Dead Space

Dead Space Developer: EA Redwood Shores Publisher: Electronic Arts Third Person Shooter - PS3 1 Save Slot 1 player

Surprise review! Actually played through half the game years ago, but life got in the way. I just set up my entertainment center and hooked up the PS3, and decided to start over from scratch.

Dead Space is... was... a new franchise from EA Redwood Shores. The IP may be sleeping/dead now, but it made a real splash during its debut. It was popular enough to spawn numerous sequels and spinoffs, after all. Capitalizing on the survival horror revival from Amnesia, revived Resident Evil games, F.E.A.R., etc., Dead Space went big budget. Like a sci-fi horror movie, there are many cinematic scenes both pre-rendered and in-engine for the player to witness. There are numerous plotlines that unravel and converge. And there are jump scares aplenty. Still, it's remarkable that there's a decent game underneath it all.

The story begins with a stranded space vessel and a SOS signal. You assume the role of an Engineer aboard a small starcraft, as part of the rescue effort. When no one in the stranded USS Ishimura answers any communication efforts, you quickly discover that things are not right with the world. Two of your other crew members are immediately torn to pieces by horrific lifeforms, and you are separated by the ensuing struggle.

One thing that makes Dead Space different is that you seem like less the main character, and more like a member of a team. In other survival horror games, you do all the exploring, and you pick up pieces of the story as you go along. Here, you do a fair amount of that, but it's in the context of assisting your crew members (and commanding officer) with their objectives. As a result, the game isn't one big open-world with massive back-tracking, but instead a number of discrete stages with its own set of maps and enemies. Nothing is lost in this structure, because there's a lot of ground to cover in each stage anyway.

The other thing that makes Dead Space different is that the third person gunplay is interesting. Rather than just generically shooting enemies by pointing in their direction a la Resident Evil/Silent Hill, or even going for headshots like Fatal Frame, Dead Space is about aiming for limbs. Body and headshots generally don't do much damage, but taking off limbs not only cripples enemies in the game, but makes them severely weaker. So when an enemy rushes at you, you may have to shoot off a leg to drop them to the ground, and as they're crawling towards you, you have to aim for an exposed arm or two before they're finished. Different weapons and a limited ability to slow them down using stasis, will assist in that endeavor. This makes the action a lot more interactive than most survival horror, and even most shooters! It's like what Bioshock was aiming for, but didn't quite achieve. Maybe because enemies in DS are much more resilient?

Whatever the case, I just found Dead Space much more fulfilling to play than most mainstream games. It definitely does do the creepy vibe thing right, with lots of attention to gory detail and intentional lighting. Add to that a mix of good puzzles, items to collect, secrets to discover, and precision-based shooting, and you've got plenty of things to entertain. The end result is a horror game that is better than it needed to be. Still, for some reason, I'm not particularly interested enough to play the sequels. I got my fill, and I'm quite satisfied.

Outland

Outland Developer: Housemarque Publisher: Ubisoft Action - PS3 3 Save Slots 1 player / Online Multiplayer

Some people recommended Outland to me before, but I only got around to playing it just now. Part action-platformer, and part Ikaruga color-switching, I was intrigued by the concept. I'd have to say I was a little skeptical, because the developer, Housemarque, is an indie studio in Finland. I never really found Western games to be able to compare to the Japanese in classic 2D genres. Thankfully, Outland blew all my expectations away.

The game sets your character up as a hero that must defeat these twin sisters of darkness and light. The story is a bit hokey, but that's fine. The real star of the show is the gameplay. For the most part, you will be jumping and slashing your way through the game. Like Metroid, you will sometimes find your path impeded until you have an ability acquired later on. The melee combat is quite satisfying, where you can get into a groove by doing limited combos on enemies. The emphasis is not on stringing together moves as much as it is timing and pattern recognition, but it's nice to know the hero has some flexibility when needed.

What Outland does right with this formula is that it's like Metroid and not Metroidvania, which I think is one of the worst atrocities in the gaming world. By NOT employing a leveling-up system, Outland always feels like the challenges laid out were carefully crafted. There is still a progression system where you can add to your life and spirit meters, but they're limited to if/when you find them.

