game_reviews

Something strange happened in the days before Medal of Honor Warfighter was released. Sites weren’t given review copies, Wal-Mart dropped the price, other outlets offered to match that price, and EB Games was willing to give buyers back almost the full price of the game were they to trade it in. Needless to say, wasn’t looking too good for this one. I won’t lie, I only picked it up because I saw the Walmart price online and thought it was a mistake, so I wanted to buy it before they corrected their error. Nope, no mistake. It’s the same price as I write almost two weeks later.

So do I regret my purchase? You know where to go to find out.

I own Sonic Adventure 2 for the Dreamcast, I own Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the Gamecube and now I have a copy of it for Xbox Live Arcade as well. Strangely this marks the first time that I’ve actually played it. After the discovery a few years back that Sonic Adventure isn’t nearly as fun as I remember, I was curious to see what I would end up thinking of this one about a decade after it’s debut.

 
James Bond games rank right there with CSI and Cooking Mama as series that for reasons even not entirely clear to me, I will always play every entry that is released. I guess because Goldeneye generated such good will for me that I’m willing to stick with them. There have been some really good Bond games since (Everything or Nothing, World is Not Enough), some decent ones (Blood Stone, Quantum of Solace, Goldeneye Reloaded), and some not so good ones (Tomorrow Never Dies). Coming off last year’s surprisingly good Goldeneye Reloaded, I was curious to see where they went with 007 Legends, which takes levels from five past Bond movies, instead of making a Skyfall centric game.

Come along with me to find out if this joins the ranks of Goldeneye or Tomorrow Never Dies.

Wow. I did not expect this. Resident Evil 6 has to be one of the most divisive games I have seen in quite a while, hell maybe ever. If you love it, or even like it, you have shitty taste in video games and are a Capcom fanboy, and if you hate it you’re a troll who is just talking shit. The topics in any message board are almost entirely people trashing or defending the game, and if you actually ask a question about the game itself it’s often greeted with “Who cares the game sucks.” I question how many people saying that have actually played the game (which according to the Internet makes me a “fanboy fag”), but either way this game has taken a beating far more severe than I think anybody anticipated.

IGN’s review of Lollipop Chainsaw opens up with a clear statement that nobody would ever state that the combat was one of their favourite parts of this game. You may point to any number of other things, but the combat would never be one of them. Sooooo guess what IGN? The combat was one of my favourite things about Lollipop Chainsaw. I call your bluff IGN!

Lollipop Chainsaw is the new Suda 51 joint, and that should tell you everything that you need to know right there. I think most everyone can agree that Suda’s games are, at the very least, unique. Perhaps not in game play execution, but definitely in style, presentation, and overall content. I’ll admit I’m pretty unfamiliar with the work that came before No More Heroes, but once I played that I knew I would be checking out everything else the man does, if only because I know I will see some shit that I have never seen in a game before.

Lollipop Chainsaw is no exception to this.

Telltale is one of a handful of developers who has earned my undying loyalty. You tell me they made a game, and I will immediately want to play that game. This is a team that decided it made absolute sense to develop an episodic series based on a relatively obscure web comic. You also have the successful revival of the Monkey Island franchise, three solid seasons of Sam & Max, and a Back to the Future series that is as satisfying a fourth entry as I could hope for. Then sadly we had Jurassic Park The Game, a rare misstep that seems to have generated a lot more ill will towards the company than is deserved.

I never reviewed Jurassic Park properly on this site so I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts here. Not the best. Story was vaguely interesting but the game play was boring and there were so many hiccups in the audio and visuals that I was expecting the game to collapse in on itself at any second. Based on how quietly it was slipped out the door, and the fact that they skipped the monthly releases and jus released them all at once immediately, I wouldn’t be surprised if Telltale just wanted to get this out and be done with it.

I am happy to report that not only is The Walking Dead a return to form for Telltale, but one of their best efforts to date.

No lie – Rhythm Heaven Fever was one of my most anticipated games of the year. I was introduced to the series with the DS installment a few years back, which I bought on a blind whim so I would have something new to play on my just purchased DSi. I sat down to try it out and ended up not moving for hours, a pattern that would repeat itself every time I fired it up. I wasn’t sure if we would ever get more Rhythm Heaven in North America and yet here we are, with a budget priced installment for the Wii.

And hey guess what? Turns out Rhythm Heaven is still fantastic.

It's insane that this day has finally come. For about 20 years now, I have wanted The Simpsons Arcade Game on a home console. Since the very first time I played it in the Smiths Falls Mall, I was hooked and the day I went there to find the game gone was soul crushing. I spent the next two decades hoping that in my journeys I would stumble upon it, and every few years or so I was lucky enough that this would happen. I loved that friggin' game. One of my fondest video game memories is when a friend and I stocked up all our quarters and actually beat the game with a crowd of people gathered around watching the machine. That was officially the last time I’ve ever had strangers impressed with my video game accomplishments. Sure beating the game was more a matter of having enough money and not so much skill but still, great memory.

A few years back when TMNT The Arcade Game was released on XBLA, it felt like we were potentially closer than ever to getting The Simpsons Arcade Game. A few more years went by and then we got an arcade perfect port of X-Men. Simpsons had to be next right?! Well there’s no story twist because yes, it was absolutely next. It is here and you can totally buy it right now!

Screw cliffhangers; guess what it was totally worth the wait. Now please please please click onward to see why!

Straight up, had I been able to play more Fortune Street prior to compiling my end of the year list, it would have had a decent shot at cracking it. It would have been near the bottom sure, but that’s still pretty high praise. Leading up to the game’s release I thought it was something akin to Mario Party and having not had a good MP fix in several years, I was intrigued and ended up kind of blind buying the game shortly after its release. I didn’t get a chance to play it until recently and what I found was a completely different beast all together.

Once again I know I’m a little behind on this one, today marking about the 50^th day since the release of Need for Speed The Run. But having just received this for Christmas I was not exposed to it until the other day and having now played it, I really had to say something. It doesn’t fit as an Under the Radar so I’m choosing to count it as a proper review. I doubt I’ll be saying anything that you haven’t already heard but trust me, I need to do this.