and a few of them are just mirror images of others making so for the 40+ hour of gameplay you're just going be replaying the same levels again and again;  the new combat system works ok but there's alot of skills that are now worthless, the ai is dumbed down and barely use any skills minus the bosses, and the main plot is thrown together with chapters missing== like you get the cliff notes edition instead of the whole thing.

It's not a bad game but it really lacks the shine Bioware usually delivers and it just feels like EA forced them to finish this in a year.  Hopefully the same fate doesn't happen to ME3. 

An 7.5 out of ten.

L.A. Noire (PS3)

Nice story and I loved the plot but the game suffers on the gameplay.  For one it's open-world but for the most part it's just a big empty city (god I say that often about these games).  What's the point wasting time driving?  Lucky Rockstar fixes this by having your AI partner drive you to points instead which I would recommend.  As for the CSI bit--it really doesn't allow you to form your own clues/fieldwork and for the interviews it's down to just eyes.  They could have some guy twitch or sweat or something but it mostly came from where the eyes where pointing and if they blinked. 

Flat 7.  Great story but boring gameplay.

Vanquish (Xbox 360)--very by the books FPS.  Had some interesting weapons like the lock-on laser but it was so underpowered--it was level 5 and it still couldn't kill the weakest of enemies with all 4 beams?  Some of the bosses had one-hit killshots that were a bit cheap and there wasn't much in terms of level design. 

And of course you'll get the cliff-hanger-ending which I really don't see them continuing considering the poor sales. 

A disappointing 6/10.

[Lithium]

Metroid: mother M

I was lucky enough to find this for $10 new so i thought ok what do i have to lose?
the story.the dialogue.the voice acting....
 

 
why did they think this was a good idea?

[oohhboy]

Just finished playing Homefront. Party Bear is pretty much on the money for most part. The Story is pretty ok until the last act where any sense of grounding it has built up goes right out the window. You also have to make absolutely massive leaps of faith to allow for the whole North Korean invasion scenario given the ridiculous number of hoops and hand waving needed that would even make Tom Clancy blush. War crimes are left, right and center. Although I was surprised the NKs didn't just burn down the country from the start given the stupid amount of resources needed to run the labour camps compared to razing everything.

The Helicopter is bugged, you can't change your altitude it you have a joystick plugged in. Otherwise it's fine, although it is absurdly resilient. Shooting from a Humvee is terrible since at no time does not-John Conner ever drive smooth enough to get a clean shot at anything other than a very broad side of a barn. I keep thinking "Let the women drive, she can't be worse than you".

The scripting also breaks a lot forcing a restart from the last checkpoint whenever you "regroup" to kick down a door. The set pieces and level design is better than MW2. Better diversity, more "fair"(Eg MW2 Brazil levels) and more interesting.

There are less guns than MW2, but there is a strange design decision where you can only get ammo for your gun from the exact same type right down to the mods. Which means you can have some M16/M4 variant but not get any ammo even though they all share a common mag and calibre across the family unless you find your exact variant, which is made worse by the very low ammo count. It means you will be doing a lot of New York reloading.

It's an amusing short game, but the whole COD style FPS sub-genre is as stale as last years bread no matter who makes it or what story it might have. If must get a COD like fix, sure, why not, otherwise your only pretty much only here for the War Crimes.

I rather go play more SWAT 4.

[UltimatePartyBear]

Just want to say that the scripting never broke on me, and I didn't even notice the ammo thing.

[Lithium]

just finished "dont take it personally babe, it's just not your story"

terrible name, but awesome game. If you're familiar to the pheonix wright style of storytelling (ie: a visual novel) then it wont be such a leap for you. This game features excellent writing and extremely realistic, 3 dimensional characters. It centres around John Rook a highschool teacher and the students in his literature class. You'll deal with high school drama and whatnot. It's not really a game but a visual novel. This game also makes me glad that im not in highschool anymore and decided to stay away from facebook XD yes i realise that the author basically made an argument for social media and that erosion of privacy isnt nescesarly a bad thing but that doesnt mean i have to agree

10/10

this is a free game and you can download it here

[broodwars]