But while that's the core gameplay, I haven't even mentioned the phase-switching aspects yet.  How it's handled here is definitely influenced by Ikaruga with its myriad of bullet hells, the ability to absorb them if you're the same phase, and the simplicity of swapping phases on-the-fly. Where it's different from Ikaruga, is that it's an action-platformer, so there are new ways to use phasing. In Outland, you generally can only damage enemies if you're the opposite phase. Sometimes the game will even penalize you for hitting an enemy of the same phase, by having it explode. Another mechanic that Outland uses is to have platforms be a particular phase, so if you're the wrong phase, you just fall through them. All of these elements definitely keep you on your toes, so you end up learning to be ever-vigilant in changing phases in mid-jump or mid-combo.

What pulls everything together is the tight controls. I was expecting that to be the Achilles heel of this game, but I think Housemarque created Outland out of a love for Japanese-game design and wanted to pay it homage. There's precision in the game controls, care in the level layouts, very few blind-jumps (those that exist seem intentional), and clever boss fights. I just got the sense that every enemy, every bullet, and every item was designed to be exactly where it is. That's exactly what I appreciate about older Japanese games, and I love it here.

Downsides? Not many, but if I were to be nitpicky, some of your earned character abilities seem more like an afterthought. The "Charge Attack" in particular seems really silly, because there's only 2-3 places in the entire game that require its usage. It almost seems like they were running out of ability ideas, so just stuck it in  the last second. Still, that's hardly a deal-breaker.

Outland is some of the most fun I've had in a game in recent times. Definitely one of the PS3's finest.

Assassin's Creed 2

Assassin's Creed II Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Action/Adventure - PS3 1 Save Slot 1 player

My only previous experience with this stealth parkour series came in the form of Assassin's Creed Bloodlines, a PSP title. The original Assassin's Creed might have established the framework, but public opinion is decidedly mixed. Even its fans won't hesitate to call it a flawed experience. Luckily, Assassin's Creed II suffers no such criticism. It received accolades for figuring out how to make the formula work. How does it play? Exactly how I thought it'd be like.

What I enjoyed most about Bloodlines on PSP was the exploration and the combat. The exploration came in the form of traversing through cities, hopping on roofs, and slipping through alleys. By becoming familiar with the layout, you'll find treasures, discover secret entrances to new areas, and can start participating in some race "quests" that test your mastery of the land.  There were some cool interior sections where you do some Tomb Raider observation and platforming, which were really the highlight of exploration. I also thought that the combat of the PSP game was deeper than it needed to be. It utilized timing-based combos and counters, which made fights more interesting than simply button mashing.

Playing Assassin's Creed II offers the same positives, but with some caveats. Assassin's Creed II is bigger, deeper, and grander than anything the PSP could muster. Cities are now massive, without the need to segment each neighborhood through load screens. The enemies are more varied this time, and the game can handle upwards of 8-10 enemies on-screen simultaneously. But the problem is what makes it better also makes the game worse. Yes, the cities are now 5-10x as large as the PSP areas, but all that means is you don't really get to "know" the cities. Yes, there are now many more things to collect, but with 66 viewpoints, 30 codex pages, 100 feathers, 400 treasures, etc, it's just too much. The game throws so many things at you, most of which are inconsequential, that it's really difficult to care.

Plus Assassin's Creed II has some new irritations AC:Bloodlines never had. For instance, your armor requires upkeep. As you get hit by enemies or fall off buildings, your armor loses its potency requiring you to go to a Blacksmith to repair. My only question is... why? This game mechanic isn't additive - it doesn't make the game harder or more interesting. I just ended up repairing it every couple hours when I remembered, but it seemed to have little bearing on the game. I'm not even sure why it's implemented at all. The other irritation is load time. During the game, it's generally OK. But every time you boot up the game, there's loading. There's even a loading screen to boot up the Title. Then once you get to the Title Screen, you hit start only to have load time again!

None of these irritations are deal-breakers. They're somewhat nitpicky, and won't ruin the experience for anyone. It MIGHT be the pinnacle of the series, with more story-oriented quests, larger areas, more weapon variety, and multiple ways of preserving your stealth. But at the end of the day, these refinements amount mostly to fluff. Perhaps the only thing AC2 offered that Bloodlines didn't was boredom. Don't misunderstand me. I may prefer the pacing of Bloodlines more, but AC2 is better in other ways. Those improvements just couldn't make up for the fact that the game felt completely unnecessary.

