The wait is over!
As I frantically mashed on the F5 key while staring at my tracking page, the doorbell rang. Steff opened the door to a delivery person wielding a giant box for me. My PlayStation 5 got here on launch day!
As of writing, it’s 2:09 PM. I could be playing it right now. Instead, I will share the unboxing experience with you! Let’s crack this thing open!
Following E3 this year is going to be difficult for me. I’ll be out in London for its entirety and my internet access will be sporadic. Besides, as much as love to devour the hottest in gaming news, I’m not going to put Steff and I’s lives on hold when we could be enjoying everything London has to offer.
Though I’ll be slow to take to the news, here are a few things I’m hoping to see come to fruition at this year’s event!
About a year after I started the site, I bought a PlayStation 3. It was the first Sony console I had ever owned and I took some time to write my impressions of the hardware at the start. The piece has an odd flow to it, as I spend most of the time nitpicking at its issues before trying to sweep it under the rug at the end by saying my overall impressions were positive. Not at all my best or most personal piece of work.
But on a special day in 2010, it became the single biggest turning point for In Third Person.
Peter Parker is no stranger to video games. Having starred or appeared in dozens of titles throughout history, most of them have been terrible, as he’s largely been tied to sub-par games made as side products in support of something else. But if there were any character that was most deserving of the Arkham treatment, it’s the web crawler. We’ve seen glimpses of how good he can be through games that fell a bit short of greatness, but the potential has always been there due to the character’s inherent design and the lore around him. Finally, thanks to the good folks at Insomniac Games, Spider-Man was given the time and love needed to fulfill the promise of what a Spidey-centric game could be. The results are fantastic.
[NOTE: I did not play the game in VR at the time of writing, so I don’t touch on it or factor it into my current opinion of the game]
Tetris is the closest thing we have to gaming perfection. Universal appeal, easy to learn, difficult to master, and inherently designed in such a way that you’ll never win, but you can always do better. Feel free to make a case for any other game, but Tetris being the highest selling game of all-time with no signs of slowing down decades into its never-ending lifespan is a testament to its greatness.
How do you reinvent gaming’s equivalent of the wheel? If you’re Tetsuya Mizuguchi – most famous for his work on trippy games such as Rez and Lumines – you change the context of what the Tetris experience is through flashy visuals, modern electronic music, and VR support. I can’t speak to the VR side of the game, but the sheer act of playing the block-staking action in Tetris Effect becomes less about exercising your brain and more about being absorbed in the feeling that the entire experience creates.
Tetris is a timeless classic, but a new coat of paint by Rez and Lumines visionary Tetsuya Mizuguchi goes a long way towards transforming it from an intense mental exercise to a euphoric trip through time and space. In this set of videos, I complete the main campaign mode, along with an attempt at taking on the endless marathon! Full review forthcoming!
What should be a glorious day for Miles Morales’ dad goes sideways as the Demons crash the party. Also, Spidey’s investigation into Martin Li reveals that the scope of this conflict is much bigger than he anticipated.
I’ll always love that first God of War game. Even though I experienced it on the PlayStation 3 years after its original release, I was wowed by the game’s balance of frenetic action, bombastic setpieces, Greek mythology, and light puzzle solving to keep players on their toes. However, the formula got stale after a while, and issues with Kratos’ always angry character design became too hard to ignore. Though the series would add five other games to its catalogue before going on hiatus, I never got very far in II or III and I skipped the rest.
Had Kratos never come back, I would have been okay with that. His first game made an impact on me that I’ll always cherish and I thought that was good enough. 2018’s God of War proves that sentiment wrong as the Greek God returns in a wholly new experience that is bigger and better than any game in the franchise before it.
My love affair with the God of War franchise was brief, yet torrid. Years after its original release on PlayStation 2, I played the original God of War remaster on the PlayStation 3 and was smitten by its thrilling action. However, my desire to play the remainder of the series fell off a cliff. I felt like God of War II and III were too much of the same and I dropped them before completion. Didn’t even bother playing Ascension because I had completely lost interest.
Almost as if Sony heard my criticisms, this new God of War appears to be the shakeup I wanted. From a new setting, to an emphasis on story and adventure over shock-factor combat, the reviews are glowing and the parts I’ve seen of it look right up my alley. Looking forward to picking this one up tomorrow!
Buy God of War Now From Amazon.com
PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale isn’t going to win any awards for originality, though I don’t think that’s the point here. Sony at this point in its life seemingly has the cast of characters and the cache to pull this off, so why not? While this provides a decent Smash Bros.-like experience, the devil is in the details, which it misses in a number of key areas.
In Third Person 