Quest to Nowhere

I never finished Mass Effect 1, at least until the day Mass Effect 2 was released. I picked up ME1 on PC during Steam’s holiday sale intending to finish it so I would have a save to import into ME2. I played ME1 on 360 originally but never finished it, so the Steam sale provided a nice way to play the game over again, and get the save to import.

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I’ve been meaning to write this since Friday. I picked up the game Friday (for 360 since they ruined the PC version and whatnot,) and aside from a break to have dinner beat the single player in one sitting. It is a bit short, but I don’t really think that’s a valid complaint.

See as much as I want to hate on this game, it is really really good. The single player is really tight, and constantly has you on the move in new locals, with new things to do. And of course its full of amazing set pieces, that make … Continue Reading

I’ve been having trouble getting into Brutal Legend, not that I’m having trouble in the difficulty level of the game, but rather that I’m not really wanting to play it. I haven’t been able to figure out why, I figured that perhaps playing it after Uncharted 2 was clouding my judgement of games. I mean everyone I know has been raving on it, and I feel like I should really like it, but for whatever reason I couldn’t figure out my problem with it. Then I watched Yahtzee’s review of the game, and it all sort of gelled together … Continue Reading

I picked up Halo: ODST (which I now read in my head as “Ah-dst,”) a little over a week ago mostly to check out for the story stuff in the game. The story stuff is really interesting, since there are essentially two parts to it.

In the game you are playing as a lone special forces type trooper, who has been unconscious for a few hours after getting dropped into a urban warzone. As you make your way through the city you find items that give you flashbacks to what the rest of your team was doing while you were … Continue Reading

The big “battle” gearing up this year seems to be between Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. Even though they are “battling,” it seems as though both games have taken to adopting different philosophies, not just in how the game should be played, but also in the business models for them.

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Video games created from movie, and TV licenses have long been apart of the industry. Even though somehow 99% of them tend to be complete and utter crap. The few games that don’t, are certainly the single needle in the haystacks of the state of Kansas. But why? Why is it that so often game companies license these properties, and yet somehow are unable to produce either a good or successful game from them?

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Ubisoft recently announced that for their new game, Naruto: Rise of a Ninja (based on the Naruto anime and manga,) they would release on Xbox Live a download to let players have the Japanese voice actors audio as opposed to the American dub’s voice actors. Now this doesn’t seem like too big of a deal, unless you are a fan of Naruto, but when you look into this a little more you might notice something that might change how DLC works in the future, and how game developers and publishers approach it.

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When Valve released Lost Coast for Half-Life 2 they included a surprising little feature to the game, a developers commentary. As you walked through the level there were text boxes which let you hear someone on the Valve development team talk about certain aspects about the Lost Coast level. Most of them were about the High Dynamic Range lighting effects that were being added to the Source game engine, but regardless it was a nice little treat that really let gamers get some understanding into the their thought process in development.

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