Journey

Journey Developer: thatgamecompany Publisher: thatgamecompany Adventure - PS3 1 Save Slot 1 player / Online Multiplayer

Art Game


That's what someone said to me, when I mentioned I picked up Journey. I wasn't sure what I was in for, but it seemed like this game was getting a lot of acclaim. Although I haven't played them all that much, I have had exposure to thatgamecompany's previous games, fl0w and Flower. Even though Journey is a much different beast, it has a familiarity to it that is very much in line with the other two games. But what IS Journey?  What do you DO?  Well, that's a lot harder to describe. And that's also part of the point.

You begin the game as a nameless face dropped off in a sprawling desert. There's no hand-holding, no automap, and no explanatory cutscene that puts the game into context. All you know is that you are there, and your field of view immediately centers upon a mountaintop in the distance. Everything in between is the journey.

As a game, you don't have much at your disposal. You can walk. You can interact with just a few things in the game. But there's little else. Early in the game, you acquire a red scarf. You'll see ribbons with a similar design scattered throughout. Interacting with those ribbons charges your scarf. And your "charged" scarf allows you to jump and float for a small duration of time. You're able to increase the length of your scarf, and hence float time, by finding these specific markers throughout the game. With just the ability to float and interact with a select few objects, your goal in each stage is to find the path to the next. But Shadow of the Colossus this isn't. The puzzles and platforming are quite lite.

Journey is about the experience. It's about the feeling of pursuing a single-focused goal, and not quite knowing what to expect as you explore the process. And although you could say that about any game, Journey is perfectly choreographed. Although the visuals are somewhat minimalistic in design, how they're used can be utterly breathtaking. You get the sense that every angle and every frame was intentional, even though the world is fully 3D. The moody orchestrated music only accentuates the intentionality.  Everything works together in tandem, and succeeds.

Make no mistake. This is an art game. On gameplay merits alone, Journey is a bit on the shallow side. There's little in the way of hand-eye coordination and puzzle logic.  And what's there refuses to put up much of a challenge.  Even the ability to find extensions to your scarf to increase float time is convoluted, because you don't even need any of them to finish the game. Still, you've got to admire the pretentiousness of it all. What thatgamecompany set out to do, they accomplished. They blended gaming and art in a way no other medium could have. Best game ever? Hardly. I enjoyed the Journey for what it was. At $14.99, I can't help but feel it's overpriced, beauty and all. The $10 threshold would make it much more appealing. It's ultimately not all that fulfilling, even with its artsy shell. Nevertheless, it's unique in what it does and that makes it worth a playthrough for me.

As a side note... since this doesn't really fit the flow of the review, I'll just mention that the online multiplayer is automatic. Other "Journey"ers will show up in your game in real time, and their presence helps enhance the feeling of the journey. You can't really interact with them, aside from being able to charge your scarf through contact. But their presence makes the journey feel like you have a partner walking alongside you (or apart from you, depending on the players).

BioShock

BioShock Developer: 2K Boston/2K Australia (Irrational Games) Publisher: 2K Games First Person Shooter - PS3 1 player

I remember my old roommate being really excited about a game trailer he had seen for this upcoming game called BioShock. It was the first and only time he called me to watch a game trailer. The footage was all FMV, but it showed off water-themed environments, and this hulking menace with a huge drill as an arm. It certainly piqued my roommate's interest. Fast forward to three years ago, when BioShock was finally released to the world to unanimous praise. I didn't (and still don't) have a PC capable of playing it, but I knew I had to try it. Thanks to my succumbing to the current generation of consoles, now I can.

Lauded for its portrayal of an alternate reality, BioShock begins fairly normal. You start the game in the ocean, having just crash landed. There's little explanation for what has just occurred, but you know one thing: you must survive. You come upon a lighthouse. But things are not what they seem. The moment you board a bathysphere, you are brought into an underwater city you had no idea existed. It is modern, technologically-advanced, and is vastly developed. The only problem is, the environment is eerily deserted for the most part. And the life that you do find is quite unexpected...

