The Walking Dead series has been my biggest surprise of 2012. Going into it with no real interest in the franchise, or adventure games, its first two instalments have taken me on an emotional roller coaster unlike any other game has before. Based on what I’d seen of the trailer for The Long Road Ahead, I had concerns that the base premise wouldn’t be as interesting as the one in episode 2. However, all my fears were quickly quashed as revelation after revelation took place.
Episode 2 of The Walking Dead video game series picks up three months after the events of the first. Having found temporary solace in a run-down motel, Lee and his group of survivors find themselves facing off against a new threat: hunger. With tensions running high, and supplies running low, a pair of potential guardian angels appear. In exchange for some fuel, this duo of survivors are willing to provide your group with shelter, and rations from their supposedly large supply. Could this be too good to be true?
Arc System Works, and Atlus are poised to take the fighting game community by storm with their fighting game spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona franchise. Persona 4 Arena has already built up a ton of buzz in the community, and it would not surprise me in the least to see this game become a tournament staple over the next few months.
As someone who has 0 interest in the RPG, and as someone who has a history of sucking at Arc System Works’ previous fighting game efforts, I approached Persona 4 Arena with a bit of caution. Having just reviewed it for Splitkick, it’s good to know first-hand that my concerns did not come to fruition. If you want to read my full review for it, head over to Splitkick and check it out now!
Currently, I’m in the midst of reviewing Persona 4 Arena for Splitkick. Yes, I did end up caving, which should a surprise to no one. Though I have a clear idea of where I want to go with my review, I wanted to see how others approached reviewing this RPG/fighting game mash-up.
While the general consensus is positive, reviewers are coming at this game from wildly different perspectives. Sites like Shoryuken, and 1Up are putting most of their emphasis on the fighting game aspect of it, while others like Giant Bomb, and Joystiq are focused on how this progresses the franchise’s lore.
Toting an electric whip, a mean “Sparta” kick, and a potty mouth that would make Howard Stern blush, style is the name of the game in Bulletstorm. Taking heavy cues from Devil May Cry, you’re constantly encouraged, and rewarded for creatively dispatching your foes. In one minute, you could be lassoing enemies towards you, kicking them in the air, and shooting them in slow motion as they fly away. In the next, you could be steering sniper bullets around obstacles to hit enemies in the butt – a 50-point feat that the game aptly calls “Rear Entry”.
Though style is at the forefront of the experience, there’s more to Bulletstorm than its overboard machismo. In fact, it’s this excess swagger that’s gotten everyone in this mess in the first place.
Over the past few months, Persona 4 Arena has been building a lot of buzz in the hardcore fighting game community. Created by the same team that brought us Guilty Gear and BlazBlue, the early word-on-the-street has been very positive. I have no prior experience with the Persona franchise, but I’m always interested in trying out a good fighting game.
Zombies, as depicted in almost all forms of fiction, are simple creatures. Featuring great strength, limited intelligence, and (in most cases) limited mobility, their sole objective is to consume the flesh of the living. For this very reason, I don’t find zombies themselves all that interesting.
It’s what happens around the zombies that creates fictional magic. From The Night of the Living Dead, to Abraham Lincoln: Zombie Hunter, to Plants vs. Zombies, creators have found a number of different ways to leverage their simplistic traits into amazing experiences. For The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day, the zombies are a catalyst for a far more interesting tale of human survival under apocalyptic circumstances.
I’ll never forget my first few hours at Toryuken, Toronto’s most recent major fighting game tournament. Scrambling for someone to partner with me for Street Fighter X Tekken, I was repeatedly rejected by dozens of players, all of whom claimed to not play the game. Inside the main room, not a single station was running the game. As the tournament was nearing its start time, one of the tournament organizers got on the mic and asked the community if it was alright if they set up a Street Fighter X Tekken station, and the crowd roared with boos. Though I’d seen a number of negative comments about the game by players in blogs, and message boards, seeing the hate manifest in that way made the sentiment really hit home for me.
Players have had no shortage of reasons to dislike this game, from its on-disc DLC, to the inclusion of the controversial gem system, to its garbled mess of gameplay systems, one game-breaking glitch, and then some. Starting now, however, Capcom is hoping to take steps to reinvigorate this under-performing title.
Save for the most recent installment, the modern-day Ninja Gaiden series has been held in high regard among critics and the gaming populous. Despite the positive word-of-mouth, I hadn’t played a Ninja Gaiden game since the Ninja Gaiden II on the NES. I’ll never forget how brutally hard the NES games were, and I heard the new games were equally challenging. As someone who isn’t much of a masochist when it comes to video games, this just didn’t sound like something up my alley.
However, when I came across Ninja Gaiden II for dirt cheap at a Blockbuster closing down sale, I decided to outside of my comfort zone to give this one a shot.
Though you’ve probably never heard of it, Binary Domain was a landmark title for Sega (in a bad way). As Sega’s most recent boxed release, it’s failure at retail contributed to substantial worldwide layoffs and a major restructuring of its publishing strategy.
Was it a bad game? Not from what I’ve read from the reviews, and general discussion on the internet. Because I was looking for something to scratch my Vanquish itch, I had this on my list of games to pick up when it hit $20. Though the game isn’t very old, it didn’t take long for it to drop to that price in my area. Is it the Japanese Hamburger I was looking for?
In Third Person 