If anyone actually reads these things, they might remember that I played Resistance 2 a while back and suffice it to say I wasn't a fan despite liking the premise.  So Resistance 3 is now upon us, and despite some reservations I decided to check it out.  Having finished the Single-player campaign and a few multiplayer matches, I can say I like this game a LOT better than Resistance 2, though it's still a problematic game.  First off, the Single-player campaign is generally well-done and well-paced (though some parts of the game do drag a bit through repetition), with plenty of "downtime" to balance out the high-intensity firefights.  As for the story, the macro story about Joseph's journey to NYC is told decently in the sense of A->B->C progression, but his personal story regarding him missing his family after leaving them comes off as cheesy and tacked-on rather than earnest.  The atmosphere is very nice and oppressive, though, with a very real sense that humanity is about to become extinct.  There's also an odd disparity between the start of the game, where your characters are terrified of a squad of Chimeran footsoldiers, and the end of the game, where your character single-handedly takes out entire armies.  And while this game does seem to close the book on the Chimeran invasion of Earth, the way it does is...goofy and contrived.

The weapons are as fun as ever, if less interesting in some respects this time to some of the ones in Resistance 2.  And taking a page from the Ratchet & Clank games, the weapons level-up and acquire new abilities the more you use them.  Since you can carry them all at once now with a weapon wheel (as opposed to Resistance 2's 2-weapon approach), there's lots of room for experimentation now and it works out well.  The new graphics engine looks very lovely as well (especially the lighting...wow, it looks nice), though human characters still fall on the ugly side of the uncanny valley.

Unfortunately, the game's a bit buggy, even after 2 650+ MB patches released in the game's first week.  This game has a thing for NPCs having to open doors for you, and several times in the game I ran into issues where they just wouldn't so I had to reload my save.  I've been blown through the environment a few times, as well as seen the screen split and go white without crashing.

Then there's the multiplayer, a feature I usually don't bother with but decided to try this time.  Good god, is this game's multiplayer broken, both from a design and technical perspective.  There is no level-based match-making that I could find, and this is a game that starts Level 1 players off with the worst weapon in the game.  Given that level-ups reward veteran players with more and better weapons/perks, beginning players are at a LUDICROUS disadvantage without a way to battle just each other.  You're lucky if you can score 1 kill out of every 4-5 deaths, and that's a major turn-off for me (especially since most higher-level players have the Rossmore shotgun and bullet-proof shields, which are extremely overpowered).  And then there are the multiplayer bugs.  I've had games randomly terminated by network issues, games terminated because the game thought my game in progress was already over 4 minutes after I joined, and major lag that makes the experience borderline-unplayable.

Overall, a great single-player game, but right now a lousy multiplayer game with major design issues even if you can get past the horrible technical issues.

[lolmonade]

Quick reviews:

L.A. Noire (PS3)

Nice story and I loved the plot but the game suffers on the gameplay.  For one it's open-world but for the most part it's just a big empty city (god I say that often about these games).  What's the point wasting time driving?  Lucky Rockstar fixes this by having your AI partner drive you to points instead which I would recommend.  As for the CSI bit--it really doesn't allow you to form your own clues/fieldwork and for the interviews it's down to just eyes.  They could have some guy twitch or sweat or something but it mostly came from where the eyes where pointing and if they blinked. 

Flat 7.  Great story but boring gameplay.

I rented L.A. Noire when it came out.  My wife and I had a lot of fun playing together much like we did for Heavy Rain, but like that game, the replay value is severely limited.  You're right that the driving, chasing people down, gun shooting, and fighting in general are somewhat pointless.  They just seem like they were tacked on for "variety" sake, and it feels disjointed when it transitions from investigation to action.  One of the coolest little touches was the ability to switch off the color.  The first sequence my wife was commenting that if it were really a Noire game, that it would be black & white, and I joked that maybe there was an option.  low and behold, there was! 

My biggest complaint is the story.  Not because it's bad, but a few missteps sour the experience.  I won't go in details, but in the story they allude to certain happenings that come to a head mid-way through that made me really care less about what happens to the main character.  If they handled the storytelling better, I could have had more sympathy towards what was happening, but the way they go through this particular story arc pulled me out of the story a bit.

Synopsis: A fun diversion, but the style of the game and a craving for an investigative game will be what keeps you going through this game, not the storyline or action sequences.

