Unlike many a gamer, who had no shortage of fond memories with Valve games, their catalogue of work was alien to me until Left 4 Dead. As an active avoider of PC gaming, I missed out on Half Life and Team Fortress completely, while being years late to Portal. Thankfully, I was there on day one for Left 4 Dead.
On a whim before the game’s release, I downloaded the demo on Xbox Live. I was not ready for the awesomeness that would ensue.
The Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/Wii generation has been quite the trip. In its almost 8-year run, we’ve seen the meteoric rise (and fall) of the Wii. We experienced how online technology fundamentally changed the way we interact with the medium. We also got a plethora of wonderful games to play.
Ranking them is no easy task, and there is no right answer. As a list-maker, all you can do rank them how you see them and open the door for discussion. Over the next few weeks/months, I’ll be counting down In Third Person’s top 10 games of this generation.
As much as I love the first and third iterations of the franchise, Contra as a whole has way more misses than hits. The franchise has struggled to find new ways to freshen up the formula, especially when it haphazardly forayed into 3D. As a spiritual successor to Contra, Hard Corps: Uprising gives the series an anime twist thanks to the handy work of Arc System Works, who are best known for Guilty Gear and BlazBlue.
What was supposed to be an extreme sports adventure on Rook Island goes horribly wrong when you and your friends are captured by pirates. Some are killed, others are missing, and you barely escape their clutches. Now it’s up to you to free the rest of your friends and get the heck out of there. While the main objective in Far Cry 3 is clear throughout, it’s easy to get sidetracked by the plethora of other experiences to be had. By the time you’ve wrapped up your work, you may have poured in dozens of awesome hours into this expansive open world.
While I generally like Disney Infinity, I don’t have any particular attachment to the source material these Play Sets draw from. However, that all changed with the release of the Toy Story Play Set. I hold those fantastic films close to my heart and have been anxiously awaiting to experience the franchise within the game. In hindsight, I’m not really sure what I was expecting from a Toy Story Play Set, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed with the final product.
With the new era of console gaming about to begin, I think now is a great time to take a tally on how this last generation went down. Who do you think won?
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There comes a time in seemingly every franchise’s life when things start to get stale. As Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 proves, not even the hottest video game franchise in the universe is an exception to this old adage. While it’s meant to be the epic conclusion to Infinity Ward’s branch of the franchise, it ends up feeling like just another one in the pile despite its best efforts.
Mere weeks before its release, Ubisoft pulled the plug on its November launch plans for Watch Dogs and bumped the game into 2014. As someone with a PlayStation 4 pre-order, this is a real bummer. This was going to be my definitive launch-day experience, not to mention the only game in the lineup that I had any real interest in.
When it comes to character choice in fighting games, I’m a strong believer in not choosing the best character, but going with the best character for you. It always works out best when you find that character with the right mix of tools that you genuinely enjoy playing as. Otherwise, you’ll never reach your full potential, even if the so-called experts will always suggest going top-tier. As I’ve said multiple times on this blog, dropping Akuma for Rose was the best decision I made while playing Street Fighter IV. Without her, I probably never would have reached over 3,000PP, 15,000BP, become the #1 ranked Rose player in Canada on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, or done as well at tournaments as I have.
This post is not intended to state why Rose is the definitive best. Heck, I’d even agree with many of the experts that in comparison to the rest of the cast, there are a number of characters that are better overall. However, the synergy I have with Rose may be tighter than any ‘relationship’ I’ve ever had with a video game character. Here’s a few reasons on why that is.
Mega Man 9 was hard. Admittedly, I didn’t put that much time into it, but the bit of time I spent with it made me feel more anger than enjoyment. I felt that way too much of that game came down to trial-and-error alongside surgical precision to the point where it wasn’t fun.
With that bad experience fresh in my mind, I immediately went into Mega Man 10 with the difficulty set to easy. 2 hours later, I was watching the end credits roll without having broken a sweat.
In Third Person 