Mass Effect Proves It’s Not a Small World, After All

After years of completely ignoring the game and weeks of contemplating whether or not I should give Mass Effect a shot, I finally grabbed a copy of the game. I’m a few hours in and have all six potential party members on my side. I have a lot to say about this game, which I’ll dole out in a number of posts in the future.

What I wanted to focus on first is the scope of Mass Effect. Without question, this is the biggest game I’ve ever played. In a number of ways, the Mass Effect experience is absolutely colossal to the point that it’s intimidating the heck out of me.

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From Hero to Zero

With the Perfect Dark remake hitting XBOX Live next week, now was kind of a weird time for me to pick up the 2005 prequel, Perfect Dark Zero. I loved the original Perfect Dark, but I’ve never played this one. At the time, reviews for this game were pretty good, but this game has been the butt-end of many jokes since. I finally decided to take the plunge when I saw a brand new copy at the store for the rock-bottom price of $3.

I (Don’t) Like To Move It

Yesterday at the Game Developer Conference, Sony finally announced the name and some more details about their new motion controller. The controller (and sub-controller) are now known as the Playstation Move. I’m not going to go into details about how the thing works, or what games were just announced to support it, but I’ll be happy to direct you to places that have that type of information.

What I wanted to do is use this announcement as a jump-off point for my current perceptions of motion control. Back in 2006, I was all aboard the motion control train. With Nintendo – my favourite game company – backing this technology, there was nothing that could go wrong, right? Wrong.
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A Comfortable Sense of Deja Vu

I’m officially 1/4 of the way through Dead Space, and there was something about the overall feel of the game that I thought was worth mentioning: the underlying sense of deja vu.
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The Grand Theft Auto IV Swan Song

After playing The Lost and Damned, I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Ballad of Gay Tony. While the Lost and Damned did a lot of things to separate itself from the core Grand Theft Auto experience, I don’t think all of it was worth while. I really loved the characterization in The Lost and Damned, but there was a very distinct point where the focus gets taken away from the main conflict and when you finally come back to it, the conclusion doesn’t give you the payoff you were hoping for. All the while, I was struggling to get re-acquainted with the Grand Theft Auto controls.
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Dead Space: It’s Game Over, Man!

Back in 2008, I was very intrigued by Dead Space. After E3, the buzz going around was that it was like the evolution of Resident Evil 4. Since that game is one of my all-time favourites, Dead Space was very much on my radar. The reviews came out great and it eventually went on to sell at least enough to warrant a greatest hits re-release.

Modern Warfare 2 Boot Camp

Over these past few weeks of unemployment, the game that has monopolized my time is Modern Warfare 2. Having played multiplayer for just over 24 hours, a lot of that was “not fun”. I say that in the sense that for every time I killed someone, I died about 2.5 times. There were games where I would kill two people and die 20 times.

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Silent Night

Despite all the negative things I’ve said about Silent Hill: Homecoming over these last few posts, I was ready to let all that slide. I was already over half way done the game, and I thought I could put up with the game’s faults for a few more hours for the sake of completing it. That will never happen now. Or ever.

Knoxx’d Out

With not much going on in my life right now, I spent most of today in my basement completing The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. I know, this is the third Knoxx post in as many days, but now that I’ve beaten the main quest and most of the side missions, I’m ready to write down some final impressions of the DLC.
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When Die Hard Fans Go Wrong

I normally pay no mind to video game related petitions. They’re usually stupid demands made by and supported by equally stupid gamers. But I couldn’t help but discuss this recent petition related to Sonic 4. To be fair, not everyone in the petition is in support of it, and some people are there just to make fun of them like I’m about to.

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