[UltimatePartyBear]

NES Open Tournament Golf.  I hate this game, so why can't I stop playing it?  It's full of numbers with relationships I don't understand.  I feel like Gabe trying to play the weather.

Also, I hate hate hate that golf pro who keeps telling me "Try to play well."  YA THINK?  He's got to be a zombie, because there's no way someone so annoying has never been murdered.


Edit: Am I the only one who hears "We've got stacks and stacks of letters" in the music?  Does Letterman even still do that segment?

[Ceric]

I have yet to hit the ball in that game.

[KDR_11k]

Vanquish (Xbox 360)--very by the books FPS.  Had some interesting weapons like the lock-on laser but it was so underpowered--it was level 5 and it still couldn't kill the weakest of enemies with all 4 beams?  Some of the bosses had one-hit killshots that were a bit cheap and there wasn't much in terms of level design. 

And of course you'll get the cliff-hanger-ending which I really don't see them continuing considering the poor sales. 

A disappointing 6/10.

Odd, I seem to recall the laser killing the basic enemies with one shot on hard (i.e. four in one volley) but it's been a while. It's the bigger enemies that take countless shots to kill. Back when I played it I liked the gun that shot large orbs through cover and killed enemies on the other side but now that I've played Space Marine I like the meltagun more than that (like a shotgun that vaporizes everything in its range).

[broodwars]

After Platinum-ing both Killzone 3 and Resistance 3 (Plats 42 and 43), I went back and played through Prince of Persia: Warrior Within HD via the PS3 Collection.  Overall, while I still like the game as a whole and thought it did some clever (if confusing) things with its story and improved the combat as a whole, I still came away from the game really annoyed with it.  The amount of backtracking through the same areas in the game is ridiculous, even if you know where you are going (and given that the game is not very good at telling the player where to go, that's unlikely for first-time players).  Over time, fatigue just sets in and the game becomes tedious to play through, especially as enemies become more and more sheer damage sponges capable of withstanding an obscene amount of sword swings from your most powerful blade.

The other aspect of the game that makes it incredibly tedious is one that commonly gets the most derision, and that is the game's tone.  Godsmack's music may very well be the worst thing that ever happened to the franchise, and the ridiculous amount of T&A in the game really made Ubisoft look desperate back in the day.  I suppose I can't fault them too much because their strategy worked and raised enough sales to justify the far, far, FAAAAR superior successor Two Thrones (my personal favorite game of the trilogy).  Still, it's embarrassing seeing the lows the game will stoop in places to get those sales, though it did inspire one of my favorite Penny Arcade comics ("I BURN with generic rage!").

On a technical side, Warrior Within HD holds up a LOT better than the HD Sands of Time.  Textures look good, audio is much more audible (though still a little muffled), and there are some bugs from the GameCube version I didn't see here.  For instance, on the GCN version I often saw the Dahaka's tentacles reappear in areas I had to retread.  HOWEVER, I also some some new ones in this version, including one very nasty early game-breaking bug where loading my save caused the game to load me as the Sand Wraith.  I had the Wraith's health-drain and sand tank regen, and this bug caused a game-breaking glitch where the Dahaka did not appear in an area to break a wall so I could proceed, forcing me to restart the entire game (thankfully, that glitch only appeared early in the game and I never saw it again).  The music still cuts out all the time for no conceivable reason, though that may be a godsend in a game with a soundtrack this bad. 

In the end, Warrior Within retains its crown as the buggiest Prince of Persia game I've ever played, though it's still not a bad one.  The game tries too hard to be "edgy" and "adult", but the story is legitimately good and the PoP gameplay is as solid as ever.

On to far greener pastures with Two Thrones HD, which so far is easily holding up the best of the 3 games in the collection.

[Ymeegod]

Finished a couple of more 11' games and here's the quick reviews:

Shadows of the Damned (Xbox 360)--it's another Suda 51 game so expect alot of crude humor which I love.  Weapns with names like Big Boner, animations with you dying holding on to your torch, even a stage with portals through asschecks, it's all screams Suda's name.  It's a solid third person shooter with limited weapons (you only get 3 but they upgrade) that can be finished in 5-8 hours.  It does have a couple of old 8bit side stroller stages that drag on for a bit.  Decent game to rent but there's little replay value so can't recommend anyone to buy this one for $60.