BioShock is a pseudo-horror First Person Shooter. Just like any FPS, shooting action is a priority. You'll have your assortment of weapons - even different bullet types to fit the occasion. You'll also have an assortment of plasmids, special powers that allow you to do some cool things like freeze an enemy or use telekinesis (think Half-Life gravity gun). There's flexibility in using different plasmids with your standard weapons, as they tend to complement each other.

But BioShock also has elements typically found in the survival horror genre. Since the environments are sparse, most of the storytelling is told in audio logs spread throughout the universe. By listening to them, you can piece together the back-story of all the events. The backdrops of the stages themselves also contribute to the feeling of dread. The first stage, for instance, takes place in a medical clinic. Some of the wards are pretty gruesome, with disfigured bodies and blood spilled all over. It's similar in feel to the horrific scenes in Silent Hill. Creepy stuff.

The thing is, after that first stage, things go downhill fast. A game like this is about the atmosphere, but apart from the medical clinic and maybe one other stage in the game, most of the scenes come off as generic, underwater city or not. The bulk of the game just feels like any other FPS, but quieter. It feels like the game wants to be horror, but is hesitant to take it all the way.

The story? Dreadful. And not because it lacks scares. The plot has its own logic that's equal parts convoluted and just plain ridiculous. Not that the story has to be grand, because I'd just as well have any paper-thin excuse to go out and shoot things. But with all the praise lopped onto BioShock, you'd think it won a Pulitzer.

But the worst sin of all is that BioShock is just plain boring.

First of all, the game is guilty of lacking "design". Sure the stage design is fairly solid, but enemies are haphazardly placed - especially since they respawn randomly. My number one complaint about Western developers is how they focus their talents on the big picture - creating a world. It then becomes up to that world and the player to generate a game. But it just doesn't work for me. In that kind of "design", enemies are merely filler, set up as random obstacles between you and your goal. This contrasts what I play video games for, where every scene is a specific challenge to overcome, and enemies are integral to that experience. Needless to say, BioShock generally follows convention, and comes up short in this area aside from boss fights.

Secondly, there are only five enemies in the game. Five.

Third, you have the ability to hack into machines and locked safes. When you do so manually, it'll bring up a water puzzle, where you must flip and exchange tiles to connect the pipes so that it will flow properly. While it was an amusing diversion initially, by your 10th hack (and 20th and 50th and 100th), you're so annoyed by it that you simply just pay the hack cost so you don't have to do that stupid puzzle anymore.

And that brings us to the totality: BioShock is full of repetitive tasks. You fight the same enemies over and over. You solve the same water puzzles over and over. And if that wasn't bad enough, the game makes you do it for 10 more hours than it should have. The pacing is painfully slow, with no reward.

I'm surprised - Shocked even - that sequels were made of this tepid game. Funny enough, when I last talked to my old roommate, he thought that BioShock sucked too.

Fat Princess

Fat Princess Developer: Titan Studios Publisher: SCEA Action / Capture the Flag - Playstation 3 1 - 32 players

Fat Princess has gotten a lot of press in the PSN shows like Pulse and Qore. I knew it was an online multiplayer game, but BECAUSE it was an online multiplayer game, didn't think I'd get much mileage out of it. I barely touch my consoles as is. But who could resist a 50% off sale?

The gist of the game is simple:

Capture the enemy princess
Protect/retrieve your princess

All in all, very much like your standard capture the flag game. But there's a twist. Fat Princess so gets its name from one fact: You can stuff the princesses with cake, making them fatter and heavier, and consequently much more difficult to move. You control one of 16 characters on your team, and you are free to change classes similar to a game like Battlefield. The nice thing is, you don't need to die in order to change classes. You just need to pick up a hat of the class you want to change into. Your base generates all of the class types, so you can immediately pick your role there. On the battlefield, you can pick up the hats of fallen allies and enemies. This allows class-changes to be seamless and instantaneous, so you can focus on the action. There's 5-6 standard classes and an additional 3 available via DLC, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Some units are better at front-line combat, while others are better as support.

