playstation 3

Daigo Vs. Justin At the Super Street Fighter IV Launch Party

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Last night, I was feeling a bit under the weather and I passed out the moment I got home. As a Street Fighter IV enthusiast, this kind of worked in my favour as I woke up just in time to catch the Super Street Fighter IV launch party taking place in the west coast.

The main event was a must-watch for those who follow the scene, as it featured two of the top Street Fighter IV players, whose rivalry has led to arguably the best Street Fighter matches of all-time. When they did battle last night, they went back and forth and finished with probably the craziest ending possible. Click through to watch the final round!
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Metacritic and My Video Game Collection

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Hate it or love it, review aggregators are becoming an increasingly important service for consumers of just about anything. In the video game space, people like them because it gives them a quick and quantifiable way of knowing what games are good and what games suck. The counterpoint to those people are those who don’t feel that aggregates tell the whole story and put an emphasis on a number rather than the context from which that number is derived from.

I’m not here to choose sides. Out of boredom and curiosity, I decided to take my XBOX 360 and Wii game collection, full retail games only, compile all of their Metacritic scores and see what the results say about my game stash. I must preface that this is far from scientific and that my collection has changed since I compiled these numbers.

With that said, lets hit the results.

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Call of Duty: World at War Pushes Me to the Brink

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Call of Duty: World at War was a game that, even after Modern Warfare 2 blew my mind, I had no interest in going back for. It had two major hurdles: it was a World War II shooter and it was made by Treyarch, whom I’ve been lead to believe made the “not-so-good” Call of Duty games.

Well, I decided to give World at War a shot when I saw it on sale at a price I couldn’t refuse. Did it earn a Purple Heart, or make me wish I was killed in action? After finishing the solo campaign, I would say a little from column A, a little from column B.

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Game Design Talk: Soul Calibur IV and the Apprentice

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Within minutes of first playing Soul Calibur IV, the game has already figured out how to infuriate me. I’m not even close to being a good player at any Soul Calibur game, but I did play enough Soul Calibur II to beat the game on normal difficulty with every character. Having been out of practice, I decided to get reacquainted with the systems by starting out in Arcade mode.

Up until the second last level, I was doing just fine. But it was then that I was pit against the Apprentice.

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Pick Up Post: You Say You Want A Revolution

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Over the weekend, I just so happened to be at an HMV when I stumbled across one of the most ill-conceived games of the last decade (if not of all-time). I have made fun of this game incessantly since it was announced in May of 2008 and have watched it fall into the absolute bottom of the bargain bin. I have seen stores have difficulty selling the full kit for $10 and the disc alone for $5.  At the price of $2 (which was the price I got it for), even I had to stand there and think about whether or not this would be a good investment. It probably wasn’t, but at least I can now speak first hand on why this game sucks.

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Game Design Talk: Taking Control Out of My Hands

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(SPOILER ALERT: This post will discuss major plot points in Modern Warfare 2 and Prince of Persia)

The terrorist scene in Modern Warfare 2 has been dissected from every conceivable angle by now. Odds are if you’re a fan of reading niche video game blogs like mine, you’ve probably played this sequence and have already come to your own conclusions about it.

For the record, I hate it. I hate it for a number of reasons, but for the sake of this discussion, I’m only going to get into one reason why I dislike this scene. I don’t hate it for the fact that you get to shoot innocent people. I applaud Infinity Ward for leaving that option open. However, that entire scenario is fundamentally broken because of the people you can’t shoot.

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Game Design Talk: Burnout Paradise and the Feeling of Progression

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For a game that is fairly one-dimensional at its core, Burnout Paradise does a lot of little things to motivate players to keep playing. You will unlock new cars by either winning races or taking them out as they randomly drive by you on the road. The game keeps track of all the super jumps you complete, fences you smash and billboards you drive through. You can even race for the best time on basically every street in the game against your friends or against the world.

Those little things have kept me playing this game longer than I usually plan to. However, each of my sessions usually ends when I realize how far away I am to making progress in the most important measure of progression in the game: the licenses.

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Game Case Nightmares

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I get the feeling I’m in the minority here, but I know I’m not alone on this one. I like to take care of my games. I take pride in keeping everything intact and in top shape. This includes the cases that my games come in. Back in the days of Nintendo boxes, I would go as far as storing all of the cardboard boxes in a safe place. Nowadays, it’s a lot easier to keep everything in top shape, as game cases are well built to withstand average wear and tear.

However, having bought a number of used game stores and more recently, having bought a number of used games, I’ve seen so many games with messed up packaging. Everything from broken cases, to missing box art, to stickers all over the box. The majority of these cases makes me wonder: what are you people doing with your games?

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Closing Thoughts on Prince of Persia (2008)

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For the last few days, I have dedicated all of my gaming resources towards the Prince of Persia reboot. My first session with it made enough of an impact on me to drop everything else I was playing and play through this to the end. I don’t know why people hate on this game so much because I enjoyed it all the way through. Granted, it has flaws, but was definitely worth my time.
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Where the Grass is Green and the Girls Are Pretty

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Burnout Paradise was a game I’ve had on my radar for quite some time. The series first caught my eye when I played the Burnout Revenge demo that came with my XBOX 360, which came with a really cool take down mode. However, the demo for Burnout Paradise left me skeptical. The sensation of going fast was intact, as well as the joy of wrecking other cars (as well as your own), but the demo didn’t really give me a sense of how the open-world structure of the game would work.

I may be two years too late, and the developers have added a ton of free and paid additional content to the game since I last tried it, but I recently got a copy of Burnout Paradise at the bargain basement price of $5 at a Blockbuster Video sale. Was this ticket to paradise well worth it?

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