6/10

Dungeon Seige III (PS3)--it's another loot-fest hack and slash.  While it doesn't do anything that we haven't seen before it does a nice job of spicing up the combat with defending button.  Instead of just hacking away you can now dodge and block if you time it right.  Also your mana doesn't auto-charge, you have to attack for it to go up and there's no potions at all in the game.  The AI partner does a good job at getting to you to relieve you and that's a plus but you can't control him/her at all, which is kinda lame.  Since you can't control your one and only ally, your stuck playing the entire game as one class?  Wouldn't have been great if you can mix it up a little just by trying the different classes (there's four).   

The plot is decent enough but the developers never did get the characters any depth.  The story changes a bit depending on your actions but I think you'll only get deeds (you recieve bonuses to your stats) for doing good which means if your evil your going get nothing for it at all.  My gripe about these types of dungeon crawlers is the game's viewed at a damned 45 degree angle downwards.  Meaning you'll get to see alot of floors and little else. 

7/10

Crysis 2 (Xbox 360)--great FPS with a crappy storyline.  Your main character can't talk or respond so he might as well be an machine because all he does is follow orders from anyone that gives them.  Crytek needs authors--hell I wouldn't even call this a B movie script--it's that bad.  Still the blowing up sh!t part with tons of weapons with dozens of custom parts is a blast. 

8/10 

[broodwars]

So now we come, at last, to Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones HD (via the PS3 collection), Ubisoft's grant apology for Warrior Within.  This was my favorite game in the trilogy on the GameCube, but is it still? Well, let me put it this way: I played through this entire game 3 times in the span of 72 hours for the Platinum (#44), and if I didn't have so many other games to play I'd happily play it again.  I can't say that about Warrior Within, which I still have to play 2 more times for its Plat.

If Warrior Within was Ubisoft making all the wrong choices with the series' formula, Two Thrones was Ubisoft making all the right ones.  The tone is back to the "Arabian Nights"-style of whimsy; the Prince is back to being voiced by Yuri Lowenthal; once-tedious combat is supplemented by the very enjoyable "Speed Kill" system (still one of the best implementations of QTEs in a game, as it combines the series' platforming and combat into something actually fun); and progression is nice and fast once again.  In fact, quite possibly more than anything else, what I love about this game is emphasis on momentum, on constant movement and progression.  The story also nicely wraps up the rather convoluted Sands of Time storyline in a very fitting manner that was probably considered quite risky at the game's release.

I really only have a few major complaints with this game: first, this is a problem in the entire Sands of Time trilogy, but Two Thrones really could have used a much wider color palette than shades of brown and yellow.  This would be rectified with the 2008 HD Prince of Persia, but it does get tiresome here.  This version of the game is also based on the PS2 version, which seems to have some graphical features inexplicably missing (such as a sunset that is supposed to occur at the end of the game during a major sequence).  Unfortunately, I also had some major crashing issues with this game on the Trilogy Collection when trying to either load the game's menu or load into game.  That shouldn't deter anyone from playing this game who hasn't already, but you should be aware that Two Thrones has these issues native to the PS3 disc version.

[broodwars]

So after all these years, I finally had a chance to sit down and play through ICO via the Ico & Shadow of the Colossus HD Collection.  I'm sorry because I know this game is so beloved to so many people, but I definitely did not enjoy this game.  Good god, this game has so many mechanical and instructional issues.  First off, this game's camera is one of the worst I've ever seen in a 3rd person game, as it's fixed and set at a far distance from the player character.  You can pan the camera a bit and temporarily zoom-in on your character, but otherwise you are at the whim of a camera that likes to hide important details and doorways where they aren't easily seen, as well as making many jumping-based puzzles incredibly frustrating and tedious.

The less said about the tedious; stiff; and bare-bones combat (which makes the horrible combat in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time look like a godsend), the better.  You spend most of the game with a weapon that takes forever to kill basic enemies, and enemies often dance and fly around your pathetic attacks with ease.  Yorda's AI is also one of the worst I've ever seen in any game: she's slow; she's clumsy; she tends to ignore your orders; and she frequently gets caught on objects.  And let's not forget that if you're away from Yorda too long or she gets dragged down a shadow pit for too long because you were busy with the 5 enemies continually knocking you down, you lose.  Babysitting her is just tedious and it gradually drains all the fun out of the game for me.  You can't even save if she's not around, which leads to literally a good 1/2 hour to an hour at the end of the game where you can't save.  Joy.