Fat Princess isn't just action. Unlike a FPS capture the flag, Fat Princess has some RTS elements to it, where you can farm resources to upgrade buildings, ultimately upgrading the units. You can also use resources to construct shortcuts (ladders, bridges, etc) and build barriers to block out the enemy. This aspect gives Fat Princess a little more depth than the standard CTF.

Contrary to what I first believed, there are decent single player options where you play against AI-controlled opponents. There is a brief story mode with different objectives that allow you to understand the different modes and get familiarized with the classes and maps. There's also an arena mode where you pick a class and try to survive through a series of combative challenges. So there's a bit to play around with if you're not as interested in jumping online.

But of course, if you want to play online, it's very easy to jump in. You can host a game and set things up if you want to play a game with specific settings. Or you can just Join a Game and it'll drop you into an existing game going on, where you just replace one of the AI-controlled team members. It all happens automatically, so you don't need to go to any lobbies, or pick a game from a list. And because the game substitutes you in for an AI-team member, if you need to go, you can quit without really disrupting your teammates. It'll just sub an AI teammember back in when you leave. Once an online game is finished, all the human players can vote for the next map. The way the online component was designed makes it incredibly easy to play for just a few minutes or a few hours.

My only complaint about the experience is that the documentation is pretty poor. Yes, the in-game manual gives you some direction into class abilities, upgrading buildings, the available game modes, etc. But many of the finer details are not explained, so even though I've played the game for hours, there are gameplay elements I don't quite understand - particularly with using resources towards upgrades.

Nevertheless, if it's a solid, fast-paced, user-friendly multiplayer game you're after, Fat Princess delivers. Whether you have just a few minutes to spare or want to devote an entire afternoon, you'll be thoroughly entertained.

PixelJunk Shooter

PixelJunk Shooter Developer: Q Games Publisher: SCEA Action - Playstation 3 1-2 players

When I got a PS3, several people recommended that I get all the PixelJunk titles. I'm not entirely sure what the PJ branding indicates, but they seem to be simple 2D games with High Definition visuals. Seems like a fine combination to me. PixelJunk Shooter is the most recent PJ game from Q Games and well... it's a shooter. Sorta.

Although it has bullet dodging and shmup'ing elements, Shooter is more like one of those classic rescue games. Each stage has a certain number of people that you have to fly around and save before the exit is opened. Then you move onto the next stage and you do the same. Although this might seem basic, there's a lot of modern tweaks to make it interesting. The first thing you notice about Shooter is the fluid physics. There are three primary elements you'll encounter: water, lava and oil. All of them have their own attributes to them, but their motion is very realistic in their fluidity. The liquids flow and drip rather than a constant pour, making for some interesting interaction. These fluids are very critical to the game. Lava is a destructive element, and touching it not only harms you, but it can kill people you're trying to save if you don't get to them in time. But lava can be neutralized with water, thus forming molten rock, that you can also use to your advantage or disadvantage.

Therein lies the simplicity, and yet the brilliance of Shooter. You have your classic shooter elements with enemies that try to shoot you down and bosses at the end of each area, but it is ultimately a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to save everyone without losing any of them. Enemy locations, gates you can interact with, the natural flow of lava and water, and various suits your ship can "wear" for special abilities - all of these things are meticulously designed as puzzle tools. And like most modern games, saving people is just a form of collectathon. You don't have to save everyone to move onto the next stage (they could also die, which also accomplishes that goal), but it is far more rewarding to. There are also tons of crystals that you can collect too - many of which are hidden or somewhat obscured until you trigger some events.

I personally loved PixelJunk Shooter more than any other PS3 game I've played. Maybe my love of 2D is hard to quench, but Shooter has that kind of clever gameplay that feels familiar, yet completely fresh. Perhaps more than anything else, that's the kind of game that resonates best with me. Some may complain that the game only has 3 areas (15 stages), but if you actually 100% everything, it'll take some time to get through all of that. Plus, PixelJunk Shooter 2 is already in the works, promising new ideas and a lengthier run-time, so I couldn't be happier.

Bayonetta (demo)

Bayonetta you're mystery
Jerky cutscenes tell a bad story
The camera lags on the battlefield, I can't tell where you are
Bayonetta you're DMC
With your long hair and nudity
Your combos are long, witch time drags on, it's mashing, it's mashing