I'd also like to give a shout-out for how this game explains nothing about its mechanics in either its manual or in-game.  I got stuck on several puzzles not because I hadn't figured out the puzzle, but because the game either didn't inform me that I could do something or how to do it.  I don't have a problem with puzzles that encourage exploration and experimentation.  I have issues when I can't solve a puzzle and I have no idea what I'm doing wrong because the game has not prepared you for the puzzle's solution (or even told you the rules of the game).

Is ICO an artistic achievement with great art direction and some really cinematic direction?  Yes.  Is it a great GAME?  No, and too many games have come since ICO that do what it does better to recommend playing this game.

[Ymeegod]

ICO isn't about the combat it's all about exploring and the unknown.  Too many games led you by the hand and this game doesn't do any of it which I loved.  As for you problem with the baddies is you're either taking to long figuring out the puzzles or you're leaving the girl for to long.  The best solution is to always hold her hand instead of the follow option. 

I wonder if they made those shadows harder in the PS3 HD version because in the orginal you can take them down with a simply couple of hacks.  They never did pose much of a threat in the orginal.

As for the puzzles--the game just shines.  By adding an helpless girl they were able to come up with some of the puzzle designs in the gaming industry. 

And don't worry we won't hang you for dissing an gem of a game like ICO, naw we perfer roasting instead--more meat =).

[broodwars]

ICO isn't about the combat it's all about exploring and the unknown.  Too many games led you by the hand and this game doesn't do any of it which I loved.  As for you problem with the baddies is you're either taking to long figuring out the puzzles or you're leaving the girl for to long.

But that's the contradiction with the game's design in a few places: it's designed as this contemplative game where you're supposed to wander around and think things out as you discover them.  But the game makes you ditch Yorda for long stretches at a time, and unless you figure out the puzzle AND how to solve it fairly quickly you're looking at having to double-back and babysit Yorda for a few minutes.  That the game likes to hide important details or tricky platforming behind bad camera angles doesn't help matters.

Take for example one of the first puzzles I got stuck on: it was the main hallway leading to the courtyard that leads to the main gate.  I had already gone up to the upper level to dislodge a chandelier from the ceiling.  A cinematic had triggered to let me know I needed to destroy the pillar supporting the lower staircase.  So I go down there, and I see the following tools: fire on the chandelier candles, the stick I wield as a weapon, the pillar I need to destroy, and some odd-looking wooden barrels lined up in the corner with some intriguing-looking red warning labels on them.

Now, if I hand you that description in any other game, any gamer's going to think the following: the barrels are explosive, gunpowder most likely.  You place a barrel by the pillar, you light your stick on fire from the candles, and then you light the barrel with your stick to blow it up the pillar.  Except that's not the solution, and it took me a good half hour to figure out why: the barrels aren't explosive.  In fact, those barrels (and some pots as well) exist for no other reason than to fool you into thinking they're important.  What I had thought to be little blue pots outside the door to the room were actually bombs with little wicks sticking out of them.  Knowing that crucial piece of information the game didn't think was important enough to share, the puzzle was easily solved.  But up until that point in the game, the game had neither shown me what those "pots" were or had me use them in a puzzle.  That's just poor design, IMO.

I also had another puzzle a little later that required swinging on a chain to get to a higher platform.  I had to look up how to do that because neither the manual nor the game tell you how you can swing on a chain instead of climbing it.  Once again, poor design.

You can't plop a player into a magical new world and expect that they will intuitively know the world's rules and what they can do in it.  That's why we have tutorials, or at the very least helpful camera angles to point out objects of interest.  Hell, I can't even count the number of doorways in this game that are barely visible that any sensible modern designer would highlight with a nearby light source just so the player can see it.

Contrast this with the first 5 minutes of Shadow of the Colossus, where the game walks you through an easy Colossus fight with helper text telling you how to ride your horse, how to grab and climb walls, how to shoot your bow, and how to find and attack Colossi weak points.  After that opening battle, you occasionally get hints on how to start your ascent on various Colossi, but that's all the help you get.  That's how immersing a player into a new game world should be done, but when Team Ico made Ico apparently they thought they were above such minor concessions to player useability.

I wonder if they made those shadows harder in the PS3 HD version because in the orginal you can take them down with a simply couple of hacks.  They never did pose much of a threat in the orginal.

You spend the vast majority of the game with the stick as your weapon.  By my count, it takes 5-7 hits from the stick to kill your typical shadow creature with it.  When you get the sword, that becomes 3-4 hits.  If you get the secret Mace or "Shining Sword" (i.e. lightsaber) near the end of the game, that becomes 1-2 hits.  And the final sword you get kills shadows in 1 hit.  All that, of course, is assuming you can hit the damn things, because the vast majority of the shadows in the game can fly so they like to fly up in the air out of your reach when you swing at them.  They also like to pick Yorda up and carry her to the other side of the area to throw in a hole, which at times can be practically impossible to reach in time depending on the complexity of the area.

[Ymeegod]

Both those points are covered in the manual :0.  Recall the chain one because I skipped the manual as well . 

[broodwars]

Both those points are covered in the manual :0.  Recall the chain one because I skipped the manual as well .

You're talking about the PS2 manual, right?  Because that information is not in the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus HD manual as far as I can see, which only has a couple of pages for both games.  If that information was in the PS2 version's manual, fair enough.  But in that case, if they weren't going to include that information in the PS3 version's manual, they should have coded that information in-game somewhere so it doesn't just completely blindside the player.

[Lithium]

Henry Hatsworth (DS)
As part of my backlog of games on the NWR's DS top 30 that I haven't played yet.

This game is tough as nails however I never felt like it was being cheap, chalk that up to the excellent level design in the game. I loved the silly tone, I only wish that tea time was that awesome in real life. Unfortunately the levels get extremely long near the end, the last level excruciatingly so.

8 steam powered robots out of 10


Metroid: other M (Wii)
I found it for $10 new

Gameplay wise this game is solid with a few caveats: it would have been better with a nunchuck/wiimote control scheme since the game insists that you move into the first person despite the fact that other M would have been better off without it; In fact if there wasn't any first person integration the classic controller would be the way to go. The Hunt and peck portions of the game do a good job of replacing any enjoyment with frustration, spending 20 minutes not being able to move Samus while trying to look for anything that will trigger the next event is not fun in the slightest. I'm not even going to bother writing about the terrible story/dialogue; that horse has been beaten to death, ground into meat and made into glue. Just know that my score accounts for it. Like I said before though, the core gameplay concept of other M is solid and if the above issues were resolved I wouldn't have any objections to the next Metroid game following the same formula.

6 unskippable cutscenes out of 10

[Ymeegod]

Golden Sun Dark Ages (DS)
Saddly this isn't the comeback that I waited 7 years for.  The story is just nonsense--you'll end up running all over hell and back but still not find a single thing about the voids or the enemy's intent.  And it ends with a cliff hanger which I doubt there's be an conclusion too.  The gameplay is pretty much the same for the series--turn-based combat but you'll not going need a brain for this one--it's freaking easy, so easy I didn't even get wiped out the entire game.  There's some +'s like the new graphics looked alright and there's some neat summons/spells to see but overall the game comes up short comeparred to the orginal.  I play these types of games for good strategies, story, and character development and this game lacks all three.

Something that I found funny, it's sales were THREE times greater in the US than in Japan.  Just saying Nintendo.

An 6/10.

Fight Night Champion (XBox 360)
The main difference with this one over the older ones is the one thing I had the most problems with--Full-Spectrum Punch Control which means it uses both analog sticks for punching and movemets/weaves.  Couldn't get used to it--either I was throwing in more punches/wrong one or not weaving like I want it but it just felt unresponsive to me.  Some say I just need more time with the game but I'm 8 hours in and I'm not some noob to gaming.  Besides that I was enjoying the game alot.  The single player campain mode was great but the game needs a better training program because this game IS TOUGH.  The only other complaint is the ref backs your view quite often--he needs to go--have him make calls but get him out of the ring because nothing pisses you off more than being knocked on your ass because the lame ref was in the way.

An respectable 8/10.